The structure is somewhat atypical. The film opens by following a prison guard through his daily routine, which includes powerful, slow shots of him dipping his bloody knuckles in water after beating inmates. Pensive, nearly silent scenes gradually add together to give the viewer a chilling picture of the facility and the abuses occurring there.
The camera then begins to watch the travails of a new inmate upon his arrival. He is stripped naked, refusing to don a prison uniform as part of a protest to be recognized as a political prisoner. The film continues with wordless long takes. Two prisoners in a tiny cell, walls smeared with human waste. Cleverly discreet exchanges of contraband during family visits. Body cavity searches. Brutal beatings.
Jeff Wells points to the above clip of Kal Penn talking about Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and it’s worth watching just for the spectacle of seeing an actor on a cable news program explaining the “dual purpose” of poop jokes.
But I must do a bit of fact checking: Olbermann introduces his guest by bragging that Guantanamo was “reviewed by one critic as a ’scatological remix of a Keith Olbermann tirade.’” That “one critic” was Joe Leydon at Variety. The actual sentence? “Not that the entire pic is a slapsticky, scatological remix of a Keith Olbermann tirade.” Olbermann/his producers justify centering their top story of the evening on a stoner comedy in its third week of release by loosely tying it to the recent release of a Sudanese journalist from the military prison, but it’s not enough to cover up the evidence that this is a Google Alert taken out of context.
Here are some gags that could have been saved for the actual movie: George Bush smoking pot and saying the words “cock sandwich”; the one-eyed inbred son in the basement, which comes after an obvious set-up, anyway, and which reminds too much of the tow truck driver’s house in the woods from the first movie; and the Ku Klux Klan sequence, which feels ripped straight from O Brother, Where Art Thou?– it will likely still be funny in the movie, despite its being familiar, but there’s no need to make us feel like the movie won’t be fresher than a sack of chicken rings.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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