Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle - 2004

"Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" - 2004
Dir. by Danny Leiner - 1 hr. 28 min.

Red Band Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

Just like, like it or not, every generation gets the awful Fleetwood Mac cover that they deserve, every generation also gets their own stoner icons.  For the last decade, that's meant Harold and Kumar, and their odyssey started here, with "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle."  Thankfully, this film is both good and weird, and stands on it's own outside of any altered states.  To be sure, if you're not at least neutral on this subject, you'll probably get as annoyed at the references as I do when watching a movie about a drunk, but I maintain the oddness in "H&K" is enough to provide a rich comedic environment for most viewers.

Harold (John Cho) works at an investment firm, and an inconsiderate pair of douchebags decide to ruin his weekend by dumping some work on him at the last second, so that they can hit some strip clubs.  Harold's roommate, Kumar (Kal Penn), deliberately fouls up an interview for medical school, and lets Harold know that he doesn't consider any work sufficient reason to change their weekend plans, which are to get baked as hell.  So when they fulfill their plans, they naturally get a little hungry, and go on a quest to eat a mountain of White Castle burgers.  This proves to be more difficult than one would think, and not just because they're both stoned.

So let's get the discussion of weed-related humor out of the way.  First point that this film makes is that indulging doesn't automatically equal loserdom.  Harold has a decent job; although he's low in the pecking order, that's more due to his age than anything else.  And Kumar is very smart (and very confrontational); although he's screwing up his future education options, he's doing it on purpose.  As he puts it, "Just because you're hung like a moose doesn't mean you have to do porn."  He's not really portrayed as a particularly bad influence, just the more easy-going of the comedic duo, versus Harold being the more uptight one.  For the most part, the things that happen to Harold and Kumar could happen with or without marijuana's involvement, although it does give an explanation for the surreal progression of events, and how the audience is just supposed to take things at face value.  But "H&K" isn't really a PSA or anything, not like this one that's part of the movie:

I'm invincible!!!

For the most part, "H&K" is about a couple of buddies who have the munchies, and keep finding themselves in improbable situations.  Director Danny Leiner is also responsible for "Dude, Where's My Car?", which features a similar manner of story and storytelling.  Thankfully "H&K" got to go for an R-rating, which frees up a lot more comedic space.  This type of story can be very difficult to pull off, and it's done so largely successfully here.  There are many small roles with familiar faces that add to the weirdness of the film, none more so than Neil Patrick Harris' few minutes of screen time.  It's impossible to talk about this film, or the franchise, without mentioning how spectacularly funny NPH is, playing a drug-fueled, hetero sex-crazed version of "himself."  It's a textbook example of how to destroy any preconceptions anyone might have about the roles that an out gay actor can play, with the understanding that there really wasn't a textbook for that prior to NPH's turn here.  The lesson: he's an actor, of course he can convince you that he wants a muff burger.  That's kind of his job.  And he's pretty good at it.

"Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" succeeds because it's funny, weird, surreally episodic, and because it has all the things a good late-night movie needs.  There's a hot girl, dream sequences (Kumar's romance sequence with a giant bag of weed is messed up and awesome, even after multiple viewings), doofus bad guys, substance abuse, a nonsensical quest, and eventual victory for our heroes.  This is a solid film, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, despite never having tasted a White Castle burger myself.  So even a minor thing like that shouldn't hamper anyone's enjoyment.

3.5 / 5 - TV

Star Trek Into Darkness - 2013

"Star Trek Into Darkness" - 2013
Dir. by JJ Abrams - 2 hrs. 12 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

By Sunday afternoon standards (which is when I saw this), "Star Trek Into Darkness" is perfect entertainment.  I grew up on weekday afternoon repeats of the original TV series, and then weekend episodes of "Star Trek: the Next Generation," and the newest movie fits right into that sort of slot.  It's funny, the characters play well off of each other, and the visuals are pretty stunning.  But if I'm being 100% honest about things, I'm not exactly sure how the content of this movie justifies it being a film that took four years to deliver to theatres, rather than the end-piece of a season of a kick-ass TV series.

ST2 opens up with Kirk (Chris Pine) and Bones (Karl Urban) having stolen a sacred scroll on an alien planet, luring the aliens away from their village that will be destroyed by an impending volcano explosion, which will basically exterminate that particular species of life.  Kirk, Bones, and Spock (Zachary Quinto) sort of succeed at this task, but not seamlessly, and it didn't really fall under their orders anyways, which leads to some demotions from Starfleet.  Meanwhile, another Starfleet officer, John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), organizes what you'd have to call a terrorist attack against Starfleet headquarters itself, which leaves him on the run, many dead, and the Enterprise on his trail to a very dangerous locale.

