Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle

Rating:
Summary: Who would think a trip to White Castle would be this funny
Review: This movie is about 2 friends who get stoned and get the munchies. So they see a commercial for White Castle and decide they have to have 20 or so burgars each. It turns into a big long adventure though as one thing goes wrong after another. They pick up a hitchhikeer played by Neil Patrick Harris "Doogie Houser, Starship Troopers" who plays Neil Patrick Harris. He's crazy and horny and steals their car so he could go find some women.

Also along the way they meet a bunch of other crazy weirdos. There's 2 other people you might recognize besides Neil Patrick Harris. Jamie Kennedy (Scream, Son of the Mask) plays a guy who chooses the same bushes to pee behind as Kumar. Also Ryan Reynolds (Blade 3) plays a doctor who hits on Kumar. The movie is often crude, disgusting with many weed jokes, but it actually doesn't suck. It's pretty funny and not as lame as you would think a movie would be that's about a trip to White Castle. The director of Dude Where's my Car doesn't mind doing something silly and unusual and he's good at it. This movie I think is much better than Dude Where's My Car though. It actually makes me look forward to his next movie.

Rating:
Summary: Stoner Comedy that Has Its Moments, but Mediocre Overall.
Review: "Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle" is a stoner comedy that tries to distinguish itself with ethnic lead characters instead of being a typical white guy buddy picture. Harold (John Cho) is a Korean investment banker frustrated with his job. And Kumar (Kal Penn) will do anything to avoid going to medical school, as his parents expect. They are recent college graduates and roommates whose idea of a good time is watching tv while getting high. One evening while doing just that, Harold and Kumar get a craving for White Castle burgers. So, stoned out of their minds, the pair set out in search of pot, women, and an elusive White Castle restaurant.

A more descriptive, but no less blunt, title for the movie might be "Vulgar Adventures on the Way to White Castle". The humor here is low-brow, scatological, literally "potty humor". Harold and Kumar are a couple of stoned, socially unsophisticated young men. There are some laugh-out-loud moments, but I think the comedy is undermined by the guys' more preposterous escapades. A couple of stoners taking the most indirect route possible in an obsessive pursuit of hamburgers is funny without turning it into a circus sideshow. Funnier, in fact. As stoner comedies go, this one just doesn't rate very high. I recommend 1999's superb film "Go" as an example of how funny and frustrating a quest for recreational pharmaceuticals can be.

The DVD: Bonus features include 4 featurettes, 3 audio commentaries, 8 deleted/alternate scenes plus outtakes, 2 theatrical trailers, a music video for "Yeah (Dream of Me) by All Too Much, and a DVD-ROM (Windows only). "John Cho and Kal Penn: The Backseat Interview" (12 minutes) is an interview of the two lead actors by comedian Bobby Lee, who has a small part in the film. They talk about various scenes in the movie while driving around Los Angeles in an SUV in the rain. "The Art of the Fart" (10 minutes) is about creating the sound for the bathroom competition between the 2 English coeds. Includes interviews with director Danny Leiner and Sound Designer Jeff Kushner. "Cast and Crew: Drive-Thru Bites" is a series of short interviews with director Danny Leiner, the actresses who play the "diarrhea twins", one of the extreme sports punk actors, the neighboring roommates, writers Hurwitz and Schlossberg, actor Fred Willard, actor Neil Patrick Harris, and Paula Garces, who plays Maria. "A Trip to the Land of Burgers" (10 minutes) is about creating the film's single animated sequence, Harold's dream. One of the theatrical trailers is approved for all audiences by the MPAA; the other is rated R.

The first audio commentary is by director Danny Leiner and actors John Cho and Kal Penn. Leiner talks about decisions and difficulties in making the film, and Cho and Penn talk about their on-set experiences. The second audio commentary is by writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, accompanied by their friend, Harold Lee, who was the inspiration for the movie's Harold character. Hurwitz and Schlossberg were roommates and wrote the film about characters like themselves and their friends. They discuss writing and storytelling decisions, casting, and their experiences on the set during filming and in getting the movie made. Theirs is the most interesting of the audio commentaries. The third audio commentary is an "Extreme" commentary by actor Danny Bochart, who played one of the extreme sports punks. It's a rambling but good-natured commentary on how he got the role and about the movie. Bochart is a skateboarder in Toronto with no prior film experience, who was cast much to his own surprise.

Rating:
Summary: Lame
Review: Better than Dude, Where's My car - but that's not saying much. H&K is an average pot toker movie that goes no where. It's not funny and at some point plain mean and racist. Not worth your time or money.

Rating:
Summary: Ugh.
Review: I did not enjoy this movie AT ALL. I don't know if I ended up watching the unrated version or something, but the completely unnecessary boob shots really pissed me off. This wasn't funny. Two smart guys get stoned, do stupid things. Oh, joy. More "teen" humour.
Made by stoners, for stoners.

Rating:
Summary: A New All-Time Fave
Review: I just gotta say that when I saw commericals for this movie I thought it was just going to be some lame hour and a half commercial for White Castle.. but I was WAY WRONG! This is seriously one of the best movies I've seen in a very long time. I've shown it to so many people who've had the same preconcieved notion about it that I initially had, and it turned them into hardcore fans & believers. BELIEVE ME: This movie is a laugh-riot! The cameos alone are worth seeing, fer sure. I recommend this flick to EVERYONE.

Rating:
Summary: fun
Review: I went to see this with my sis and her husband and i admit that we all enjoyed it. Of coursre a couple puffs of a cigarette and chinese food help make this movie more fun but it would have been good anyhow. See this movie.

