Last year, following the SXSW premiere of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, I had an interesting chat with John Cho, Kal Penn and Neil Patrick Harris about the ethnic stereotype humor in that sequel, as well as their thoughts on movies focused on the discussion of race in general. In a way, I think the first two Harold & Kumar movies did as much as is needed in terms of making fun of racism — and, more broadly, any kind of stereotyping or racial profiling — so my first thought after learning that a third installment was in the works was that it should just be a simple stoner comedy with little or no concentration on the ethnicity of the two main characters.

However, now that this third film has a title, and that title is A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas, I’ve changed my mind. Sort of. Instead of playing the race card, I hope that writer-directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg go for religious satire. After all, it’s set during the holidays, and considering most ignorant Americans would assume that Harold and Kumar aren’t Christian (they may or may not be), the movie could tackle that sort of stereotyping. Then again, I would love it more if they actually went with the “Harold & Kumar Babies” idea that Cho proposed last summer.

Anyway, while I spent the day dreaming of my ideal White (Castle) Christmas movie, everyone else was wondering how Penn’s Obama administration job will affect the making of this sequel. Check out other bloggers’ thoughts on AVH&KC after the jump:

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The Democratic National Convention is over, and all the ecstatic party members have left Denver to go back to their zombie-esque lives (Bob Hope said it, not me). But after four days of celebrating what it means to be a Democrat, some may not wish to settle down and calmly wait out the next two months until Obama’s (possible) win, let alone the next five months waiting for the candidate to (possibly) be sworn in as President, participating in the normal non-specifically-Democratic, non-self-congratulatory activities that most of us are content with.

So, one thing excited Democrats can do is watch movies that will continue to inspire and encourage their beliefs and politics. As Karina already wrote, The American President is one movie that just barely may allow Obama fans to relive his DNC speech. Also, beginning yesterday, the Oscar-nominated documentary No End in Sight will be available in full on YouTube through till Election Day. Of course, there’s always other anti-war and anti-Bush docs for free viewing online, at such sites as SnagFilms and FreeDocumentaries.org.

And since there are so many docs out there that can make a Democrat giddy with the want for change, I’ve decided to limit today’s list to fictions and dramatizations, because they are more about feelings than facts, and that’s all you really need for political inspiration these days. As usual, I’m leaving out a lot of picks, both obvious and obscure, so feel free to tell us what movie make you feel most proud to be a Democrat.

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I don’t know what is more upsetting, that I’m actually excited about a movie starring Ben Stiller and Jack Black (remember Envy?) or that it’s actually Robert Downey Jr. in blackface that’s provoking all this excitement. Fortunately — or maybe unfortunately — I’m not the only one that’s going ga ga over Downey’s racial transformation for Tropic Thunder. It began a couple weeks ago when this still, featuring Stiller, Black and a colorized Downey, made the rounds through the blogosphere. It turned out the actor’s appearance is part of a brilliant joke on method actors. Downey plays Kirk Lazarus, a multiple Oscar-winner who goes through a special skin-darkening procedure in order to play an African American sergeant during the Vietnam War. It’s mostly funny because you could almost imagine someone like Sean Penn doing this for real.

But is there danger of the joke becoming a bit too much during the whole movie? After all, it began as a mere sight gag with the still photo, then continued with the website, where Downey actually looks eerily identical to Blaxploitation star Fred Williamson. However, now it’s also an audio gag, complete with what must be referred to as blackvoice. Yay, racism is funny! Not that I’m knocking it; I do actually think Downey is absolutely hilarious here. And having Brandon T. Jackson there as an actual African American actor, acknowledging how ridiculously racist Lazarus is, makes it the potentially the best use of racism as comedy since Blazing Saddles (sorry Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay).

I wonder, though, if the joke, the blackface and Downey’s performance will all completely overshadow the rest of the actors. I guess, considering my lack of favor for either Stiller or Black, I should be more hopeful of that being the case than worried.

Tropic Thunder, written by actor Justin Theroux (Inland Empire) and Etan Cohen (Idiocracy) and directed by Stiller, arrives in theaters August 15.

I was definitely a little hard on Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay in my review. But I’ll admit, though I kind of already did there, that it is a pretty funny movie. And as with any movie that I know will be popular despite anything I write negatively about it, I wanted to raise a discussion, here specifically of the racial issues the comedy deals with. Fortunately, I was able to do so with the filmmakers and actors, themselves, during a “roundtable” interview at Austin’s InterContinental Stephen F Austin Hotel on Saturday afternoon.

Of course, I realized by the end of the talks, which came in two parts — first with co-writer-directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, then with co-stars John Cho, Kal Penn and Neil Patrick Harris — that by simply bringing up the “issue”, I was encouraging and continuing a racist perspective of addressing ethnicity as an issue, which is certainly more a part of the problem than I mean it to be. Basically, I should have been more celebratory of the sequel, like I have always been with the original, because overall I should be thankful Cho and Penn were again allowed to star in their own movie. I just hope this isn’t the best Hollywood can do for them or other Asian-American actors trying to find non-typecast work in the movies.

My first indication that I was taking Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay too seriously was earlier in the day, during the SXSW panel actually titled “Race, Politics and Drugs: a Harold & Kumar Panel,” where Hurwitz and Schlossberg flat out said they have no bigger agenda with these movies than to be a showcase for vagina jokes. Yet ever the one to press matters, I later asked the pair about their decision to deal more with race in the sequel.

Check out the conversations with both groups after the jump.

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One of the things I love about Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is the way it treats its two stars, John Cho (as Harold, or “Rold”) and Kal Penn (as Kumar). The plot could have been played with any hot young dudes in Hollywood in the roles – you’d maybe expect two white guys, one with blonde hair, one with brown – but instead the characters are a Korean-American and an Indian-American. And it isn’t a big deal. Aside from a few derogatory, stereotypical comments made by unfavorable guys the duo meets on their adventure to find a White Castle, race isn’t an issue and doesn’t really come into play story wise.

However, the sequel, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, turns the color of their skin into the impetus of the story, which revolves around them being mistaken for terrorists (“North Korea and Al-Qaeda working together”). Almost disguised as a smarter, more politically satirical follow-up, Guantanamo Bay, which was directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who wrote this movie and the original, is basically just an adaptation of a Truly Tasteless Jokes book — if every other page of that book were annotated with updates, apologies, corrections and clarifications. It’s a movie that wants to have its offensively stereotypical cake and eat it, too – using a kind of utensil we’re not accustomed to seeing used for such a meal. What I mean is that each joke is a play on a socially recognized stereotype. Easily stereotyped characters are set up as clichés (dumb white-trash hick from Alabama) only to be revealed as the opposite (he has a classy home with refined interior decorating and accoutrements), yet ultimately they’re also exposed as being a part of that stereotype (he’s married to his sister and they have an inbred cyclops child in the basement).

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