Screenwriters Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg have the lofty aim of subverting stereotypes by letting Asians get stupid.
“We joked to each other that if the movie ever got made, it would end up as David and Jason Go to McDonald's.”
Given the premise of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (two friends from New Jersey smoke some j's, struggle to get to White Castle, get the girl and jump on any incidental sex that comes their way) and the fact that it's directed by Danny Leiner (Dude, Where's My Car?), you'd think this was going to be a retarded film. I'd have to say it succeeds brilliantly at being that. Get together with your local Asian mafia and go see it: endorphins are guaranteed, as well as a lot of great one-liners that I predict will enter the vernacular and hang around long past their welcome. "Daddy is not coming on to anything" will annoy close friends of mine for months to come.
Us kids on the West Coast don't really know White Castle burgers apart from the freezer section. When I first hit the Midwest, I did seek them out, made curious by various Beastie Boys' references. I think this film will cause a second wave of seekers. Funny enough, from the trailers, you'd think this was a college caper set in a dorm (it's only partly set in a dorm). You find out, however, that both Harold Lee (John Cho) and Kumar Patel (Kal Penn) are recent graduates: Harold is a junior investment banker, and Kumar is trying to avoid being a doctor like everyone else in his family. Maybe I should just blame it on Asians always looking about ten years younger than they are.
Unlike most comedies these days, Harold & Kumar can boast a tight story that you can appreciate even without chemical enhancement. In contrast to the average Ben Stiller film these days, it doesn't suffer from the mid-belly flab that you usually hit at the 40-minute mark (you know, the moment when you've seen all the best excerpts from the trailer, which weren't as funny anyway because you'd already seen them on TV for weeks, and when the plot dives into a borezone freefall as it tries to resolve itself). One gets the feeling that maybe screenwriters Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg knew that it'd have to be that tight in order for a feature comedy starring two Asian Americans to get made. Harold and Kumar packs in the Asian pop culture references densely, as though trying to make up for all the time Hollywood has ignored stories about Asian Americans. Most of the humor is just dead on, cf. "Daddy is not coming on to anything." Told you I was going to get annoying with that.
There's also a lot of joyous homoeroticism in the film. It's as though Harold and Kumar are so horny that there's just this excess of libido that spills over into unlikely expressions like licking each other's faces and riding a cheetah together. Hurwitz and Schlossberg have the lofty aim of subverting stereotypes by letting Asians get stupid. As college friends, they managed to sell a script to MGM their senior year (interestingly enough, Hurwitz was preparing to be an investment banker). They gained some clout in Hollywood and decided to take on the way minorities are portrayed with Harold and Kumar, their screenwriting feature debut: "In high school and college we always had Asian and Indian friends, and even though there were racial and cultural differences, they were the same as us in terms of attitude, dialogue and issues. Yet, whenever we saw these characters onscreen, they were usually portrayed as nerdy or downright dumb, with thick accents, and usually seen delivering food." I suspect that the characters of Goldstein and Rosenburg, Harold and Kumar's neighbor/buddies are faintly disguised versions of the writers. (I might insert here my gripe with Baz Luhrmann films, which have marginal ethnic characters to add color, pardon the pun, to the film, but which retain the general hierarchy of white folks being at the center of the story. I find this almost equally as ridiculous as presenting films of an all-white world).
So, did Harold and Kumar succeed in upturning stereotypes of Asians? Yeah, sort of. Harold and Kumar sort of go in opposite directions on the Asian stereotype line: Harold starts out as an uptight investment banker and morphs into a dirty, tousled, sexy, and sexually aggressive Asian guy; Kumar starts out as the cocky, bratty rebel, who like a tragic figure comes to accept his genetic predisposition for becoming a surgeon. So, what can I say. Harold and Kumar got under the radar with me; its only fault might be that it's a little too positive with all the Asian love: I never heard boys battle crying "Asian Tits!" before in my life. But I kinda liked it.
www.haroldandkumar.com