Rating:
Summary: Harold and Kumar, the two smartest stoners in movie history
Review: In the beginning there was "Up in Smoke" with Cheech and Chong. If that was not the original stoner comedy it is at least the most pertinent reference point for considering "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," because as a society we have clearly moved from a stoner comedy in 1978 starring a Hispanic-American and an Asian-American to a stoner comedy in 2004 starring a pair of Asian-Americans. Not only that, but the two young Asian-Americans are a Korean-American and an Indian-American, and not the Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans that usually pop up in American movies (or the Chinese and Japanese that pop up in Chinese and Japanese movies, respectively).

The ethnicity of the two main characters, Harold Lee (John Cho), an investment banker, and Kumar Patel (Kal Penn), who is avoiding going to medical school, matters because while these pair are stoners, they are the two smartest stoners in the history of American cinema. Yes, I know, the bar is set pretty low in the first place in that regard, but these guys are really smart. They are both college graduates, Harold has a real job in the real world involving making real money and Kumar has perfect MCAT scores, which explains why he can perform surgery is the situation requires it. Of course the first-time writing team of Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg are not Asian-American, so I cannot go so far as to argue there is a concerted political statement being made here, but in terms of playing with an ethnic stereotype this works pretty well. Besides, any excuse to make the lead characters in a movie like this something more than dope smoking idiots is always going to be a good thing.

This film is in the great tradition of "Dude, Where's My Car?" and "The Lord of the Rings," which is to say that "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" is a quest film. The title characters are already high when a White Castle commercial comes on and suddenly the most important thing in the world is getting a bag of the mini-burgers to scarf down. However, this requires getting in a car and driving to the closest White Castle, which is not in the same town. In fact, exactly where the closest White Castle is becomes a major problem in the film, which makes sense because otherwise it ends up being about an hour shorter. In between getting into Harold's car and finding the Promised Land there are a gang of skateboarders, an entire department of racist cops, a tow truck driver with serious genetic problems, and, best of all, Neil Patrick Harris (Neil Patrick Harris).

I can appreciate Harold and Kumar's situation in terms of trying to find a White Castle because I thought we had one in our town and we did, but it has since closed. So my plan to have the kids pick up White Castles to eat while watching the film, admittedly not the most original idea in the world for this one, was thwarted. But there was talk about driving 70 miles to where we know there is a White Castle and if it was not for the fact that the movie would have been over by the time whoever made the trip came back with cold burgers we might have considered it. So someone was sent out for tacos instead, which made no sense for watching a movie starring a pair of Asian-Americans, so we ate the tacos without watching the movie (No, when I watched the movie I did not eat Oriental food either, so the whole logic here fell apart completely).

Director Danny Leiner did "Dude, Where's My Car?" and the parallels between the two become really obvious once Harold's car gets stolen by the actor who played Doogie Howswer (playing himself). But this movie really is twice as good. Is it because Leiner learned from his mistakes the first time around? Is it because writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg are twice as good as Philip Stark (who at least had the "Pink Eye" episode of "South Park" on his resume)? Is it because John Cho and Kal Penn are twice the actors Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott happen to be?

Now, that last one I am pretty sure I can quantify, because Cho and Penn do a great job of keeping these characters real and quite different from what we usually find in such films, but I keep coming back to the ethnicity of the two stars, although the film does not go overboard on the Asian stereotypes (there is a scene where Harold has to deal with a group of other Korean-Americans that could be right out of "Gilmore Girls"). Would this film be as funny if the two leads were something other than Asian-American? It really matters that these two guys are smart and the film takes advantage of the stereotype that Asian-Americans are smart to make that point. Lots of stoners have been obsessed with the quest for weed and a bad case of the munchies, but Kumar is smarter than all of them put together, which makes his dream world involving a giant bag of pot that much funnier. Then there is Harold and his quest to at least speak to Maria (Paula Garces), the beautiful girl he keeps meeting in the elevator in his apartment building.

The other way in which "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" goes against type in the stoner movie genre is that there is actually a sense of personal growth for the boys after their experience. In this case the film is much more reminiscent of "The Lord of the Rings" than "Dude, Where's My Car?" You do not expect stoners to grow up at the end of their quest (you expect them to spend all their reward money getting Van Halen to play at their birthday party), which just gets us back to the ethnicity of Harold and Kumar. It is rather difficult to walk that kind of a tightrope in a comedy (see "White Chicks"), but this film manages to do it. It will also absolutely cure you of ever wanting to sneak into the girl's bathroom in a college dorm.

Rating:
Summary: This is no nice way to say this is garbage.
Review: It isn't clever, funny, interesting, or the least bit insightful. It isn't anything but stupid and boring. I've seen worse, but not by much. Pretty much unwatchable.

Rating:
Summary: Hmmmm, why not...
Review: So, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. If you like teenage comedies, and stuff like American Pie's, there a big chance that you'll like it. For example, it's much better than Dude, Where's My Car, and I know that a lot of you liked that one. So, what's all about with Harold and Kumar. They're two pot smoking dudes, who one night desired to eat White Castle's hamburgers. So they go through series of events to finally get there. There's quite some really funny jokes (Freak Show and his wife), although you'll also find some too stupid. Well, you may also enjoy Mariah, sexy neighbour, who ends up with Harold in the end. So, give this movie a chance. You just may like it.

Rating:
Summary: funny ass stoner movie
Review: to me this is a funny ass stoner movie just like half-baked,definitly worth renting or owning.if you like comedies or stoner comedies for that matter,than this is definitly a must have.