There has never been a movie quite like Harold & Kumar and probably never will be. I thoroughly enjoyed it, the surprise being that none of the scenes featuring deep-seated unfairness ever fazed me.
C.f. Ghostbusters, where when I watched it as a kid the scene where Bill Murray electroshocks his test subject (the guy, not the cute one) even though the guy really did start to become psychic at the end, or at least guess right... anyhow, that scene always really agitated me, yet nothing from H & K agitated me.
It's just about the right combination of movie about Asian guys and movie about guys who do drugs. For what it's worth, among my most frequent poker buddies are an investment banker of Indian heritage and a physics grad student of Korean heritage. On the surface it's like if H & K traded roles, except that neither of them resembles either character much.
Of course the one scene I really could have done without was the one scene that inspired its own featurette. That scene singlehandedly ruined my faith in either young moviegoers today or moviemakers who cater to them or both, in that we got the point about five seconds into it, no need to run the joke into the ground.
(Then again... Blame Mel Brooks? Of all the things one would remember from "Blazing Saddles," what's the one scene most people will think of first? Then you have Terence and Philip: Depending on how much of the irony is on purpose, either uniquely stupid or uniquely brilliant or both.)
By contrast - file under "there's a right way and a wrong way to be puerile" - the scene with Mrs. Freakshow was outstanding, especially the dialogue and the timing. Major American Pie influence, with a dollup of David Lynch.
Posted by Matt Bruce at January 7, 2005 11:54 AMI already have a review on my site from when it first came out last summer, but I'll add that I agree with you about the stupidity of that specific Blazing Saddles homage. On the other hand, I spent as much of the time trying to figure out the logic behind the New Jersey geography -- which is all over the place.
Posted by: JQ at January 7, 2005 05:00 PM