Bleeding Fiction

I went out last night, with Ogre, Erik and Nick, to see Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. This movie was made by the same man who made Dude, Where's My Car?, so it really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone when I say that it was a tremendously stupid drug trip of a road trip comedy. When "Dude" came out, I thought it was going to be tremendously stupid. I went to see it only because Ogre forced me to. It turned out to be very funny and, in some ways, very similar to a movie I love from more than a decade earlier, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. So, when Harold and Kumar came out, I was expecting something really good. I wasn't disappointed.

Harold and Kumar, as you can infer from the title and as the trailers will tell you, spend the movie in search of White Castle. Now, among the list of things that should not surprise people about this movie is that pot is one of the key factors in the search. I can really only think of three things that will make someone truly crave White Castle, and pot is first on the list (the second is alcohol, the third I'll deal with in a minute). Suffice to say, then, that this movie is also a drug-trip movie. On the list of such things, I think it falls short of Friday but rates above Half Baked. Really funny, though, with such lines as "In hand-to-hand combat, either one of us could take a coyote."

We left the movie and, of course, Ogre said "you know, I could really go for some White Castle right now" (this movie being the third thing that will make someone crave White Castle). Nick said, "hell's yeah." So off the four of us went, at half past midnight, to find the only White Castle we know in northern New Jersey. Getting there wasn't close to the adventure we had just seen on screen. But when we arrived the place was near packed. In a place that could hold about fifty people there were already thirty at tables and online. We listened in on conversations as we stood on line and realized, with a sort of grim fascination, that almost every other person there had just come from seeing Harold and Kumar. Moments later this fact was confirmed by a young guy who called for a show of hands on exactly that question. Nearly everyone in the crowd raised their hand or gave him the nod.

We went home after that, but sometimes, wow, White Castle really is what you crave.