Student Life Archives

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

Rating: 3/5
Starring: John Cho, Kal Penn, Rob Corddry
Directed by: Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg

There is a separation moment in “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle,” one that divides those who then and there buy into the movie’s silliness from those who simply cannot do so. Anyone who has seen it remembers-it is the moment that the two upper-middle-class stoner heroes climb onto the back of a cheetah in an attempt to ride it to safety. At this point the audience (the ones who aren’t high, at least) must decide whether they will accept the movie’s ridiculous premise and embrace the simple pleasures found in a pot comedy with a brain and a heart.

But from someone who laughed himself to tears when Harold and Kumar’s makeshift Battle Cat took off into the New Jersey foliage, I must say that the characters’ unlikely second outing, “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay,” doesn’t ever have that moment. But it manages quite a few chuckles and perhaps a belly laugh or two. I’m just not sure that I ever bought it.

“Guantanamo Bay” picks up right where “White Castle” left off. Roommates Harold and Kumar have bought two plane tickets to Amsterdam. They are on a mission to find Harold’s new lady love Maria, and to spend a week in the weed capital of the world. At the airport, they run into Kumar’s ex who is all set to marry a rich, Brooks Brothers-wearing, cushy-government-job-holding jerk. (How come all the coolest girls fall for these guys?) Kumar is visibly shaken, not only by the feelings he still has for this girl but by the realization that he has done nothing with his life in the time since they broke up.

He brushes off his sadness by reminding himself that he is on his way to a vacation visiting his green, memory-depleting lover. In fact, he’s so impatient to get a taste of his favorite herbal remedy that he breaks out a high tech water pipe on the plane. Of course when a passenger sees a brown guy trying to light up a tubular device with flashing lights in the bathroom, his insistence that what he carries is only a bong falls on deaf ears.

They quickly escape from the inept guards at Gitmo and start the long journey to Texas to find Kumar’s ex so that they can use her boyfriend’s connections to get out of their jam.

The humor of Harold and Kumar is built mostly on cultural ignorance and twisted expectations. The pot humor is certainly a part of it, but most of the jokes are about institutional racism, either on the part of the characters or the audience. The original played mostly with stereotypes of Asians, hitting both the Koreans and Indians pretty hard. The second time around the filmmakers are more generous in their whacked form of profiling. The giant black man carrying a crowbar approaching Harold and Kumar’s wrecked car? He’s an orthodontist just trying to help them out. The idiotic law man, played by Rob Corddry, tries to intimidate that same helpful doctor by pouring a grape soda on the ground. A voice in the background asks if he’s got any Kool-Aid.

The problem with Harold and Kumar the second time around is also what holds it together. The writers of the original, who are now writer/directors, have gone beyond the essentially frivolous groundings of the first installment.

Although there were police chases, creepy tow truck drivers and runaway cheetahs in “White Castle,” it was the munchie-fueled call of steamed burgers that drove the two, and nothing more. There was an inherent but underlying humor to the entire proceedings: These guys could have ended their troubles at any point by getting something else to eat, but they soldiered on despite all odds to get their hands on some Slyders.

Now, Harold and Kumar have real problems and the forces that are driving them are no longer hilariously inane. They are real and politically topical. They’ve ruined the moronic antics by adding a message. Not that the first movie was stupid. No, the benefit of “White Castle” was that it was extremely stupid and clever, simultaneously. The inclusion of Neil Patrick Harris as a drugged-out, sex-obsessed version of himself no longer feels as inspired. Why not rummage around in the pop culture lexicon and find us someone else who we forgot to remember?

There’s still a lot of fun to be had with “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay,” but it’s of a less effortless sort. John Cho and Kal Penn are still just as charming and have shown that they can rise above the typecasting that plagued Cheech and Chong and work as serious actors while retaining enough suburban-stoner cred to pull off another one. Next time, as there certainly will be a next time, let’s hope everyone remembers that broadly ridiculous themes are just as funny as strictly topical ones, and do better on DVD.

