Harold Kumar Go to White Castle Again
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'White Castle' delivers meaty summertime one-act
I secret of fiction is the cosmos of unique characters who are precisely defined. The clandestine of comedy is the same, with the departure beingness that the characters must be obsessed with unwholesome but understandable human desires. Many comedies accept the same starting place: A hero who must obtain his dream, which should if possible exist difficult, impractical, eccentric or immoral. As he marches toward his goal, handful conventional citizens behind him, we laugh because of his selfishness, and because secretly that's how we'd like to behave, if we thought nosotros could get away with it.
I realize this is a lofty beginning for a review about a stoner road one-act, but there you are. The summertime has been filled with comedies that failed because they provided formula characters, mostly nice teenagers who wanted to exist loved and popular. "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," on the other mitt, is about ii very specific roommates who want to fume pot, meet chicks and eat sliders in the centre of the night. Considering this cavalcade is read in Turkey, Botswana, Nihon and California, I should explain that "sliders" are what fans of the White Castle chain call their hamburgers, which are small and inexpensive and slide right down. We purchase 'em by the purse.
Is a slider worth the trouble leaving dwelling house and journey miles
through the nighttime? If you lot're stoned and take the munchies, as Harold and Kumar are, and if you lot're in the grip of a White Castle obsession, the respond is clearly aye. The simply hamburger worth that much trouble when yous're clean and sober is at Steak 'n Milkshake. Californians believe the burgers at In 'north Out are amend, simply that is because they practise not appreciate the secret of Steak 'north Milk shake, expressed in its profound credo, "In Sight, It Must Be Right." (Many people believe the names of In 'n Out and Steak 'n Shake perfectly describe the contrast in bedroom techniques between the coast and the heartland.)
Harold Lee (John Cho) is a serious, bookish, shy Korean-American accountant. Kumar Patel (Kal Penn), an Indian-American, is a party brute whose parents recall he's most to enroll in med school. That the dean is played past the benevolent but obscurely disturbed Fred Willard lets you know this process will not be without setbacks. Harold and Kumar are getting stoned one night when a White Castle commercial plays on Tv set and gives them a slider fixation.
Kumar seems to remember that there is a White Castle nearly where they alive in New Jersey. There is not. If there were, it's questionable whether they could observe it, as they careen through the night on a journey that makes the travels of Cheech and Chong wait like outings in the Popemobile.
It is an detail of organized religion in comedies that if you leave the principal route, y'all will instantly be in a state inhabited past people who did non learn all they know most chainsaw massacres from the movies. Consider Freakshow (Christopher Meloni), an auto mechanic who comes to their rescue after they run off the road while wearing what John Prine calls illegal smiles. Freakshow has a complexion and then bad, information technology upstages sausage pizza. Alarming fluids erupt from its protuberances; volcanic activity on the Jovian moon Io comes to mind.
Harold and Kumar somewhen find themselves, inexplicably every bit far as they are concerned, on the campus at Princeton, where the students may exist Ivy Leaguers merely, similar students everywhere, occasionally unwind with ear-shattering demonstrations of flatulence. This is the kind of movie where they selection up a hitchhiker, and enquire him, "Are you Neil Patrick Harris?" and observe out that he is. Later on he steals Harold's car. Harold is incredulous: "Did Doogie Howser just steal my car?" Aye, but he did it for a good reason. He did it and so that when they finally get to a White Castle and detect him there ahead of them, Harold can ask, "Dude, where's my car?"
Danny Leiner, who directed this film, began his career with "Dude, Where's My Machine?" I inexplicably missed that movie, but I laughed frequently enough during the screening of "Harold & Kumar" that afterward I told Dann Gire, distinguished president of the Chicago Film Critics' Assn., that I thought maybe I should rent "Dude" and cheque it out. Dann cautioned me that he did not call up information technology was all that urgent. Still another reason our leader'south photograph should be displayed in every government role and classroom.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the moving picture critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his decease in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)
88 minutes
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