We like Kal Penn (a.k.a. Kalpen Suresh Modi), a Hollywood actor of Indian origin.
We’ve seen the fella in Mira Nair’s The Namesake (based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s book of the same name).
In Namesake, Kal Penn held his own against the superior Bollywood actor Irrfan Khan.
No mean feat that.
Over the last 12 months or so, SI readers have been recommending we see the comedy Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.
We kept putting it off but when the suggestions got insistent, we finally succumbed.
So last night we headed to Blockbuster and picked up the 2004 film.
Just slipped the disc into the player and watched a few minutes of the movie.
It’s Friday.
Keen to enjoy their weekend, two White guys in an office dump a huge pile of their work into the lap of a Chinese-American colleague Harold and rush off to have fun, but not before making a crude threat of downsizing to ensure that their work gets done.
After we finish the 90-minute movie, we’ll update this post.
Update:
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is alright.
Nothing extraordinary but just alright.
If we were paying $9 to watch this film in a theatre (instead of the $2.03 we paid at Blockbuster for the rental DVD), we’d have felt a bit let down.
Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) are pot-loving buddies and roomies whose desperate craving for White Castle burgers one Friday evening lands them in one big mess after another. Folks, that is the movie. No more and certainly no less.
The laughs keep coming because both Kal Penn and John Cho are decent actors and the dialogs are well written and refreshingly crisp.
A lot of it is over the top. Even by comedy standards.
Like a ride on the high-on-weed Cheetah that’s escaped from a local zoo. Or medical school aspirant Kumar treating a seriously injured person at a hospital.
But what the heck. The pace is fast and for the priapically inclined there is the added incentive of a few topless scenes.
Hey, if we can get what Harold got from Maria at the end of the movie in the lift (after the trip to White Castle), we are all for it.
By the way, White Castle is not a fictional burger place. They exist in New Jersey, New York and a few other states. We’ve been to one of the places on Queens Blvd in NYC a long time ago.
You can rest assured we’re going to be visiting one in the near future.
Watching Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle added by SearchIndia.com on
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it’s high time..
other than me, 3 other people have recommended it..
http://www.google.com/search?&q=site:searchindia.com+“white+castle”
Þórarinsdóttir, gandhiji and Skjoldbjærg .. they must be having really good taste in movies.
SearchIndia.com Responds:
We’ll let you know in a little while whether the aforementioned characters Þórarinsdóttir, gandhiji and Skjoldbjærg have good taste. 😉
if I had written “must have really good taste”.. please correct it to “must be having really good taste” and delete this post 😉
SearchIndia.com Responds:
Corrected. 😉
Off the topic.
I was coming across some pages through Google, and I got a link for an “Uncyclopedia” [not ‘en’]. Dont know who maintains it, but articles are hilarious. It has the same look and feel, and tone of Wikipedia, but the content is not meant to be serious [written for fun.]
These articles are the ones I read:
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Joan_of_Arc [Dont miss early life. Before this, you may read it in actual wikipedia]
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Bangalore
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/India [has something about Bollywood too ;-)]
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Laughter
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/George_W._Bush
SearchIndia.com Responds:
Not bad.
We checked out Bengalooru and India.
ip you review today.. it’s too eaRRly ip you review tomorrow.. it’s too late! You pick the tiiimeeeeeee tick tick tick tick tick tick ah tick tick tick tick tick tick ah tick tick tick tick tick tick ah dowling..
SearchIndia.com Responds:
1. Lawrence Choudray would’ve been better.
2. That was one hilarious song from Dr.Rajkumar.
Watching it now.
Wonder who wrote the lyrics.
did you know that Penn is now
‘Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison’.. whatever that means.
because of that there will probably be no 3rd H&K film.. good in a way, because I didn’t like the second one as much as i liked the first one.
Did the law and order fan in your household recognize SVU’s Meloni (Freakshow)?
SearchIndia.com Responds:
1. Yes, we read about Kal Penn’s work at the White House sometime back.
Get the feeling he’s developing political ambitions.
2. L&O fan in the family did not recognize Meloni as Freakshow and neither did we.
Come on, no one would have with that kinda makeup and the puss oozing out of the skin and all that.
I saw H&K a couple of times… Liked it, though haven’t seen the second one yet.
BTW, media reports suggest that National Film Awards 2007 (which was due to be announced today but postponed due to YSR’s death) has 7 awards bagged by mallus.. including best director for Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Best film is reportedly Kancheevaram directed by Priyadarshan. Taare Zameen Par made it to the final round of 35 films along with Chak de India and Ore Kadal (Malayalam,which incidently brought home the award for Best Music Director). The news is just breaking here so you may not find it on the net..
SearchIndia.com Responds:
1. You write: media reports suggest that National Film Awards 2007 (which was due to be announced today but postponed due to YSR’s death) has 7 awards bagged by mallus..
Alas, the only Malayalam expression we know is porathu poda nayinda mavane!
We doubt even Adoor, an acclaimed film-maker as he is, will ever make a movie on a nayinda mavane. 😉
2. You write: I saw H&K a couple of times… Liked it, though haven’t seen the second one yet.
The reviews we read when H&K Escape from Guantanamo released weren’t favorable but Wiki tells us it made more money than White Castle.
Its “makane” (which is too formal in this context) or “mone”. The rest is absolutely correct. May be the words got scrambled when you ran out.. 😉
SearchIndia.com Responds:
Thanks. 😉
Dude you gotta check out H&k escape from guantanamo bay….its hilarious and the bush part is awesome.[ 😉 ]
SearchIndia.com Responds:
Will watch it for the Bush part. Love to see the idiot being skewered.