Pineapple Express DVD

How's this for a meeting of minds? The script for Pineapple Express was written by the Superbad boys Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, with some help from their mentor Judd Apatow - all specialists in guy-guy bonding and verbal vulgarity. The director, on the other hand, is David Gordon Green, best-known for independent films such as All the Real Girls (2003), but now bent on rebranding himself in the hope of mainstream success.

Still, Pineapple Express must be one of the strangest Hollywood movies of the year, a stoner buddy comedy that starts off like a tribute to Cheech and Chong and ends with a long, headache-inducing shoot-out in a warehouse. Rogen and Goldberg may have intended little more than a sub-Tarantino genre romp, but Green's unique faux-naif sensibility is present in countless ways, including the taste for master shots, the bald presentation of bloody violence, and the surprising glimpses of emotional vulnerability in heroes and villains alike.

As the down-to-earth process server Dale Denton, Rogen remains his usual boisterous self, standing on his dignity while sounding off at length (he's like a young, energetic John Goodman, should such a thing be imaginable).

The soul of the Pineapple Express film belongs to James Franco, who immerses himself in the character of Saul Silver, a beatific pot dealer who drifts above the workaday world on a cloud of his very own. But in the Judd Apatow universe some things are eternal. It could be that the homoerotic content of Pineapple Express is placed out in the open to divert attention from its celebration of marijuana use - or maybe it's the other way round. In any case, this is unambiguously a story about two men who fall in love, even if they express their feelings mainly by sticking joints in their mouths and shooting other men with guns.

Here is the Pineapple Express Trailer

The story goes with Seth Rogen as a Process Server who really loves weed. Life is high until he witness a murder, the badguys track him to his dealer and things get really complicated and those two soon find themselves in the middle of a gang war.

The source of inspiration for making Pineapple Express, according to producer Judd Apatow, was Brad Pitt's character in True Romance (1993), a stoner named Floyd. Apatow "thought it would be funny to make a movie in which you follow that character out of his apartment and watch him get chased by bad guys". According to Rogen, the ideal production budget was $40 million, but due to the subject matter—"because it's a weed movie", as he put it—Sony Pictures allotted $25 million.

David Gordon Green met with Apatow, Rogen and Goldberg on the set of Knocked Up, and later on the set of Superbad to discuss the project. Gordon cited The Blues Brothers, Midnight Run, Running Scared, and Stir Crazy as sources of inspiration and influence on directing the film.

Rogen was originally going to play the "stoner buddy" character of Saul Silver, but Apatow suggested that Franco should play Saul. After a table read, Rogen agreed, thus casting himself in the role of Dale Denton.

Seth Rogen spoke with musician Huey Lewis, of Huey Lewis and the News, on writing and performing the film's theme song in November 2007.

There was an exclusive sneak peek of the film attached to the Superbad DVD, which was released on December 4, 2007.

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