Quickie: Harold and Kumar, The Escapades Edition

Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (2008). Directed by Jon Hurwitz, 

Hay Schlossberg. Starring: Kal Penn, John Cho, Paula Garcés, Rob Corddry, Neil Patrick Harris. -- 

Word of the Day: bowdlerize [bohd-luh-rahyz, boud-] To remove material that is considered offensive or objectionable from (a book, for example). [After Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), who published an expurgated edition of Shakespeare in 1818.]

You are best served avoiding Harold and Kumar at your neighborhood Philippine cinema and await the DVD release (official, of course). The cuts sacrificed in order to obtain an R-13 rating are so extensive as to render some passages incomprehensible (not that comprehensibility is the film's strong point). Of course our MTRCB deserves the fair share of blame, although I find it equally dubious that the local distributors, unlike the American producers, actually believed that H&K was appropriate for the 13-18 set. One may suppose that the R-18 cut would have left a more intact film. Still, my personal belief (which I will not bother to elaborate on), movie classification is censorship which is unconstitutional following the free expression guarantee of the Constitution.

Anyway, H&K will be sufficiently enough lauded by merely saying I laughed out loud a lot, in many bits where few other audience members were laughing, and many more were frowning. Its alternative meta-reality (featuring, among others, the most shocking assassination in the U.S. since John Lennon in 1980), and ethos ("You don't have to trust your government, all you need is to trust your country") is daring enough. However, its subversive cred is severely damaged by a cringe-inducing sequence in the end that acquits George W. Bush only of venial sins and daddy-issues. 

(sidebar: at one point, Kumar offers a gratuitous dig at the 2004 opus Eurotrip. Granted that Eurotrip was not, shall we say, a very good movie, it did have one joke centering around the death of a certain head of state that was extremely clumsy in construction as well as tasteless, yet unexpected and audacious that it deserves some faint applause for effort)