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"FacebookPinterest\n\nSo here's an idea for a movie you know would pack 'em in at Sundance, collect a bunch of Independent Spirit Awards, and put the rest of us to sleep. The heroes are two idealistic AsianAmerican postadolescents who feel trapped by ethnic stereotyping and their families' bourgeois expectations, all right As they struggle for fulfillment, they keep coming up against the facts of life in these United States, from whitecollar hypocrisy to Holy Rolling Christianity and celebrity privilege. They're attacked by skinheads and tossed in jail by bigoted cops, where one of the duo is newly inspired by a wise black man's advocacy of nonviolence. Movingly, in spite of everything, they end up achieving their dream.\n\nFunnily enough, though, Harold Kumar Go to White Castle didn't play Sundance at all, much less win prizes for uplift. Why, I wonder: just because the black guy went on to confide that his real consolation was having a large penis Or the debauched celeb was the former Doogie Howser, M.D., with Neil Patrick Harris having a ball playing himself as a drugcrazed satyr Maybe it was the scene in which a pair of lissome Princeton coeds squealed their way through a farting contest called \"Battle Shits.\" But I'm guessing that the overriding reason was that our protagonists\u2014stressed KoreanAmerican numbers cruncher Harold (John Cho) and his roommate, reluctant IndianAmerican medschool candidate Kumar (Kal Penn)\u2014had only one joy in life: weed.\n\nThat's why their quest for the sliders they crave is known in some foreign markets as Harold Kumar Get the Munchies. But in more than one sense, Europeans don't know what they're missing. The target of H K's odyssey didn't only prove that the movie's very sharp screenwriters, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, had great taste in fast food. Their fellow Americana expert Chuck Berry probably enjoyed the double meaning of White Castle almost as much as the scene with the coeds. How your Critic could have seen that title on a marquee and not guessed that the most stoopidsounding comedy of 2004 might be one of the shrewdest beats me.\n\nInstead, like most fans, I caught up with it on DVD, where, just like Office Space, it keeps getting better. Understand, my Sundancefriendly description is no fib. The movie really is about chasing the American dream as your fellow Americans chase you, and Kumar even says so in his climactic speech. It's just that he and Harold are about to hang glide off a cliff after they've fought a raccoon, had their car stolen by Doogie Howser, made an ally out of an escaped zoo cheetah who likes dope as much as they do, performed ER surgery on a friendly gunshot victim, and ogled the Ivy League's secret life. That's aside from their runin with Freakshow (Christopher Meloni), who takes \"What would Jesus do\" so literally that he offers to let them bang his wife while he fis their car for free. John Waters in his prime couldn't have packed a better Whitman's Sampler of our national dementias into eightyeight goofball, raunchy minutes.\n\nStarting with another title that deserves to go down in popculture history\u2014Harold Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay\u2014you can't call Hurwitz and Schlossberg's new sequel unambitious. It also isn't as good as the original H K, partly for the same unavoidable reason Help! wasn't as good as A Hard Day's Night. Just like the Fab Four, the Fried Duo are now familiar quantities, obligated to deliver the goods. But if any movie characters were put on earth to razz the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, and Dick Cheney, these are the two.\n\nThere's a lesson here for earnest movieland liberals. Once Escape from Guantanamo Bay breaks the boxoffice jinx on films that reference our global war on terror, they'll be thinking, Oh man\u2014why didn't we let Tommy Lee Jones go through In the Valley of Elah wearing an illegal smile Why didn't we talk Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep into having a whocutthecheese throwdown midway through Rendition And why, oh why, didn't we get Neil Patrick Harris to pop up in Lions for Lambs, high as a banshee and tensely muttering, \"I'm losing wood\"\n\nTo which I can only say, Yeah, why didn't you What's the matter, don't you love America\n\nEven if it were a lot more botched than it is, Escape from Guantanamo Bay would say more by definition about The Way We Live Now than Hollywood's highminded Iraqwar flops. Something Hurwitz and Schlossberg are probably a mite too aware of for their own good is that they're updating a great tradition. Because silly comedies don't need to be responsible, they've long been a gold mine of casual\u2014or pseudocasual\u2014social satire and topical gotchas. Just ask the now sainted Marx Brothers, who got away with a lot more in their scruffy early freeforalls than after they'd been rebranded as a class act.\n\nThe Airplane! guys used to be masters at this. Nobody's ever going to make a drama explaining the 1988 presidential campaign, but why bother For us oldsters, Michael Dukakis's beaming portrait next to the Hindenburg in flames in Naked Gun 2 12 said it all. Even so, I still remember the look of horror that crossed a seriousminded friend's face a couple of years back when I started talking up the genius of Talladega Nights. She'd expected her pal the film crit to praise Culture, and I'd let her down with Will Ferrell. There didn't seem to be much percentage in trying to tell her Talladega Nights captured the bamboozled patriotism of the post&amp;amp;#x2013;September 11 U.S.A. in ways Oscar winners never touch, right down to Sacha Baron Cohen's \"You taste\u2026of America\" and Ferrell's dignified \"Thank you\" after their climactic soul kiss.