In early 1996, the American people were ready for many things; a new Alanis Morissette single, a Deep Blue vs. Garry Kasparov chess rematch and another four years of Bill Clinton. One thing they weren’t ready for was “The Dana Carvey Show.”
The ill-fated prime-time sketch comedy show only lasted 7 episodes before it was cancelled. Perhaps it was the poorly planned lead-in; the family based “Home Improvement” didn’t appreciate the first-ever sketch which involved Bill Clinton lactating and nursing puppies. Maybe it was the show’s poor attempts at shoving classic Dana Carvey characters into an unfamiliar format; the Church Lady voice pops up far too often where it doesn’t belong.
But it certainly wasn’t a lack of talent that doomed “The Dana Carvey Show.” The show featured the acting and writing talents of pre-fame Steve Carrell, Steven Colbert, Robert Smigel, Louis C.K., Dino Stamatopulos and Charlie Kaufman. Yes, that Charlie Kaufman, of “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” fame.
But it wasn’t just green talent that couldn’t bring the funny. This show was hilarious. It debuted Ace and Gary, “The Ambiguously Gay Duo,” and featured the classic Tom Brokaw pre-taping Gerald Ford’s death announcement sketch that SNL took word for word when Dana Carvey hosted later that year.
They have a lot of great material that you haven’t seen like Skinheads from Maine or Germans Who Say Nice Things (imagine Steve Carrell shouting, “Mr. Holland’s Opus was the feel good movie of the year!” in a German accent. Hilarious.)
It’s too bad the show existed before cable was a viable moneymaker because this was a brilliant precursor to “Chappelle’s Show” and probably would have been just as successful in a friendly market. The humor is a bit too topical and relies on Carvey’s impression skills to often, but it holds up.
Check out the whole show for free on Netflix.com (if you are a customer) or on hulu.com (free for everyone).

When the trailer for this new pseudo-indie flick from Disney-owned Miramax debuted around Sundance time I noted that by being named “Smart People” the film is automatically marked as a movie for people who aren’t “smart.” Think about it like this: If “Planet of the Apes” were made for the dirty ape demographic, wouldn’t it just be called “Planet?”

The way it is, the movie seems to put “smart people” on display as if they are a zoo attraction. Look at the self-absorbed college professor do the New York Times crossword puzzle in his stuffy, book-lined natural habitat. In our next exhibit, we have his over-achieving, neo-con daughter wearing sweater vests and brushing up on her vocabulary in preparation for achieving a perfect score on the SATs.

A bearded, pot-bellied Dennis Quaid plays narcissistic professor Lawrence Wetherhold. He ignores his students, moves the clock forward in his office to avoid honoring office hours and only seems interested in getting his newest book published. The book, a scathing criticism of the entire history of literature criticism, seems like a book only someone like his daughter might enjoy.

Portrayed with a sufficiently stuck-up, affected, self-important pomp by “Juno” star Ellen Page, Vanessa Wetherhold is the kind of girl who prefers academia to pop-culture and wouldn’t know a party if it was raging in her living room.

When her loser of an uncle, Chuck, played by Thomas Haden Church, sporting an especially loser-like mustache, sneaks her into a bar in an attempt to loosen her up, she ends up drunkenly asking a couple of girls in line for the bathroom, “What’s it like to be stupid?” They astutely reply “What’s it like to sit alone at lunch?”

“Smart People” attempts to be about intelligence and how that gets in the way of relationships. Dennis Quaid lands in the hospital after a botched break-in to the campus impound lot (he’s so self-absorbed he can’t help but park in two spaces at a time). His sexy young doctor reports his impact-induced seizure to the DMV, meaning Wetherhold won’t be able to legally drive for six months.

The role was originally intended for the adorable Rachel Weisz but instead was given to Unsexiest Woman Alive Sarah Jessica Parker. Personally, I have no problems with Parker’s sex-appeal-it’s her one-note acting that offends me. As it turns out, that doctor is a former student who harbored a crush for her Victorian Lit 101 professor and actually lets the obnoxious snob take her out on a date. She’ll have to drive, of course.

For all his other driving needs, Lawrence turns to Chuck, his adopted brother. Chuck moves into the spare room upstairs and immediately starts spreading his smoky, mellow wisdom around a household desperately in need of an enema powerful enough to kill the bugs up everybody’s butts. As Chuck, Church gets all the best lines and generates almost every laugh the movie has to offer. His one-liners are frequent and ingratiating but offer little more than obvious color commentary on the Wetherhold’s sad life style.

I watched “Smart People” with two other Wash. U. students who would fit the descriptor offered by the title. They disliked it much more strongly than I. They pointed out that first-time director Noam Murro obsessively dropped in “intelligence” markers, such as high-scoring games of Scrabble and discussions of William Carlos William’s place in literature as an imagist and a modernist, which added nothing to the plot and simply reminded us that the people we were watching are, indeed, smart. I forgave him this because I think the movie is not intended for the “cultured” indie audience, but for less pretentious and, quite frankly, larger crowds. “Smart People” could be seen as “The Squid and the Whale” for philistines, but marking it as such would be undervaluing the message of both movies.

