Tried to find an old thread and came up with a post-release thread from 2004 with 9 responses, figured this is justified...
I missed the boat with this one, as I caught it for the first time last night. Very funny movie, although I appreciated it more when the humor stemmed from awkward situation comedy rather than ridiculous circumstances. For instance, the culture clashes were all gold, but the riding cheetah scene fell completely flat with me. Maybe it was the bad special effects, but the whole scene came across as really dumb. The raccoon attack was similarly ridiculous, but at least it is a character-based event (Harold's paranoid reactions say not just a lot about his personality but also how he reacts to being high) naturally progressed the plot to Kumar's confrontation with his father at the hospital.
I'm not a stoner myself, but I can appreciate a good road trip buddy flick, and John Cho and Kal Penn convinced me that they're good buddies. There's very little set-up for their friendship (assumedly they met in college and bonded over smoking pot), but their chemistry together is so convincing that a lot of the dialogue came across as improvved, or at least benefited strongly from their body language and facial expressions. Speaking of road trips, kudos to the film for being so specific about highways and cities and the atmosphere of both. The movie felt lived in, like I'd gotten a (albeit heightened) impression of New Jersey with truth in it.
I appreciated, as well, the strong attention to cultural context. Harold and Kumar are not just compared against other Asians, but also against specific situations involving whites, African-Americans and Jewish men. There's a lot of emphasis on not just the differences between the groups, but also the universialities. We get a wide spectrum of individuals that aren't defined so much by their race as by how they react to the expectations of their race.
I also wondered if there was a bit of post-colonial deconstruction going on with the scene involving the two British women. There's an establishment of Harold's "twinkie" tendencies (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) which reminded me of a graphic novel I'd read recently called Shortcomings. Now I'm not Asian-American so I can't speak to the dichotomy of Asian men's relationship with Caucasian women (especially the whole blond woman fantasy that Shortcomings deals with). The women could have been any white women, and their accents aren't even mentioned, but they're specifically British and wanting to sleep with Indian/Asian men. A bit of dialogue hints at them "slumming", and I don't think it's coincidental that the "battleshits" game they play not only makes them unappealing to Harold and Kumar but also evokes the British Navy.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAND I've put way too much thought into Harold and Kumar. On to the sequel!
