Somebody Else's Nimrod

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle

I've always had a soft spot for the stoner/dimwit buddy film, going back to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Even today, I've been known to voluntarily tune into Beavis and Butthead when I want a little background noise. Sure, they can be pointless, but they can also use their heroes' lack of common sense as a great wedge to open the film's world to surreality, and their celebration of the simple joys of life (playing air guitar, greasy hamburgers, hanging out with your best buddy) is often incredibly appealing.

Whether I can enjoy one of these films depends on (a) whether the boys are basically good at heart and (b) the proportion of gross-out jokes to goofy ones (the higher it is, the less likely I am to like it). Harold and Kumar pushes my limits on gross-out (one or two fart jokes isn't so bad, but some day, the Farrelly brothers are going to pay for making them the primary focus of the silly comedy), but it's essentially a good-humored little comedy with enough laughs to justify the ticket price. It also deserves the praise it's gotten for its radical message that non-Caucasian twentysomethings get the same agita from post-graduation life as their white quarter-life-crisis compatriots do, just in slightly different flavors, and they long to escape in much the same ways. If Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were junior analysts and med students, they would probably have gone hunting after sliders around midnight, too.