This is not to say that “Smart People” is a resounding success, or really successful at all. It has some funny moments unconnected to the plot, but has far too may hanging threads and unintriguing characters. I don’t believe that it should be derided for presenting “faux intelligence,” (although it does deserve a black mark for lazy storytelling and characterization) because I think these characters were not supposed to be realistic. Just as Hilary Swank’s boorish relatives in “Million Dollar Baby” were cartoonish representations of low-brow middle-America, the Wetherhold clan are just easily digestible portraits of the academic elite.

This movie’s problems are far simpler and more fundamental. If Hollywood (and don’t let the markers fool you, this movie is as studio as it gets) really wants audiences to enjoy a movie, they should make characters that are at least mildly interesting after they are easily identified. Lawrence comes off as needlessly grumpy at the start and, while Quaid plays it well, the character doesn’t ever open up enough to let us see him as much more than a grouch. In a movie like “Sideways,” which “Smart People” certainly tries to emulate, Paul Giamatti’s character Miles shows his unflinching humanity when he steals money from his mother’s sock drawer. It’s a bold move for the filmmaker, and one that may lose the audience, but a divisive choice is better than none at all. “Smart People” doesn’t ever take any chances and, for a movie that wants so badly to be clever, that’s a pretty dumb decision.

Street Kings

Rating: 2.5/5
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Forrest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie
Directed by: David Ayer
Release Date: April 11, 2008

There are few surprises in “Street Kings,” the new LA-based crime thriller directed by “Training Day” writer David Ayer.

Keanu Reeves stars as Tom Ludlow, an alcoholic, morally-confused detective who tosses the rule book out the window in favor of what gets results.

Forrest Whitaker revisits some of his best bipolar moments from “Last King of Scotland” as Reeves’ commanding officer who refers to Ludlow as “the tip of my spear.”

James Ellroy’s story is pessimistic and focuses with an uncomfortable clarity on the ethical confusions of a city where neither cops nor criminals operate by the rules.

Ellroy’s Los Angeles is becoming more and more familiar to audiences who have seen some of his original screen stories (“Dark Blue”) and his novels adapted as overblown crime melodramas (“The Black Dhalia”) or classic modern noir (“LA Confidential”). Perhaps it was the latter film’s unlikely skill at translating Ellroy’s sparse prosaic vision into the film format that has overshadowed all other attempts.

“Street Kings” was written directly for the screen (Jamie Moss and Kurt Wimmer also get script credits) and quite deftly presents Ellroy’s worldview on screen. Unfortunately a lot of the acting is flat (I mean, Keanu Reeves is the star; I shouldn’t expect much) and the story is simple and less shifty than it hopes to be.

Detective Tom Ludlow performs a number of underhanded operations for his Captain (Whitaker) and is so successful that Cap sends him to the complaint desk until any trouble from Internal Affairs (embodied by the painfully-miscast Hugh Laurie) blows over.

Some of this trouble comes from Ludlow’s former partner who has transformed from corrupt officer to whistle-blower quickly enough to anger both the criminals on the street and in the department.

A convenience store hold-up gone wrong results in the death of this honest troublemaker, but the murder scene bears the marks of an assassination. Ludlow takes it upon himself to find out whether the hit came from the crooks or the cops.

There is some decent acting in this movie, at least enough to keep things interesting, but no one can really keep up with the stylishly-stilted dialogue except for Whitaker, who adds some depth to what could be one-note.

Evans is also fun to watch in the stock role of the rookie detective in over his head.

David Ayer seems to be a competent enough director, but does nothing to distinguish himself from the Antoine Fuquas of the world.

“Street Kings” is competently bleak and offers enough interesting moral dichotomies to make writing it off completely impossible, and yet it offers nothing to get excited about.

Most of the time our Old Movies column focuses on just that: movies which are old. But this week, we’re going to use it to refer to movies that are fresh out of theaters, newly on DVD and deserve a second look from those who skipped them when they were in theaters. Each of these films came out in the later half of 2007 but were overshadowed by some of the very best movies of the decade.

‘Southland Tales’

I’m not recommending this movie outright. I will actually say that I didn’t especially like “Southland Tales.” However, I found it endlessly fascinating as an attempted piece of satire and as a testament to the ability of some directors to get funding for movies that just don’t make sense.

