Pineapple Express

Met Aimee and Rikk to see Pineapple Express because Tropic Thunder was too expensive (Aimee wanted to go to Leicester Square despite my warnings about price because of the proximity to her work), and I’m glad we caught it because it was excellent fun. The first half in particular is great, with snappy, improvisational dialogue that perfectly encapsulates goofy stoners, and some of the random childlike silliness is just brilliant, doing for weed what Withnail & I did for booze.

While Withnail & I is a grim and believable British film, though, here we get an overblown American movie where perhaps something more down-to-earth would’ve been better. There’s a reason Clerks is more highly-regarded than Jay & Silent Bob. Realism is important, and while the premise here (stoner witnesses drugland killing and then gets hunted by hitmen) is believable, the way it unfurls gets really overblown while plot strands just get abandonded. If there’s a fault to the movie, it’s how it recourses to action movie clichés, which are amusingly sent up with ineptitude and character quirks, but which don’t really seem part of the same movie as those amusing conversations. It’s only this that keeps the film from being great rather than good. Definitely very funny, though. My only other complaint was that the girlfriend was just too pretty – made me think she was conning the main character somehow…