Pineapple Express

I don't know where I read that the Buddy movie is a genre subset of the love story. Pineapple Express disproves this theory. It is a bromance - a true romantic comedy about two dudes falling in platonic love for one another. It is also a stoner-action movie. Does this sound bad? It is.

An old fashioned buddy movie isn't really a love story. Normally, in a buddy film, the plot involves two buddies teaming up to bring down some sort of bad guy or to pull off some type of scheme. There is an outside antagonist. In a love story, the antagonist is generally the love interest.

In any case, there are two subgenres of Hollywood films developing right now - the bromance and the action-movie spoof. Superbad and Pineapple Express are the best examples of the bromance, where basically man-adolescents are stuck in a perpetual teenage-dom and seek love/intimacy with their best dude friend. These themes are uninteresting to me.

Action-movie spoofs like Pineapple Express and Hot Fuzz are made supposedly by filmmakers who love 80s action comedies. Yet, these spoofs, to me, fundamentally misunderstand 80s action comedies. Those movies had real menace. The bad guys were real characters and real bad. And the good guys were competent. There is actually a seriousness in the films that these spoofs do not really lampoon and makes me think the filmmakers don't understand the genre. They don't work as as true action comedies and they don't work as spoofs in the way Austin Powers lampoons James Bond.