Pineapple Express‘ Wednesday night opening broke two records: with its gross of $12.5 million, it had the best August Wednesday opening day ever. It has also now grossed more than every other film directed by David Gordon Green combined. His previous high grosser was All the Real Girls, which made about half a million dollars back in 2003. That’s right: in a single day, he beat his personal high score by a factor of 25. Of course, Pineapple also opened in 125 times as many theaters as Real Girls played in its widest release.
There’s really no way to calculate how much of that $12.5 million is due to the efforts of Green, and how much can be credited to the Judd Apatow brand name, to the combination of leads Seth Rogen and James Franco, or to the immortal Huey Lewis. So…cheers all around!
I’m glad I didn’t know Huey Lewis and the News were performing their Pineapple Express plot song on the Jimmy Kimmel show, because if I had, I might have actually forced myself to watch the Jimmy Kimmel show, and it wouldn’t have been worth it. The video evidence of the performance is above, and it’s hard to imagine a more cheerless gesture of synergy. After Huey’s half-assed opening hand claps, he seems to give up the game to his horn section. Maybe for good reason––he’s seemingly employed the finest pop-rock saxophonists alive––but I’m still going to say it’s for Huey Lewis and/or plot song completists only.
This is it, the day we’ve been waiting for two full decades (or, at least, since we first heard it was happening back in December): the Huey Lewis plot song written specifically for the David Gordon Green-driected, Judd Apatow-produced stoner comedy Pineapple Express has hit the web! The Playlist first posted a clip of the song last night; today, Whitney at Pop Candy points to the full thing, available for streaming or download on MySpace.
It’s very much in classic Huey Lewis plot song mode, complete with gratuitous hand claps and sax solo. It’s not as directly narrative as, say, “Back in Time” (above), but it’s slightly more literally connected to the film than, like, “The Power of Love.” A sample from the chorus: “How did we get into this mess? Pineapple Express! Can’t deal with this stress! Totally gone, cause we’re on, Pineapple Express!” It is the best, and it is also totally the worst.
As we’ve discussed before, plot songs take the science of the source cue to a new level. After the jump, a brief, video-guided journey through plot song history. Let us know what we’ve left out.
“You know neither of us are really very creative people, Joe. I mean, I have filmmaker friends who walk around generating plot ideas all the time, but shit, when I walk down the street, all I do is brood about my friends and my loved ones and really zero in on all the attending barbs and snags and accrued resentments that seem to get in the way of closeness.” Ronnie Bronstein pulls back the curtain on himself and Joe Swanberg in the latest installment of our Butterknife interviews. See also: Butterknife stills.
On this week’s podcast: An argument about No Country For Old Men, a love letter to Billy the Kid.
My post on Huey Lewis’ two, questionably classic contributions to the Back to the Future soundtrack garnered some impassioned responses. Ryan Stewart wrote in to defend the track that I called the lesser of the two, Back in Time:
Cassette? Um, I own the LP. Back in Time is the best example ever of a plot-song. It’s that 1/1,000 that actually work, and work really awesomely, and the kind of thing they’d never have the guts to do these days.
Oh yeah? Well, never underestimated the guts of David Gordon Green. A friend of Spout pointed me to this Stereogum item from Monday, in which Seth Rogen, writer and star of Gordon Green’s Summer 2008 comedy The Pineapple Express, confirms that none other than Huey Lewis was commissioned to write “a track reminiscent of Power Of Love” for the movie. My source says he’s heard the song, and he confirms that it incorporates “lyrics that tell the plot of the movie, with ‘Pineapple Express’ in the chorus.”
So is the plot song ready for its comeback? Are YOU ready for the plot song’s comeback? Can you even name the last film that featured a full-on plot song? I can’t. While you’re pondering all of that, watch the above clip from The Pineapple Express. I’ve heard one or two whispers that the film could very well show up at Harry Knowles’ Butt-Numb-A-Thon this weekend (which, sadly, I’m not going to be able to attend), so we might get a full review of Huey’s contribution sooner rather than later.
Prompted by a Twitter from Chris Thilk, last week I set out to solve a long-burning conundrum, once and for all: of the two songs Huey Lewis wrote and performed on the Back to the Future soundtrack, which is better: Back in Time, or The Power of Love?
I was so enamored with the first BttF film as a child that I actually owned the soundtrack–on cassette!–but I haven’t listened to either song divorced from the film as an adult. I intended to give this matter the utmost serious consideration. But then I actually listened to the songs all the way through…and they both pretty much made me want to throw myself in front of the Delorean (the pre-Mr. Fusion, non-flying Delorean). The best analysis I can offer? Time’s awkward shoehorning of references to the movie (”Get back, Marty!”) aside, they’re kind of the same song. Love is, marginally, more enjoyable, if only because it’s blissfully free of Time’s gratuitous saxophone. But that guitar solo … ouch.
I’ve embedded two Back to the Future fan tributes: one set to The Power of Love above, one set to Back in Time below the jump. Watch them if you dare, and if there’s some kind of essential greatness to one or the other that I missed, let me know.
Pineapple Express‘ Wednesday night opening broke two records: with its gross of $12.5 million, it had the 
