Don't Mess With The Express
Continuing my Judd Apatow education, I watched two movies he co-wrote. Turns out neither was all that great.
I watched Pineapple Express, which is a stoner movie with a fugitive plot. As far as stoner movies go, it's pretty good -- but it's still a stoner movie. If you aren't a stoner, by the end of the movie, you think "why did I just watch that?" Judd Apatow co-wrote the story with Rogen and Goldberg, but didn't help them write the script, so we probably shouldn't blame Apatow for this crap. It's not Superbad-bad, but you don't want to pay to see this, and you probably don't even want to plan to watch this. This is the kind of movie you turn on as background at a party or when exercising; the good parts of the movie are best experienced indirectly, in small bits.
I also watched You Don't Mess with the Zohan. You also probably shouldn't watch the Zohan. It's -- passable. Not worth paying for, but if you're flipping through random cable channels with nothing to watch, it's not that bad.
Most of the bad stuff comes from it being a juvenile Adam Sandler movies. Whenever Sandler isn't tightly controlled, he goes overboard on the crude humor and I'm like "yeah, whatever" and think about turning off the movie, if it has no other redeeming features.
The rest of the bad stuff comes from it being an Adam Sandler wish-fulfillment movie. I've noticed that he has a tendency to pick movies where his character is portrayed in as good a light as possible. He doesn't like to play people who lose or are ridiculed, even though the best movies I've seem him in (The Wedding Singer, 50 First Dates,) he does lose a bit. Granted, in Little Nicky, he's portrayed as a total loser -- a loser whose dad is Satan and who has supernatural powers -- and that movie is definitely the worst Sandler movie I've seen. But in other movies, Sandler likes to portray people who win a lot, even when the bad guys are trying to beat him. In Zohan, he's an Israeli super-counter-terrorist who can single-handedly fight an army. There are some funny bits in the movie, and it's definitely not Little Nicky or even I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, but it's not worth seeking out.
Oddly, it turns out that Judd Apatow may not have had much to do with the movie. He was a co-writer, but the project was shelved when 9/11 happened and never got involved with the development again. Who knows how much rewriting Sandler and Smigel did after he left? So it's still looking like Apatow is sort of a non-entity when it comes to script-writing: whoever he writes with determines whether the movie will be good (Ben Stiller,) flawed (Adam Sandler,) or bad (Rogen and Goldberg.)