Don't Bogart that Script My Friend

Rating: 3/10 (12 August 2008)

It was very pleasant to get stoned in the sixties. The ritual of rolling a joint, the Michelangelo's of joint rolling whose joints did not deserve to be smoked they were so beautiful, the frisson of Narc danger, the towels under dorm room doors, the perfect music. Could Inagadadavida be recorded today? One joint and the Allman Brothers at Fillmore East could get you from Satellite Beach to Santa Monica in one dazed trip with gas at 29 cents a gallon and three deuces and a four speed growling out the state lines in pre ethanol days. Dashikis and Afros, candles and light shows, multiple attendances at any showing of Fantasia.
Of course the preceding is mere reportage and inference from what others told me, and some reading on the subject.
Indeed, a book I am reading at present, 'My Name is Will', does a good job of bringing the druggy sixties into the similarly druggy mid-eighties. The eighties: ground zero of Nancy Reagan's 'Just Say No' campaign and the criminalization of of anything that would get you higher than a kite can fly. Except, of course, alcohol. An aside: I was once in the company of the main lobbyist of the 7-11 Corporation in Florida, during the late eighties and he, high one night on Miller and Marlboro Lites, told me he was in the drug business: you know, he said, alcohol, nicotine, and sugar. Hmmm, Nancy never said 'no' to those drugs.
A long preamble to why I disliked 'Pineapple Express' so much.
There is a proud, admittedly liberal in structure, history of extremely funny stoner movies in these United States. Ambling, discordant, self indulgent, silly, and freaking funny...their central plot device: the cool, laid back stoners and the Man. The humor arising from making the Man look silly and in shared common moments of stoner-dom. Like in California eating nine tacos at two in the morning. Or in Chicago, talking the Greek guy through every thin slice from the spit, like a surgeon teaching a gall bladder operation to interns, to make a perfect gyros sandwich in the wee hours. I am told that connoisseurs of the best bud are connoisseurs of the best gyros stands. Eaten, standing at the window, as the hawk makes hungry stoners long for the soft January Siberian night rather than a typical mid-January Chicago: weak sunlight seldom penetrating the clouds of snow hovering two stories above the city. Late night micturation against a greystone an exercise in imaginative ice sculpture. Or, to get back to a more universal gustatory experience brought on by evil weed, the purchase and consumption of an entire package of double chocolate Milanos whilst watching Cops wherever you live.
This movie barely honors classic stonerdom but, when it does, it is very funny. But, for most of the movie, Pineapple lobs a grenade into those hazy fond memories of experience or fondly remembered movies. According to this movie, we no longer live in the mellow pot sixties. Forty years of chemical refinement seems to have created Frankenstein pot, stem cell pot, giga byte pot, pot which takes gentle 'screw the Man' plot devices and substitutes automatic weapons, massive fire power, gut wrenching wounds, severed ears, gallons of blood and a body count that 'Saving Private Ryan' would envy to support a ponderous plot that pot can not handle.
Turgid New Age psycho babble. No stoned word associations from alpha to omega, Disney to Marx, time travel to space travel, buttons? who invented them...really...what chocolate really tastes like. No, in a 21st Century power pot movie, we get awkward social situations verbalized as cute not anarchic. A god-awful complicated who did what to who murder rampage story line that would ruin anyone's high.
The plot: God knows...a murder most foul witnessed, friendship found and tested, a Sino-Corrupt Cop-Stoner conflict, Rosie Perez reminding us that time marches on, continuous doobie doing, an add on, for no reason, scene of selling dope to foul mouthed school kids, two corpulent African Americans with roles that are so demeaning that I hope they skipped the premier, a waste of two funny leads, who must be embarrassed at the power pot plot they had to inhabit.
Worse, not even enough of a contact buzz to make me veer into World Market for a Ritter Bar with almonds afterwards.
Hey! Even stoner movies need someone, as this script began transmogrifying from stoner to stupid, to say 'don't Bogart that script, my friend, pass it over to someone else to make it funny and funnier.'