Links to threads on All the Real Girls (2003), Undertow (2004), Snow Angels (2007) and the upcoming Your Highness, all of which David Gordon Green has directed or will direct, as well as Shotgun Stories (2007), which he produced.

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Boldly Going One Toke (or More) Over the Line
IF you were trying to select the appropriate personnel to refurbish that slightly disreputable, perpetually half-baked genre, the Hollywood stoner comedy, you might very well ask Judd Apatow, the current king of schlubby, non-alpha-male humor, to serve as producer. And you could easily imagine Seth Rogen, leading man of “Knocked Up,” co-writer of “Superbad” and someone whose résumé suggests at least a passing familiarity with the munchies, as co-writer and star.
But David Gordon Green in the director’s chair? In the parlance of the main characters of his new movie, “Pineapple Express”: Whoa. ...Uh. ... What? Seriously?
For 10 years Mr. Green, 33, has been making small independent movies. They have played at film festivals and in art houses. They have been praised for their meditative delicacy, their naturalistic performances, their exquisite visual composition. And they have taken home some very nice awards. His directorial debut, the self-financed $42,000 “George Washington,” a gentle portrait of a group of rural Southern children, was named the best first film of 2000 by the New York Film Critics Circle.
But even the most successful of his four movies, 2003’s “All the Real Girls,” made less than $550,000 at the box office. And winning something called the Sundance Special Jury Prize for Emotional Truth isn’t something that you can pin to your lapel when you walk into Sony’s executive suites to prove that you’re the guy to make the studio’s next comedy.
Nevertheless Mr. Green, who says he is neither a passionate aficionado of the buds-with-bongs genre nor “an enormous pothead,” is delighted to have landed the gig and insists it’s a more natural fit than fans of his earlier work might assume. Yes, he admires the films of Terrence Malick, but growing up outside Dallas in the late 1980s he and his junior high school friends also indulged a bottomless appetite for the goofiest low-end action comedies.
“Pure amusement,” he said, unrepentantly. “I was into some trash. It wasn’t even prestigious trash, like the taste that Tarantino has. I mean trash.” . . .
New York Times, August 3

I must say, when I saw this trailer in the theater before The Happening, my friends and I were howling with laughter the entire time.

Ditto. Seeing James Franco and Seth Rogen teamed up brought back fond memories of Freaks and Geeks.

I must say: Rogen is good at what Rogen does, but the real revelation here is Franco, who is very funny but also strangely real. GreenCine recently quoted a critic who pointed to a scene where Franco tries to persuade Rogen to hang out with him, and another scene later on where Rogen sort-of breaks Franco's heart, and the critic there is absolutely right: those scenes are very good indeed.

Did CT Movies review this? Nope. Is it possible that giving a stoner film a positive review on a CT maybe the only thing which could surpass the hate mail they receive for giving movies with promiscuous sex a positive review?

PTC reviewed it for CT Movies

Michael Todd wrote:
: Did CT Movies review this? Nope. Is it possible that giving a stoner film a positive review on a CT maybe the only thing which could surpass the hate mail they receive for giving movies with promiscuous sex a positive review?

As Darrel noted, I did review the film -- though it was, admittedly, a last-minute assignment, hence the review went up today instead of on Wednesday. I don't know that I would call my 2-star review "positive", but for what it's worth, we did already receive one complaint from a reader who wondered how I could possibly have zeroed in on the theme of male friendship, which I do respond to in a broadly positive way, rather than grinding the movie into the dirt for its language and violence. (I paraphrase.)

It's weird, because I really did think that that theme -- the male-friendship theme -- rang through loud and clear within the film itself. I wrote the review in more of a rush than usual, so it went a bit long, and thus some of the plot-synopsis stuff in the middle got cut, and I think the review still works without that stuff, but had that stuff NOT been cut, the review would have included even MORE evidence of how the theme of friendships-made-and-betrayed recurs throughout the movie -- not just in the Dale-Saul relationship, but also in the Saul-Red and Red-Ted relationships. (And I didn't even bother to get into the film's portrayal of the prissy, sissy hit-man, who kind of exists as a quasi-gay extreme example of what the central male friendships in this film are NOT. And I didn't even touch on any of the stuff that comes up in the film's final fifteen minutes, which really drives the "bromance" theme home but would have taken us into serious spoiler territory.)

This would be a fun film to nitpick, BTW, if I thought there were any point to it.

The story begins on a Monday -- we know, because it's a school day and because, the next day, the Franco character says it's Tuesday -- yet we are supposed to believe that, on the second day, Franco is planning to go over to his grandmother's place to change the clocks because of Daylight Savings. But Daylight Savings always changes after midnight on SATURDAY nights! (Hence people are always either late or early for church the next morning.)

Also, how likely is it that the cop played by Rosie Perez would always drive up to the drug lord's house in her police car, and walk into it wearing a police uniform, much less that she and he would kill a man in their living room late at night with the curtains wide open and the lights on bright, and in a room that is visible from the street? And all in addition to the fact that the drug lord in question is the only supplier of the particular weed that Seth Rogen just happens to be smoking in his car at that point in time? Etc., etc., etc. (Some of these quibbles survived in my review, but a few were cut, again for conciseness.)

And if the Asian gangsters are going to "go to war" with the other guys and launch a ninja-style attack on their secret base out in some rural area, how likely is it that they wouldn't leave any guards stationed outside?

Etc., etc., etc.

I also find myself wondering what to make of the fact that this film, for all its cartoonish violence, also shows at least one innocent bystander getting shot during one of the chase sequences. It's like the filmmakers were trying to subvert movie conventions BOTH by going cartoonish, but ALSO by going more realistic, and I'm not sure the combination works.

I was wrong then, I did not look closely enough.

I have not seen the film, and may not go see it, but I was hoping to tack on another movie from Apatow and his crew that CT Movies dodged.

I thought James Franco and Seth Rogen make a pretty good comedy team. But pot-smoking typically doesn't make for primo comedies, and this film doesn't do too much to elevate this half-baked sub-genre. Although it's marginally funnier than anything Cheech and Chong have since 1979 or so.

The Real Geezers debate whether this is a "morality tale", among other things: