Let me lay a few images on you: 1) Environmental activist and electric car poster boy Ed Begley Jr. packing heat and dropping f-bombs like pocket change. 2) Petite Rosie Perez putting the smack down on James Franco. 3) Danny McBride baking a cake to commemorate the birthday of his dead cat. 4) Seth Rogen feels insecure when he meets his high school girlfriend’s hot male classmate who’s impressed her, not with his muscles, but his ability to do a killer Jeff Goldblum impression.

No, my friend, these are not hallucinations. Instead, welcome to director David Gordon Green’s stoner comedy Pineapple Express, which,paying homage to Spike Lee’s term-of-choice, could be called a "Judd Apatow Joint." Emulating '70s stoner classics from its opening credits, Express gets a much-needed credibility boost, as award-winning writer/director David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls, George Washington) and his talented cinematographer Tim Orr turn what could have been a Harold and Kumar meets Cheech and Chong rip-off into something that’s more beautifully photographed and painstakingly edited than one would assume such a comedy should be.

Yet, that’s not to say it’s George Washington 2.  In producer Apatow’s Pineapple Express, "everybody must get stoned" and in the process, laugh themselves silly. That’s right, in the latest trippy offering from the informal Judd Apatow School of Comedic Filmmaking, following Knocked Up, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, and Superbad, co-screenwriter and star Seth Rogen plays a process server with two passions in life: weed and talk radio.

When he isn’t donning elaborate costumes to surprise his “targets” with subpoenas, Rogen’s Dale Denton can usually be found driving down the highway, joint and steering wheel in one hand, and cell phone in the other, spouting off his own life lessons to whatever unfortunate DJ happens to be on the air. Tackling every issue, from his obvious ardent support of the legalization of marijuana, to trying to justify to the world—and disbelieving audiences—his improbable relationship with Angie (Amber Heard) a pretty, eighteen year old blonde, Dale coasts through his days, seemingly without any greater ambition than receiving the perfect smoke and giving the perfect pearl of wisdom.

While the logic of Dale and Angie: The Couple, makes as much sense as Leah Remini and Kevin James on The King of Queens, Rogen and his co-writer Evan Goldberg manage to cull a great deal of unexpected humor from the situation as Dale proceeds to surprise Angie with a visit in two of the film’s funniest scenes. The first occurs early into Express, when he arrives at her high school and gets busted by faculty within minutes; then, in one of the most uproarious sequences, after he shows up, bleeding and dirty, for dinner with her parents on an evening gone horribly wrong. However, in this instance - as in every time he’s paired alongside James Franco - Rogen is instantly upstaged by Angela’s father, played by Ed Begley Jr. as an uncharacteristic and downright hysterical Clint Eastwood type, eager to unload his rifle into his daughter’s loser beau.