One of the things that ST2 does really well is the brief, sharp exchanges between characters.  There aren't really soliloquies here, so much as commas punctuating the action sequences.  Kirk is a man of action, and although he's not an unthinking character, that's about all the self-examination you can realistically expect from him.  And since he's in charge, the other characters largely follow suit, albeit in ways that work with their own personalities.  There are also a number of stunning visuals, the best of which is probably in the opening scene, which has a planet with a red and white forest.  It's hard to explain how exotic it looks, but one of the film posters uses a picture from that scene:

Beyond that, there's plenty of space porn: nebulas, moonscapes, alien planets, ruins, enormous space stations.  And in at least a couple of scenes, director JJ Abrams really gets across a solid sense of the scale of these ships, something that's easily lost in space scenes with no normal points of reference.  In terms of the story, I felt like it worked (although one of the third act twists was so apparent from a very early point that there appeared to be a giant shoe hovering over the screen for the duration of the run-time, waiting patiently to drop).  Long-time Trekkies won't be entirely surprised by some of the things that happen, but I didn't find it to be a detriment to my enjoyment of the film.

But to get back to my early point, I'm just not sure that what was here was worth a trip to the theatre and waiting four years for a second installment.  That's not to say that I didn't enjoy ST2 quite a bit, and it's also not to say that you wouldn't, either.  I liked this one a lot better than the first one.  I will grant that some of the scenes of calamity aren't anything that you couldn't accomplish on a tight schedule, and that this movie had a couple of fairly intense moments.  But I'd argue that it wasn't any better than ST:TNG's Borg storyline, merely a bit prettier.  Part of the burden of doing franchise movies is that you have to realize that the characters' histories are loping behind you, and having watched years of Star Trek TV series, I feel like that's a more ideal environment for stories involving these characters.  You can't do big, action-filled stuff every week (and that's not really what the shows were all about), but more than half of the appeal of the earlier TV series is that you can see characters you like engaged in everything from drudgery to excitement.

I'd love to see these characters bored out of their minds and getting on each other's nerves (space is big and empty, it can't possibly be all explosions), but as long as there's one movie every so often, that'll never happen.  There's an obligation to deliver something specific if you're going to build up a story as an event, lest you derail the franchise and kill off any future sequels.  That totally didn't happen here: "Star Trek Into Darkness" is a lot of fun, and it's good popcorn entertainment.  But I was a little bummed out that there's not going to be another, tonally different story with these same characters next week.

3 / 5 - Theatre

One for the Money - 2012

"One for the Money" - 2012
Dir. by Julie Anne Robinson - 1 hr. 31 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

In the last year or so, there's been three attempts to launch movie franchises based on popular serial book characters (this one, based on Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum, James Patterson's "Alex Cross," and "Parker," based on the Donald Westlake novels), and all three fell flat on their face.  Watching "One for the Money" is the second of the three that I've watched (I've never read the source material), and there are obvious comparisons to "Alex Cross."  Being lumped in with that film isn't exactly a compliment, and I wouldn't pretend for a second that "One for the Money" was a successful movie, but I found it somehow less offensive and awful than "Alex Cross."  At the same time, it didn't feel like anybody was really going for anything here, and the lack of ambition to make a really good movie ended up leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

Stephanie Plum (Katherine Heigl) has lost her job selling lingerie at Macy's, and has been unsuccessfully trying to find a new job for six months when we meet her.  She's kind of unemployable (although there's not much explanation as to why), in debt, divorced, and and about to have her car repo'd.  Stephanie ends up pestering her cousin (who owns a bail bond business) to let her become a "recovery agent," since she's already exhausted every option she can think of.  He relents, and she finds a big-money target that she shares an intimate history from high school with (Joe Morelli, played by Jason O'Mara).  The whole thing is a little more complicated than she thinks, and she ends up trying to untangle a case that the police don't seem to have much interest in pursuing.

To start with the positive, "One for the Money" isn't blatantly stupid.  It's definitely a paint-by-numbers story, and there's a lot of characterization that isn't explored, instead leaving the audience to infer pretty much everything about.  But there's a proud tradition of PG-rated murder mysteries (think "Murder She Wrote," but instead starring a pretty cute actress with awful hair), so I wasn't particularly upset that this wasn't as gritty of a story as it probably ought to have been.  Yeah, there are prostitutes, but they're more like the comic relief than "anything for ten dollars" crackheads.  Yeah, Katherine Heigl gets naked at one point, but it's all either seen through a shower curtain or shot from the collarbone and above.  Yeah, people get shot and die, but it's either largely bloodless or entirely off-screen.  That's all fine.  This movie can probably air on TV with zero edits, and that's not reason for complaint.

