Aiming low pays off

Rating: 2/10 (19 May 2009)

Watch an overweight egomaniac shouting and quivering his way through a ridiculous stoner script that makes the Marx Brothers look light-handed and almost elegant! The Three Stooges used to make trash like Pineapple Express, but their pictures mercifully averaged about ten minutes. This horror lasts nearly two hours --- have Americans got nothing better to do? Why doesn't someone puncture the inflated reputations of Seth Rogan, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, Judd Aparow and their ilk? Where on earth does the money come from for these kitsch celluloid monstrosities? Are they all financed by Ponzi schemes or drug racketeers? Pineapple Express is interstitial by-the-yard, made to fill up the space between commercials. It's the movie equivalent of junk food. All the "laughs" and "jokes" are imitations of the real thing and serve to validate the claim that Americans do not have a sense of humour, or at least one that reaches beyond the kindergarten. The giveaway in this picture is the obnoxious handling of the girl-friend role. She is casually cast aside and forgotten in a way that even the sexist movies of the 1950s would never have done. At least Cheech & Chong never had girl-friends, and Tommy Chong paid for his excesses with jail time --- something Seth Rogan will not be doing, I think.