Rogen and Franco hit the Express lane.

Cruz
controls in
Barcelona.

sitting shotgun trying to act tough is Lila (Upham), and illegal immigrants are shuddering in the trunk. Because Leo’s every gesture conveys the desperation of a sinewy survivor, Frozen River works as an unlikely thriller about the price of poverty, the burdens of motherhood, and the promises of America, false and otherwise.

High and Mighty

The Superbad guys reinvent the bud-y action comedy

Pineapple Express SETH ROGEN, JAMES FRANCO COLUMBIA, R

V _Bi_ac_rk_cy_eC _lor_nis_atina _½
JAVIER BARDEM,
SCARLETT JOHANSSON
THE WEINS TEIN COMPANY, PG- 13
Woody Allen brings a
bewitching ScarJo to Spain
For his 39th feature, Woody
Allen ventures to Spain, where
two friends spend a summer
entangled with a sultry painter
(Bardem), testing their appetites
for romantic intensity. While
Johansson’s Cristina (perpetu-
ally dissatisfied) jumps at the
chance to play a bohemian
version of house with Bardem’s
Juan Antonio, Rebecca Hall’s
Vicky (unsatisfied with her
dreary fiancé) anxiously tries
to leave it at letting him jump
her one wine-drenched night.
The movie clicks along neatly
for a while, like a cross between
a New Yorker short story and a
Travel & Leisure photo spread.
Then—abruptly, majestically,
unforgettably—Penélope Cruz
smolders in as Juan Antonio’s
ex- wife. Darkly enchanting,
she’s a mad professor giving
the americanas a study-abroad
course in violent passion.

The tasty title refers to a fictive strain of Hawaiian marijuana—a bud so kind “it’s almost a shame to smoke it,” in the impaired judgment of low-level dealer Saul Silver (Franco). But despite this film’s many bong rips—and an arsenal of smoke tricks establishing Dale Denton (Rogen, playing Saul’s cuddliest customer) as this summer’s best bad influence—Pineapple Express isn’t a stoner comedy. Scripted by Rogen and Evan Goldberg (who wrote Superbad), directed by David Gordon Green (the auteur behind All the Real Girls, more used to art house than greenhouse), and blessed by Judd Apatow (inventor of the dudes-will-be-boys genre of Knocked Up), it forgoes the purposeless haze of Half-Baked in favor of the joke-spiked action of Fletch, the henchman chattiness of Pulp Fiction, and the short-term odyssey of After Hours. When it becomes a cult classic (and it will), the status will owe to its mining of friendship for farce and thrills.

For a job, Dale cruises some vague town from morning drive time to quiet-storm midnight, smoking joints on breaks from serving subpoenas. One night, springing legal papers on, it turns out, a drug lord, he witnesses a murder and flees to Saul’s

place. The craggy villain gives chase, and the two little Lebowskis undertake a raucous journey, partly in the company of another ridiculous small-time dealer, Red (Danny McBride). Structurally speaking, Red is in the McLovin role—a third wheel spinning with hormones. But where Superbad’s blade-thin Christopher Mintz-Plasse was a shiv of aggressive heterosexuality, fleshy Red is intriguingly ambigu-

With his arsenal of smoke tricks,
Rogen’s cuddly drug customer is
the summer’s best bad influence.

ous. “I wanna be inside you, homes,” he tells Saul, smitten with his heroics, in one of a hundred moments that earns deep laughs, and not because it taps into adolescent homophobia. Pineapple Express sees the Apatow Company outgrowing the weirdness about male intimacy that’s marred its other bromances. These guys still act like children whenever one of their cardboard girlfriends makes the scene, but, alone together, they’re man enough not to squirm when they say I love you.

Frozen River
MELISSA LEO, MIST Y UPHAM
SON Y PIC TURES CLASSICS, R
Surprising thriller takes on
plight of illegals, motherhood
Director Courtney Hunt’s feature
debut about two run-down
moms in the smuggling racket is
set in three countries: the U.S.
(the desolate edge of upstate
New York, bingo parlors and rust
under a leaden sky), Canada (a
demented strip club in Quebec),
and between them, a Mohawk
reservation so poor that it owns
only the pride of calling itself a
sovereign nation. One December,
Ray (Leo), whose husband has
run off to gamble their savings
away, chugs from here to there
in her beater. The Indian woman

Hamlet 2
STEVE COOGAN, CATHERINE KEENER
FOCUS FEATURES, R
School’s for fools in lame spoof
of classroom dramas
Alas, poor Coogan. I knew him
as a lively fool—Tony Wilson in
²⁴ Hour Party People and Alan
Partridge on TV. Here, he flops
around in the thankless role of
Dana Marschz, a high-school
drama teacher with a cheating
wife, grandiose Oedipal rage,
and a job the school board
is eliminating. Attempting to
goof on the likes of Dead Poets
Society and Stand and Deliver,
Hamlet 2 instead compounds all
the dullest clichés of classroom
melodramas into a sloppy
parody. For every funny line,
there are ten written and read
so cynically it seems this comedy
wants mostly to laugh at you. At
the climax, Marschz inspires his
apathetic pupils to stage a musi-
cal loaded with meaningless
blasphemy and juvenile adult
situations, and they save drama.
The filmmakers, however, save
the comedy for some other time.

_P SPO_a T_tLI_tG_iH T_SO_mN TH_itE _hMU_:S_DIC O_rF_{eam of Life} Steven Sebring shot Patti Smith for Spin in ¹⁹⁹⁵, fell in love at first snap, and invested 1 2 years in making Patti Smith: Dream of Life. For good and ill, the doc plays like a labor of blind love, with every gauzy beach scene and invocation of great poets— heck, every bull session with Flea or Tom Verlaine—screaming “punk icon” very loudly. But his access is excellent (witness Smith in dutiful daughter mode: “Only for you, Ma, would I do a medley”), and his humble subject unfailingly delivers onstage, as in the case of an exceedingly glorious “Gloria.”

Smith in Dream

Coogan (left) and class in Hamlet 2