Faint praise?  Well, yeah.  "One for the Money" isn't a good movie.  The biggest problem that I had was the familiarity everyone in the entire city seemed to have with one another.  Part of this was that Stephanie almost exclusively interacted with cousins, or with people she had history with, but everyone (and I mean everyone) just seemed way, way too nosy and involved in each others' lives.  I assume that's how Trenton, New Jersey is supposed to be (or at least to feel), but I'm not from New Jersey, and that's not how any community I've ever been a part of has ever behaved.  It just felt weird, and like there was way too much that no one was bothering to explain to me as a viewer, which also made me feel like an outsider.  That sense made it really hard for me to be interested in any of the characters.  There were ham-fisted explanations of Stephanie's dislike for other people (does she really need to explicitly tell her family that she'd already had a husband, and didn't care for it?  Since it's such an awkward way to refer to her history, I assumed that he'd show up at some point, but he never did), but the writing used entirely too much shorthand to fill in people's histories and not enough actual characterization.

There is also the fact that Stephanie ends up buddying up to her target.  The character was unconvincing as a "in it for the money" hard-ass (and has the self-awareness to realize that wasn't working), but Stephanie has a weird need to be liked, even though she seems to be constantly turning her nose up at everything and everyone around her.  Who knows if that is how the source material reads, or if it was intentional, but I was almost immediately not interested in seeing any more movies about this character.  I didn't care if she consummated the sexual tension between her and Joe, I didn't care much if the evil MMA guy got his hands on her.  There simply wasn't any drama, of course she's going put Joe in jail and collect her 50k.  And the comedy didn't work - it's like watching someone crack not particularly funny observational jokes about their family (whom you've never met, and come to think of it, you never met her before either).

I get what everyone involved was going for here: an everywoman hero succeeding in a tough-guy world, preferably with a little style and feminine charm.  But since everything all the way through "One for the Money" is so predictable and rote, there's no way the ending is going to be a downer surprise, either.  I liked Heigl here more than I had before (but I think the only other thing I'd seen her in was the "wet blanket" role in "Knocked Up"), and she cuts a sharp figure in jeans and leather jacket, but I didn't find her fumbling to learn how to recover skips particularly charming, and the character was so poorly written (at least if you want anyone to be sympathetic to her) that it short-circuited any potential emotional connection this type of story requires in order to be successful.  I didn't hate "One for the Money" when I finished watching it, but it just keeps getting worse in retrospect.  Seriously, it can't be that hard to turn a successful book franchise into a successful movie, but this is even worse than "Alex Cross," and probably about as bad as I expect "Parker" to be.  So, film directors, feel free to succeed in this territory.  I'm impatiently awaiting just that.

1 / 5 - Streaming

Identity Thief - 2013

"Identity Thief" - 2013
Dir. by Seth Gordon - 1 hr. 51 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

Here's the upshot of "Identity Thief": this film is exactly what you think it's going to be, based on the trailer.  That's good and bad.  Good, because the premise and casting work.  Bad, because surprises are nice in comedies.  But also, there's nothing about "Identity Thief" that suggests it's going to be anything more than a pleasant, forgettable comedy that you should probably pay about three dollars to see.

Sandy (Jason Batetman) is basically a corporate accountant, one who is good at what he does, and yet still has to deal with a crappy boss (played by Jon Favreau).  He plays by the rules, but falls victim to an identity thief, who gets his sensitive private data during a fraudulent phone call.  The thief, Diana (Melissa McCarthy), immediately goes on a rampage, getting arrested and racking up huge credit card bills all over her hometown in Florida.  Eventually, the police go after Sandy, who is in Denver, but the police don't show much initiative about resolving the theft, which threatens Sandy's job and comfortable life.  Sandy comes up with a solution: he's going to Florida to bring the thief to justice.  This yields a long road trip with an uncooperative passenger, with some criminal types hot on their heels.

The plot unfolds exactly as it's set up to: odd couple road trip, they end up on better terms, the baddie develops a heart, happily ever after.  The other bad guys are supposed to be menacing, but they're in a comedy, so they're more like speed bumps than actual threats.  Even in a R-rated movie (which seems to be only on the basis of a few too many f-bombs), you know that there's next to no chance that thing are going to end badly.  The result is that I ended up waiting for the scenes where Diana and Sandy would torment each other, and the rest didn't matter much.

There are funny parts here, but the best material is based on watching Diana be her manipulative self.  She spends a lot of time doing that at Sandy's expense, which works, because Jason Bateman is very good at reacting to what's going on.  I wish there were more of that in this film: the other elements (criminals and skip tracers, namely) felt like an excuse to get to the meat of the story.  But those elements don't work well on their own merits, and I wish the story had just dispensed with them, put the bare minimum explanation for why the road trip needed to happen forward, and then doubled down on the interactions between McCarthy and Bateman.  The alternative would have been to beef up those parts, really earn the R-rating, and watch the crap roll downhill.