“Southland Tales” is writer/director Richard Kelly’s follow-up to his cult favorite “Donnie Darko.” This one is a very loose retelling of the Book of Revelations, set in an alternate Los Angeles of the near future. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson plays Boxer Santaros, a beefy action-film star married into a political family with some aspirations of his own. He’s sleeping with a porn star (Sarah Michelle Gellar), harboring delusions of grandeur and has helped her write a screenplay that may or may not predict the end of the world.

In order to research his role for the film, Santaros schedules a ride along with police officer Ronald Taverner (Sean William Scott), but in fact gets his twin brother (also Scott), who has been manipulated by an extremist group vaguely affiliated with the teachings of Karl Marx.

Throw in a government with complete oversight over all communication due to an expanded Patriot Act, a German corporation that has created a form of free universally available energy and a musical number featuring Justin Timberlake lip-syncing to a Killers song and you’ve got all the background to “Southland Tales” that makes even a little bit of sense.

The real key to “Southland Tales” for me is not its satirical qualities (it has a few admirably humorous moments, but not enough to make it truly successful) or even its place as a puzzling failure of intelligent sci-fi.

I mark this movie out as one worth watching and exploring because of the fact that Richard Kelly was able to attract money and stars to a project that never even tried to have a cohesive plot.

His movies are not pretty or arty enough to appeal to the David Lynch set, and yet he has made a movie that can only reach anything approaching a storyline with an audience that has read his graphic novels and listend to commentary tracks on his director’s cut of “Donnie Darko.”

For those who have seen “Southland Tales” or choose to do so after reading this article, the FAQ page on IMDb.com is a great resource for those who choose not to read the fake script for a movie that Buffy playing a porn star pretended to write. Or something like that. Either way, I suggest going into “Southland Tales” completely oblivious to the world it attempts to inhabit. It is fascinating in its ineptness and yet held my attention like a good pair of pliers.

After having your mind blown, then read all about how it was booed at Cannes and how the distributor felt cutting 20 minutes out of an already stupefyingly confusing movie would help it sell better. It’s really a fascinating story.

‘The Mist’

Emotional horror movies can often be a tough sell. “The Shining” worked due to Jack Nicholson’s star power and credibility, not to mention Kubrick’s dually fascinating and disturbing imagry. “The Mist” doesn’t have that. “The Mist” has Tom Jane and a director who makes the movie in an old-fashioned style unpalatable to modern audiences.

But if you can get past the mediocre acting (it’s arguably meant to be so) and cartoonish computer effects (another possibly purposeful move) “The Mist” is a terrifying film about the monsters lurking in our own psyches and societies.

Without giving too much away, “The Mist” tells the story of a small New England town weathering a crisis brought on by a mysterious and dangerous mist. Many of the townspeople barricade themselves inside the local grocery store, shutting out what may or may not lurk outside. And yet it is what is already inside that is truly frightening.

“The Mist” is a film about despair and the dangers that accompany it. As the people in the store become more aware of what the mist is and what it carries, they turn to those who shout the loudest as their leaders. The bickering and infighting over the best course of action are made all the more frightening by the fact that we, as an audience, do not know the right answer but we watch this group go down a path we can be certain is the wrong one.

While there are some elements of this movie that may turn off a lot of viewers, it is truly a treasure for those who appreciate a classic horror film in the vein of “The Thing” or Romero’s zombie movies. It understands that, while the supernatural serves well as an initial threat, true terror stems from distrust and despair amongst people who need to cling to hope most of all.

(Side note: A feature on the disc DVD shows the film in black and white, which was writer/director Frank Darabont’s original intention.)

‘Wristcutters: A Love Story’

With a bleak subject matter and strange sensibility, it’s easy to see why “Wristcutters: A Love Story” sat on the shelf for so long before being lightly released last fall. The story follows a young man, Zia (Patrick Fugit of “Almost Famous”) who is so depressed about breaking up with his longtime girlfriend that he kills himself. Upon doing so he discovers that there is life after death, and it sucks.

He, along with everyone else who ever has committed suicide, lives in a barren world approximating resembling the Mojave Desert mating with New Jersey. Nobody ever smiles and there’s never anything fun to do. Whether this is a form of punishment or just a product of a landscape populated entirely by the depressed is never explained, as are very few of the particulars about the workings of this world. Can these people die? They can have sex, but can they reproduce? These questions are unimportant to the filmmakers, because they are out to tell a love story.

