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Tuesday, May 20, 2008

HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE (2004)

Wildly uneven, but often LOL funny ‘stoner’ comedy is at its best when it moves past its sophomoric elements (the usual bodily functions & moronic anti-establishment gestures) to hone in on its picaresque all-night buddy-movie premise with our hungry, if mismatched eponymous pals. Scripters Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg chart a fresh course just by swapping the usual surfer-dude heros for a couple of ethnic types (Korean-American & Indian-American) & by letting this new face of America serve variously as text & sub-text. (Using the thriller genre, Stephen Frears did much the same to London in DIRTY PRETTY THINGS.) An even bigger surprise comes in the casual acceptance of gay related riffs from these hetero-boys without the expected reflexive gay panic response. The film may be no more than a good-natured mess (w/ utterly winning perfs from Kal Penn & especially John Cho), but it’s also a healthy subversive tonic.

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