Pineapple Express and Tarantino's Peak

Rating: 5/10 (20 August 2008)

Of course "Pineapple Express" was an entertaining movie. How could it not have been? You take talented comic actors, one of whom has a fairly decent knack for writing dialog, throw in a seasoned producer and top it all off with a big budget, and voilá! Mission accomplished. But honestly...I'm beginning to get a little tired of movies that aren't about anything more than their creators' love for the movies that preceded them. And you have to admit that's exactly what "Pineapple Express" is.
Imagine Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg sitting on Judd Apatow's couch watching action flicks for about eight or nine hours straight. Imagine the jokes they would tell each other while watching the movies, describing events that would make the scenes funnier and speaking in the voice of the characters. Take about an hour of jokes out of those eight or nine hours and tack them on to a boiler plate flick. Bingo, you've got the screenplay for "Pineapple Express." And I guess that's fine. But it's not special. "Kill Bill" was infinitely more inter-textual. "The Big Lebowski"'s protagonist was even more hilariously ill-suited to the cinematic situation at hand. Kevin Smith's New Jersey chronicles re-contextualized classic mise en scenes in a much more sophisticated and often ironic way. "Pineapple Express" is a late arrival to the tired trend of movies idolizing and gently mocking other movies. And maybe that's a little unfair, given that Rogen wrote the script years earlier, but that's just how it goes.
Maybe I'm a snob. Maybe I'm just sour. But I honestly think that we've hit the point where worshiping movies is, well, lame. It goes without saying that filmmakers are going to love other people's movies and that those movies will influence them both consciously and unconsciously, But we're making these kind of movies too quickly and too plentifully. Is this really the contribution we want to make? Where are the Charlie Kaufman? Where are the Hal Hartley's? Why can't we "make it new?" as Ezra Pound would say?