The Harold and Kumar panel opened with a disclaimer from moderator Adam Vary of Entertainment Weekly. “This is family day at Comic-Con, but in case you didn’t know, this is for an unrated DVD of a stoner movie.”

But what better way to sell a DVD to your teenage fan base, then to get your hooks into them when they’re in close proximity to parental wallets?

Cynicism aside, it looks like there are some pretty cool elements to the package for the fans. In addition to a “12-15 minute mini adventure of what would happen if Harold and Kumar had decided not to smoke weed on the plane, and made it to Amsterdam,” there’s an extensive interactive feature called “Dude, Change the Movie,” which allows the viewer to swap out scenes from the theatrical cut for other options. Remember the bottomless party? You can choose to watch it topless. “Most of the options,” said co-writer Hayden Schlossberg, “Are extremely unrated, and extremely…”

“Nude,” John Cho interrupted.  “You’re welcome.”

Some vague details about Harold and Kumar 3, and disappointment for fans who want to believe that John Cho and Kal Penn are really Harold and Kumar in real life, after the jump.

…Read more

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.

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.

…Read more

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).

…Read more