Zia gets a job at Kamikaze Pizzeria and actually makes a friend in despondent Russian musician Eugene, whose entire family has joined him in suicide. After hearing a rumor that Desiree, the girl who drove him to death, has also killed herself, Zia recruits Eugene to embark on a road trip to the other side of their world in hopes of finding her.

“Wristcutters” deals in very dark territory, but it never wallows in sadness. Eugene and Zia have very funny conversations, eventually enlivened by a pretty hitchhiker, Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), who feels she doesn’t belong there. The entire movie has a very strange sense of humor, but it never laughs at the seriousness of depression or suicide. In fact, it shows that even in a barren wasteland where people seem incapable of happiness, life still can be worth living.

Writer/director Goran Dukic employs a very quirky style of filmmaking with strange colors and oddly brilliant casting choices (Tom Waits is perfect as a mysterious leader of a small commune). Not everyone will be able to get past the film’s lighthearted attitude or its bizarre fantasy, but it bears many of the best elements of Michel Gondry movies without the preciousness.

Shine a Light

Rating: 4/5
Starring: The Rolling Stones
Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Release Date: April 4, 2008

The moment Martin Scorsese drops the audience literally into New York City’s Beacon Theater for the first few notes of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” is one of the most invigorating and stunning sequences in Scorsese’s long career. Even the energy of Keith Richards’ guitar and Mick Jagger’s growl cannot keep up with those of the filmmaker at points.

But, as the concert continues, the film becomes less about purely energetic filmmaking and rocking, although Jagger does seem to prance and dance at an inhuman constancy. Scorsese’s documentation of a Rolling Stones concert in 2006 is not really so far removed from his seminal concert film “The Last Waltz” from 30 years ago, when he captured the Band’s farewell concert; both films are about looking back on successful careers and focus on the shared intimacy and artifice of a rock concert.

And yet, in “Shine a Light” Martin Scorsese is filming a band that has been together for 45 years. Even now, Mick Jagger remains an entertainer of unparalleled charisma and attitude, Ron Wood is as skilled a musician as he was when he joined the band in the early ’70s, Charlie Watts is still shy, funny and filled with rhythm, and Keith Richards.well, what else can you say about him that hasn’t been already?

The guitarist with a thousand stories wanders about the beautifully appointed stage slowly enough that Marty’s team of top-notch cameramen (including four Oscar-winning cinematographers) can capture him in all of his rugged glory. His smile (almost certainly illegally enhanced) not only captures the joy Richards still finds in entertaining after so many years, but serves as emotional entrance to the band and the film.

We smile as well, not just because the Stones can still bring the house down with classics like “Tumbling Dice” and “Sympathy for the Devil,” but because we get the sense that they actually still want to be on the stage.

This shows through best in the three numbers featuring guest artists. While Christina Aguilera tries to oversing what is a delightfully dirty little number (“Live With Me”), she grinds believably enough with Mick that the song ends up working.

Jack White III (as he is calling himself these days) looks at Jagger with an almost scary adoration on “Loving Cup,” but adds enough of his own personality to make it more than just a modern rock and roller’s fantasy camp.

The truly inspired guest appearance is from Buddy Guy playing along on an old Muddy Waters blues wailer called “Champagne & Reefer.” His piercing vocals are quite stunning, as is his riffing with Richards. It is the latter, though, that highlights the entire performance and the most endearing aspect of the film. Neither Guy nor Richards actually bother to play all the notes.

Scorsese and his cameras capture rock and roll in its most emotionally pure form. The artists on the stage are either having a great time or, in Mick Jagger’s case, are totally within their element.

The Stones have sounded better before, and they’ve certainly looked better (the Imax format is not so friendly to the aging rock stars).

Even Scorsese cannot match the immediacy and power of “The Last Waltz.” But the parts of the film that are not concert footage (the hectic planning stages, the archival footage spanning the Stones’ career) all point to the Rolling Stones’ place as descending rock gods.

But it doesn’t indict them for it; in fact it celebrates their experiences and continued livelihood.

This is not the best concert film Martin Scorsese has made, but it does go beyond just the recording of a concert: he touches on the humanity of the musicians and the performance, while never letting the audience forget that whether on stage or in an interview, people as famous as the Rolling Stones rarely let their guard down.

It’s all a bit of a show for them, but after almost 50 years, it still hasn’t gotten old.