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August 14-20, 2008
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Express yourself
Chicago Tribune Movie Critic
Hell on wheels
by Michael Phillips
Express yourself
Chicago Tribune Movie Critic
In its gleefully befogged first hour, Pineapple Express seems to be onto something new: It’s a marijuana comedy that keeps shuffling genres, like a stoned blackjack dealer. James Franco is blissfully funny as Saul, the supplier who finds himself running for his barely cognizant life with steady customer Dale, played by Seth Rogen. Dale’s a 25-year-old dating a high school senior. (He proudly sports a high school girl’s wristwatch.) They’re running because Dale witnessed a drug-related murder and then dropped a precious joint at the scene of the crime. Unsure whether they’re in a comedy or a drama, Gary Cole and Rosie Perez play the ruthless criminals who want the witness dead. The film’s title refers to a particularly rare and exquisite brand of weed.
At its sharpest, the script by Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who co-wrote Superbad, recalls what made Superbad worth seeing: the sidewinding conversational riffs, the why-am-I-laughing? wordplay. When Dale explains to his dealer that he’s a process server, he replies, “You’re a servant? Like, a butler?” As written, that line could go either way, but Franco — fully invested in this doper’s doper — makes it sing. It’s tempting to say Franco knocks such stupid retorts out of the park, but that would imply a certain degree of focus and drive utterly lacking in Saul. Not since the cinematic cannabis heyday of Jeff Spicoli (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, 1982) and Withnail & I (1987) has a fully baked stoner come to such worthy comic life on-screen.
Then, around the midpoint, Pineapple Express falls apart and keeps falling, and the comedy, spiced with considerable, unevenly effective violence in that first hour, goes out the window, and in comes all the gore and the bone-crunching. The director is David Gordon Green, who made one of my favorite films this year, Snow Angels. His work (which includes the poetic George Washington) has never been easily confined to one category or mood. But there’s probably not a director alive who could make sense of this script’s queasy blend of jokes and slaughter. Green shoots the fight sequences with rough edges and hand-held realism intact, and the realism is... well, real. An early smackdown between Rogen and Danny McBride’s belligerent idiot Red ends with the trashing of a perfectly good apartment; the scene grinds on well past its usefulness, and the injuries grow more wince-inducing, and before long you’re thinking back on Freebie and the Bean, another comedy that kept morphing into an accidental and deliberately acrid action picture.
For all that, Franco’s on-screen rapport with Rogen is a fine thing. Certain lines keep coming back to me, lines that could’ve come only from truly talented writers. “Hey! I can see through my leg hole!” is one; Franco says it after he kicks through his own windshield during a vehicular chase sequence. Also, there’s a throwaway bit with Franco attempting to buzz Rogen into his apartment that approaches perfection — the quintessence of pot humor, honoring the tradition of the “Dave’s not here” routine (Cheech & Chong, for the uninitiated). Pineapple Express could care less about perfection; its mood swings and genre change-ups are deliberately messy.
Few comedies recently have started so well and ended so poorly. Whether that first half is enough depends on your receptivity to another pair of jolly Judd Apatow-sanctioned boy-men, taking time to smell the roses even as people are trying to kill them.
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Hell on wheels
by Michael Phillips
Hell Ride should’ve been a scuzzy, disreputable low-budget hoot, flying down the highway at 110 mph. Instead it revs its engine for 83 minutes in a cul-de-sac. Written and directed by Larry Bishop (Joey’s kid, for the record), the film apes the biker movies Bishop worked in, once upon a time, for American International Pictures. At one point in Hell Ride, Michael Madsen, who plays a killer called The Gent, rasps a comment about being stuck in a “whopper of a chopper opera.” First of all, do you really want to cross that line? The one where the characters start commenting on the thing they’re in? Secondly: A whopper this isn’t. It’s not even a Whopper Junior. It’s the paper the Whopper Junior came in.
The cast of Hell Ride is dominated by gents in their 50s, 60s and (in the case of Dennis Hopper) 70s. The women in it — sorry, “broads”; sorry, “chicks” — skew just a tad younger, by two or three or four decades. “Bikes, beer and booty,” according to Madsen, are the reasons to live in this world, or at least this film.
AIP got the biker craze going in 1966 with The Wild Angels and among its profitable drive-in progeny a couple of years later was The Savage Seven, in which Bishop co-starred. Quentin Tarantino, drive-in and grindhouse aficionado, always liked The Savage Seven, and he decided to put some money where his affections lay. This is why Tarantino’s name is the biggest on the poster for Hell Ride: the man behind the recent faux double-bill Grindhouse executive-produced it. Bishop’s script pits the members of the Victors gang against the scum of the 666ers in a series of revenge killings and slow-motion struts backed by balls of flame. Bishop plays one of the strutters, Pistolero, sporting what appears to be a rented, paste-on goatee. Hopper and David Carradine show up as well, and everyone seems to be doing a Michael Madsen impersonation.
I did enjoy the sensitive peyote-fueled dream sequence, and in a bit role as a bartender, Laura Cayouette intones the line “You must be... The Gent” in a voice so sultry she’s halfway to the post-coital cig as she’s saying it. Her smile, however, suggests an actual actress having actual fun, in a movie where everyone around her is either hiding behind sunglasses or mud-wrestling. For a grindhouse throwback that works, try Tarantino’s Death Proof (the shorter version). That one delivered; Hell Ride gets a flat 10 minutes in and goes floop-floop-floop the rest of the way.
—MCT
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