Apatow Productions

Pineapple Express.

***1/2 Pineapple Express

Directed by David Gordon Green. Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. With Seth Rogen, James Franco, Gary Cole, Rosie Perez and Danny McBride. (R)

The stoner comedy has sputtered of late with Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and The Wackness. It's taken Judd Apatow to set things back on their circuitous Cheech & Chong course with Pineapple Express, a movie made by folks who have obviously inhaled, and I don't mean that dry schwag that smells like Pine-Sol.

Apatow hired Superbad's Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg to write a Midnight Run for stoners, in which Rogen intended to play the drug dealer. Instead, Rogen plays Dale Denton, a process server with a teenage girlfriend (Amber Heard) and James Franco the dealer, Saul Silver, who's got a new strain called Pineapple Express and badly wants Dale to be his friend. (While it may seem that the teenage girlfriend is a sign that Hollywood has gone to Rogen's head, in this movie it just makes Dale more of a loser.) Saul introduces Dale to the cross joint, "the apex of the vortex of joint engineering," and then they're on the run from a ruthless drug lord (Gary Cole) and a crooked cop (Rosie Perez). While the contours of the film are familiar, the hacking coughs and the fact that Dale and Saul never leave Superbad's Clark County make this a road movie for serious slackers.

Franco, who spends the entire movie in pajama pants, is the revelation here. The other surprise (other than Cole doing the two-pistol John Woo thing) is David Gordon Green (George Washington), a director not previously known for his sense of humor. Green plays it straight, which lets the audience connect to the characters, showing his colors when Dale and Saul take time out for a blissful romp in the sun-dappled woods. If Rogen could get his head out of his pants for more than a few minutes, this shaggy bromance would be just about perfect.

**1/2 Man on Wire

Directed by James Marsh. (PG-13)

Those daredevils who keep climbing the New York Times building have nothing on Philippe Petit, the Frenchman who spent an hour dancing on a wire between the Twin Towers on the morning of August 7, 1974. How he and his accomplices managed to get past security, smuggle heavy equipment into the towers and rig the wire is told in Man on Wire, British filmmaker James Marsh's documentary on the irrepressible Petit.

Fortunately for Marsh, Petit documented himself thoroughly, filming practice runs in his backyard as well as earlier clandestine trips between the towers of Notre Dame and the pylons of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, and his co-conspirators are a colorful bunch. But Marsh was hired for the dreamlike reenactments of the Errol Morris school used in his documentary Wisconsin Death Trip, and some of these are particularly unnecessary. Petit's gleeful reminiscence about a post-courthouse tryst with a groupie is reenacted as a pornographic silent comedy, while the film never manages to get around to Petit's "sentence"—to perform a free show in Central Park.

That's typical of the storytelling lapses in the film. There seems to have been a lot of going back and forth between New York and Paris, and how this street performer paid the bills is never explained. That Petit also performed in Washington Square Park in the early '70s is never mentioned, and surely indicates that he spent more time in New York than the movie implies. And what has Petit been up to since then? By focusing on the minutia of the rigging, Marsh seems to have missed the bigger picture.

But there is a charming innocence in this story and in the crime-ridden New York in which Petit, who now lives near Woodstock, undertook his adventure. Would the charges have been dropped today, or the police have waited an hour in awe before arresting him? And smuggling all that equipment through JFK? Fuggetaboutit.

*** Up the Yangtze

Written and directed by Yung Chang. (NR)

The transformation of cities and villages along the Yangtze River and the displacement of two million people by the Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric project in history, is seen through the eyes of two teenagers working on a cruise ship in Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang's documentary Up the Yangtze. The cruise ship is one of several offering "farewell cruises" to Western tourists, and as dam construction sweeps whole towns out of existence, the teenagers see the temporary cruise jobs as a way out.

Chang follows two cruise workers, Yu Shui, a 16-year-old from a family of subsistence farmers near the soon-to-be-flooded Ghost City of Fengdu, the site of the Gates of Hell in Chinese mythology, and Chen Bo Yu, a middle-class 19-year-old who lives with his grandparents in the city. Yu Shui is renamed Cindy and given a job as a dishwasher, and Chen Bo Yu, who speaks English, is dubbed Jerry and put to work tending bar and carrying bags. Cindy, the eldest of three children in a rural family that has typically defied the Chinese one-child rule, is painfully shy, while handsome Jerry has the coddled cockiness of the only children produced by that policy.

At times Up the Yangtze is a throwback to the days of Robert Flaherty, hovering closer to neorealism than the current conception of documentary. Some scenes at Yu Shui's home, such as when her family is discussing whether she should go to work, are obviously staged, since the cameras wouldn't have been there if Yu Shui hadn't already been hired. (Chang found his subjects through one of the cruise operators.) These scenes feel slightly exploitative, since Chen Bo Yu, shown downing vodka shots and singing karaoke with his friends, does not suffer the equivalent. (His grandparents, who raised him, do not appear in the film.)

Still, any teenager can identify with Yu Shui's mortification when her parents visit her at work, and Chang finds much interest on and off the boat, from the Hotel English classes to the self-criticism reports the employees are required to file to a tour of a model farmer's house, complete with air conditioning and TV. It's a Potemkin prototype for mass resettlement, and while it would certainly be an upgrade for Yu Shui's family, as the dam's walls slowly close over the river, it's clear that it's not Fengdu but the dam itself that Chang considers the gates of hell. ¦

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