I don't think it's fair to expect genius out of "Identity Thief."  Instead, it's the kind of forgettable, yet enjoyable film that careers are made of.  If you went down Walter Matthau's filmography, they're not all "The Odd Couple."  Sometimes, you've got to just keep working to keep your skills sharp until something comes along that an actor can really sink their teeth into.  That's reasonable, and I certainly enjoyed myself for the couple of hours this took, but "Identity Thief" is not something I could imagine ever having a burning desire to re-watch.

2 / 5 - Theatre

A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas - 2011

"A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas" - 2011
Dir. by Todd Strauss-Schulson - 1 hr. 30 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

What a disappointment.  There's no other way to sum up "A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas."  I'm speaking as someone who enjoyed the previous two films, and was looking forward to seeing this one.  And instead of getting another hazy installment in the "Harold & Kumar" franchise, I got characters that bore little resemblance to their previous incarnations and a general tone of joylessness.

Harold's (John Cho) married, and his in-laws are visiting.  They're headed up by Mr. Perez (Danny Trejo), who has an implausible obsession for Christmas trees.  Of course, something happens to the tree that Mr. Perez brings, and Harold has to replace it by the time the Perez clan returns from whatever the heck it is that they're doing.  Separately, Kumar's (Kal Penn) girlfriend has broken up with him because his life's fallen apart.  And it's Christmas-time.  The plot isn't worth much more discussion than that.

Here's one problem: the filmmakers seemed to put together a checklist of things that had been in the previous two films, and then jammed them all together, and set it on Christmas eve.  An irrational quest for a macguffin?  Check.  Graphic male nudity?  Check.  Those two guys that were in the first "American Pie" with John Cho?  Check.  White Castle cameo?  Check.  NPH sequence?  Check.  There's even a gratuitous claymation sequence when the two main characters are drugged, but nothing comes of it.  Nothing comes of any of it.  The characters' motivations are suspect, which undermines any sense of urgency the plot is trying to convey.

Let me put it this way: in the first film, Harold and Kumar had a hankering for some White Castle burgers, and would not be deterred.  I think everyone can relate to that.  In the second one, they had to escape Guantanamo Bay because of a mix-up that left everyone thinking they were terrorists.  If not relatable, it's at least understandable.  Here, Harold is trying to please his father-in-law's hard-on for Christmas trees.  Even though there's a "I genuinely want to make him and my wife happy" speech, it's kind of spineless.  A lot of the potential audience for this film is not going hope that Harold and Kumar can come through, they're going to want Harold to throw his middle finger in Mr. Perez's face and tell him to eat a bag of dicks.

But beyond that problem, both of the characters are off, tone-wise.  Harold has always been kind of neurotic and freaked out, but in this installment they throw in being beaten-down by a less-than-ideal family life.  And his replacement best buddy, Todd (Thomas Lennon), clearly irritates Harold.  Kumar is even worse.  Whatever charm and energy Kal Penn brought to the character is completely gone.  He's been bounced out of the medical profession by failing a drug test (which removes the possibility of a bright future), and he's introduced in this film mired in depression from his girlfriend breaking up with him.  He's not funny, he's not impulsive, and throughout the film, Kumar barely registers the environments that he's in.  It's fine to have the film start off with the main characters being estranged, but it takes entirely too long to for them to re-unite, and when they do, it's in an unsatisfying manner.  Even the NPH sequence isn't as good as the previous ones (although still pretty good), and even worse, it's not even a satisfying stoner movie, either.  Harold largely abstains, and Kumar seems to be smoking out of a compulsion rather than for any enjoyment it might bring him.  This feels like a betrayal, like the "Family Guy" episode where Brian manages to legalize marijuana, only to begin campaigning against it when someone essentially pays him to.  

I actually had to stop the movie when watching it about an hour in, I was so bored by the whole thing.  It didn't really feel like anyone was having a good time making this movie, and that showed up on-screen.  And I should mention that while it claimed to be a ninety-minute film, there's about ten minutes of credits at the end.  I can't remember being this let-down by any sequel of any film I've ever seen, and that's saying something.  Maybe part of the problem was seeing a Christmas movie in June (related point - why would anyone release a Christmas movie to home video in the summer?  That's psychotically bad scheduling), but I don't think seasonal appropriateness nor the appropriate lack of sobriety could help "A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas" out.  It's just a flat-out failure.

.5 / 5 - Blu-Ray