James Franco: Pineapple Express

If you had told me two years ago that pretty boy James Franco would deliver one of the best performances I saw in 2008, I would have called you a pot-smoking fool.  Turns out, the joke’s on me, because the star of such wretched drek as Annapolis and Flyboys stepped up to the plate and smashed his role in David Gordon Green’s marijuana-laced comedy Pineapple Express out of the park.  As Saul Silver, the low-rent weed dealer who clearly samples a little too much of his own product, Franco is comic dynamite and single-handedly keeps this otherwise unsteady vehicle cruising along.  Couple this with his equally strong dramatic turn in Milk and it looks like a guy I was once ready to write off is back in a big way.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it.