Okay, not every fart joke is funny but to discount them outright is just too uptight for my tastes. I'm talking farts because I just finished watching the new DVD of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. A little background first. My office, for lack of a better term, is a desk in the corner of my bedroom. Virtually every DVD I watch is played on the PC I personally constructed last year. Most of my watching is in the middle of the night when I don't have to worry about the sensibilities of my two year old son, or more accurately, his disturbing habit of repeating just about everything he hears. This means that you can usually find me watching a movie around 2AM with headphones on and my wife asleep a few feet away. Loud snorting laughter is the sort of thing that will get my ass kicked for waking her. Combine that with my admittedly juvenile taste for fart jokes and then smack them headlong into this movie's infamous Battleshits scene and you have a guy preparing to spend the night sleeping on the couch. A scene featuring two beautiful British Princeton students engaged in a contest to see who has the nastiest case of chili shits just about had me on the floor. And this is the second time I've seen the movie. Even worse was the documentary on the disc about the development of the sound for that scene, which I actually had to stop in the middle before I hurt myself.
There's plenty more to love about White Castle, but I've covered that in a previous review. So I just want to bring out a couple little moments that I loved. The scene where Kumar goes to take a piss in the woods, only to have another guy appear and inexplicably choose the same bush to piddle on is classic. It's funny for the performance but also for the way it so completely violates male bathroom etiquette. Another great element, which I didn’t take as much notice of the first time around, are the characters Goldstein and Rosenberg, who are essentially just like Harold and Kumar, young stoners. The difference is that these two behave like 80-year-old Jewish men, which is an almost surreal combination.
This is a movie that I had very low expectations and yet it turned out to be perhaps my favorite comedy of the year. I love it when I'm wrong.
- John Shea is going to need a good blanket for the night.