\n\nThe lowly stoner comedy has always had interesting underpinnings, too, starting with the ethnic angle that dates from Cheech Chong's invention of the genre. Even when the stoners are Anglo, the basic gag amounts to a weird modern spin on oldfashioned race humor. Like the comic minorities white folks used to laugh at in a bygone screen era, they're funny because they can't get with the program. Face it, they're our time's inoffensive equivalent of that offensive Jim Crow caricature, the HappyGoLucky Negro: those childlike perceptions, that puzzlement about responsibility. Sean Penn's Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High is the perfect example.\n\nHurwitz and Schlossberg's trick is to take advantage of all this at the same time they're turning it inside out. One joke is that the heroes come from two immigrant groups with reps for industrious conformity, not rebellion. Another is that they aren't slackers: They're bright college grads on the fast track to success\u2014&amp;amp;#xE0; la Borat, the clouds of reefer smoke and the actors' ethnicities barely hide Harold and Kumar's secret identities as a couple of brainy, affluent Jewish kids who aren't too unlike, dare I guess, their creators. That just shows how things have changed, since Jewish characters used to have to be disguised as\u2014or in a pinch, played by\u2014goys to keep Middle America buying tickets. Now they've got to be passed off as dopehappy Koreans and Indians to avoid looking like juvenile Woody Allens.\n\nUnlike Woody, though, Hurwitz and Schlossberg have a lot to learn about directing movies, the job they've promoted themselves to this time out. Believe me, you'll get a new appreciation for how effectively the first H K's director, Dude, Where's My Car alum Danny Leiner, punched the jokes home and kept everyone's performances on the same page. We're just lucky the sequel's premise is so dandy that the great bits make us willing to put up with the chaff, something incidentally true of most Marx Brothers movies aside from Duck Soup.\n\nPicking up where they left off, the boys are headed for Amsterdam\u2014the Disneyland of legal weed\u2014to hook up with Harold's love bunny, Maria (Paula Garc&amp;amp;#xE8;s). But their presence on the plane unnerves the other passengers; in a joke swiped from Annie Hall, one biddy visualizes Kumar as bin Laden. Once people mishear \"bong\" as \"bomb,\" U.S. air marshals pile on out of nowhere. Next stop, Gitmo.\n\nBecause Hurwitz and Schlossberg know their audience, the prison's horrors are a frat hazing on steroids, with ridiculously beefy guards demanding blow jobs from the cowering inmates. Luckily, Harold and Kumar soon make their getaway, hitching a ride back Stateside with some chipper Cuban refugees. Then they're off on another gaudy trip through God's favorite country, from a Florida pool party packed with crotchbaring babes (Hurwitz and Schlossberg do know their audience) to a runin with the Cyclopseyed spawn of married Alabama siblings. After they've been peed on at a Klan rally and hauled to a whorehouse by Neil Patrick Harris, who's gotten even more demented since last time, they end up in\u2014one guess\u2014Crawford, Texas, where a certain president of the United States is taking his ease.\n\nLittle do they know their parents and friends are being dragged in for harassment by Rob Corddry as a Homeland Security bigwig who's sure he's hit the jackpot. But Corddry is one of the movie's mistakes; this Daily Show vet isn't really an actor, and about the last thing his rabid shtick needs is to have every piece of bombast underlined with bad satiric music. His best scene is his spectacular exit\u2014a variation on Slim Pickens's bombsaway farewell in Dr. Strangelove.\n\nA much better newcomer is One Tree Hill hottie Danneel Harris as Vanessa, Kumar's longlost one and only. She's nothing less than the chick who first turned him on to pot, and the college flashbacks to a studious Kumar and a gothedout Harold are very funny. Of course, though, Vanessa's now set to marry a blueblooded fink (Eric Winter) with ties to the Bush administration, and even though I'm never sorry to see rulingclass WASPs played as psychotic blond scumbags, you'll admit it's not the freshest idea. For my money, Bradley Cooper's version in Wedding Crashers pretty much retired the prize.\n\nYet I also don't care that much about Escape's dim bits and unduly frantic attempts to top the first H K's signature scenes. No doubt some lefties will complain about the movie letting POTUS off the hook\u2014as indeed it does, though in a way unlikely to make either his base or his 'rents too happy. By now a movie that insouciantly invites us to identify with a stoned George W. Bush is more subversive than one raking him over the coals\u2014and Hurwitz and Schlossberg's most attractive trait is that they're never superior or disdainful about what they're lampooning. From Doogie to the Klan, they revel in it like kids in a candy store, with the same open delight Joel and Ethan Coen finally copped to in O Brother, Where Art Thou after looking down their noses at us for years. Call H S irresponsible if you like, but they're saner than Oliver Stone. They know they live in a country where White Castle almost makes up for Gitmo.\n\nTom Carson is a GQ correspondent. To see his musthave DVD picks, click here."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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