Pineapple Express

This might be the funniest movie I've ever seen in my life. That sounds so wrong, so off. Surely there's another one I'm forgetting about, but nothing is coming to mind. And YES I know that my opinion is suspect because I've been talking up "Hot Rod" for the past nine months, but much like the sharply-dressed guy on this season's "Project Runway," I have impeccable taste (wait, bad example). Overall my favorite movies include The Third Man, Pierrot le Fou, Rushmore, George Washington, and The Night of the Hunter, all of which are renowned by many people who are notoriously not dopes. Anyway, this is for funniest, not best all-around (although PE is well-made). In other words, the most LOLs-per-minute.

All right, enough formalities. I had hoped against hope that I would even like this movie. I thought that Knocked Up was fairly sexist, depressing, and not particularly funny, and I didn't really care for Superbad either (for the record, I loved Freaks and Geeks and thought that 40 Year Old Virgin was good, if exhaustingly raunchy). But David Gordon Green is my favorite director (if you haven't already, find his 2000 debut George Washington), so I had some hope, even though he's never really directed a comedy before.

I had nothing to worry about. Pretty much nonstop I was laughing, at various levels, ranging from a jar of pickles to whenever Danny McBride or Craig Robinson was on screen. But James Franco is the best part; he's a really, really good comedic actor, and fucking superhot, even as a really rather dirty and gross pot dealer. I think that DGG is the reason the movie's so good, though. It's hard to describe, but his touches are everywhere, and on a dialectical level, I recognized a lot of the films he cited as inspiration when he started working on the project (like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, another balls-out bizarre action/comedy). He seems to understand that comedy is fundamentally about surprise, and knew how to manipulate his own beautifully strange, dreamlike style into the tired form of the pot comedy, to make something fresh. It makes me really sad that his version of A Confederacy of Dunces (with Will Ferrell as Ignatius!) got stalled, because PE strongly suggests that he'd have done the book right.