Just a very quick one, this week, because we are going to see REM at the Rose Bowl. All comedy, n’all:
Dude, Where’s My Car?
I’d dodged watching this movie for ages – possibly down to my long-standing and inconsistent prejudice against teen or subculture comedy that only really started to shift when I saw American Pie by accident a few years after release. “Dude, Where’s My Car?” also managed to evade me long after I fell in love with the director Danny Leiner’s later – and similarly targeted – movie “Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle”.
We only watched “Dude…” – I’m going to call it that, because the whole title is just going to sound daft repeated over and over – this week due to a game-night gone awry. We had pitched up at a friend’s house with board games, but we were all too tired to actually participate actively in our entertainment, so we decided on movies.
Of the choices available, “Dude…” was the only one that offered the promise of entertainment that didn’t require intellectual input, so I pushed for it. Our host was pro the viewing, but they were the ones who recommended “Euro Trip”, and we all know how that turned out. I took responsibility for the choice, though – and it was a risky proposition. I knew that one day I would have to watch it, because I loved the “Harold And Kumar” movies, but this one had always sounded like it was going to be just that little bit too dumb. And quite aside from that, for Girl One Leiner was an untested quantity – if she hated “Dude…”, it was quite possible that I’d never get her to watch H & K.
I was wrong to worry, though. There isn’t a lot to say about the film, because it is pretty daft, but ultimately it’s got plenty of laughs, and unexpected ones at that, that it doesn’t matter that the ride makes no sense – because you enjoy being on it enough.
Furthermore, the characters are vacuous but likeable – Sean William Scott in particular plays against what would have been the jerky redneck type he had quickly fostered in the American Pie franchise – and the situations they get into are just bizarre enough that they keep you interested, but always fitting the film’s own internal logic, twisted as it is.
This is the difference between a film like this and one like “Euro Trip”, although honestly, comparing “Dude…” to that flick is probably a little disingenuous. It’s much more like a lost “Bill And Ted” excursion – the characterisation of the leads is almost identical, although their world is grounded much more in reality than those earlier films. This might sound strange when one considers the science-fiction craziness that takes place in “Dude…”, but Jesse and Chester inhabit a world that pretty much stays mundane throughout, whereas Bill and Ted, in their more innocent time, aren’t retracing their steps after a drug and drink bender, they are instead heading relentlessly towards their fantasy aim of being a super-famous rock band, by way of getting away with not doing their schoolwork.
Even when they’re saving the universe, Jesse and Chester are only ever thinking about keeping their girlfriends happy, in pursuit of their “special” anniversary gifts.
Also similar with Bill and Ted, though, is that question of internal logic. For such a dumb movie, there is some pretty nice narrative fancy footwork around the integration of the science fantasy elements into their world, in ways that almost seem to make sense.
As far as the humour goes, most of the jokes here aren’t particularly sophisticated – in fact, repetition is the order of the day, with both repeated threads of behaviour throughout the film, and with the almost hypnotic echoing of a line in a short space of time, by either the pair or one of the people they meet along the way, until it can’t help but be funny.
All in all, more fun and bewildering than it really should have been. And Girl One liked it too, which is how I managed to force the point of watching…
Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle
It’s already clear from my review of the sequel a couple of weeks ago that I love this film, but this was the viewing that I’d been both looking forward to and dreading – when I was going to show it to Girl One, and she was going to almost certainly hate it. We had our “Euro Trip” loving, “Dude, Where’s My Car?” hosting friends over, and that gave me a little more confidence, but then at the same time, I’d been riding them mercilessly about that other movie since they recommended it, so I wondered if I hadn’t set myself up for a fall, movie-wise.
“Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle” pitches itself as little more than a stoner comedy, and the renaming of it in the UK to “… Get The Munchies” only helps this idea along.
It is a stoner comedy, on one level, but on another it’s a very well-realised buddy movie – in fact, you could strip out the drug references, and you’d still have a great comedy road movie.
Of course, being stoned is what creates the impetus for the titular characters to go on their quest. And there is an unforgettable fantasy sequence in which Kumar imagines an explicit relationship with a giant bag of weed…
Okay, let’s not try and pretend there isn’t a drug element to this film – it clearly isn’t working. Certainly, marijuana isn’t portrayed in a remotely negative light, which immediately singles it out as being a love-letter to drugs with some audiences. I can imagine that working as both a negative and a positive for the movie’s reception with those audiences, actually.
But the real strength in the film is in the relationship between the restrained and generally unsatisfied hard-worker Harold, and the shiftless, impulsive and self-absorbed genius Kumar. John Cho and Kal Penn did a great job in both of these movies – their characters don’t call for a lot of depth, but there aren’t really any moments when you don’t believe in their actions and motivation, and that’s essential in a film that requires such a lot of suspension of disbelief in the outlandish situations that they get themselves into.
Overall, I’d say that this is a more focussed and tighter film than the sequel – which in this case doesn’t mean that either one is better, because what the follow-up lacks in direction, it makes up for in scale. However, I’ll always have a soft-spot for this movie, and have spent the few days following this watching craving those succulent little White Castle burgers, a luxury that we in the UK are sadly devoid of.
Oh, and Girl One and our guests loved it, even though none of us smoke, and in Girl One’s case despite the one quite scarring scatological scene around the middle of the movie!
