Courtesy of Sony, Warner Bros.
Much is being made over Pineapple Express director David Gordon Green's inexplicable overnight transition from indie auteur (the one behind slow-paced tone poems like George Washington and All the Real Girls) to helmer of a Judd Apatow marijuana-glorifying fart comedy, a job for which he has practically no relevant experience. The other night, Vulture took a rare trip outdoors to catch a screening of Pineapple and what impressed us most wasn't Green's ability to coax funny performances out of Seth Rogen and James Franco (this couldn't have been too hard, right?) but the fact that the movie's action scenes � the ones that Manohla Dargis calls "crudely choreographed and just the kind of big finish a dead-ended writer or two might come up with while searching for a third act and lighting up to a Steven Seagal flick in the wee hours" � weren't nearly as crappy as we thought they'd be.
In Pineapple, Rogen and Franco flex their acting muscles as a pair of stoners on the run from hit men and drug lords (including Darryl from The Office, hilariously), and (spoiler alert) the movie climaxes in a fifteen-minute gunfight in a barn. Obviously Green is no John Woo, merely the scene is transparent, well paced, and nowhere near as stupid-looking as one might reasonably expect, especially considering that it includes shots of Rogen firing an automatic arm. There are explosions, hemorrhage injuries, and some moderately impressive stunt work, non bad for a freakin' Judd Apatow movie. Surely it helps that Rogen is fat and slow-moving, but we could actually tell what was occurrent the intact time � more than we backside say for the
