MOVIE: Moneyball (2011)

Any fan of baseball will find plenty to like about this film, which is based on a non-fiction book of the same title by Michael Lewis, who also wrote the book the film The Blind Side was based on.  It’s about ex-ballplayer Billy Beane, GM of the Oakland As, and how he, along with a kid named Paul DePodesta (fresh out of Harvard with a degree in economics), completely revolutionized the way baseball teams pick players.

Unless you love the game, though (or are a serious math nerd, I suppose), I’m afraid you won’t get much out of Moneyball, despite the fact the writer and director tried extremely hard to give it a broader appeal.  The sad news is, it was that very thing — the addition of a hammy subplot about Beane’s ex-wife and daughter — that took what might’ve been a great movie and turned it into a flick too long by at least 30 tedious minutes (all of which were absolutely insufferable dreck).

Though ultimately, this film really only succeeded for me as a teaser for the book, it’s an entertaining teaser, for the most part.  Beane (Brad Pitt) was General Manager of the Oakland As in the late 1990s when the team’s budget, already low, was slashed dramatically by its owners.  The As had long struggled to be able to afford star players, and with this latest round of payroll cuts, Beane was convinced they were doomed — unless he could figure out a way to think differently about what truly makes a winning team win.

It was right about this time Billy met Paul (Jonah Hill), a young Harvard grad working as a statistician for another team in the majors.  When that team wouldn’t trade him the players he wanted, Beane “bought” Paul instead, and as he began talking to the economist, he realized the kid had some incredible ideas about how to make a ball team successful on the cheap.  Using sabermetrics, Billy and Paul began analyzing the sport’s least valued players, and, after juggling the numbers, realized they could build a team virtually guaranteed to be a success and still stay under budget.

Naturally, the rest of the A’s scouts, owners, and managers were horrified by Beane’s proposed line-up — to them, it just looked like a team of misfits and losers.  But he pushed his ideas through, got the team he wanted, and then sat back to watch them . . . lose.  Manager Art Howe (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) refused to follow Beane’s advice on the order in which to bat each player, which Paul had calculated would promote the most base hits, and the result was exactly what everybody had expected:  a miserable flop.  But as the team continued to get creamed left and right, Howe finally caved and began to do what Billy and Paul were telling him.  And, of course, the As then immediately launched themselves into a record-breaking series of wins, making it to the playoffs that same year.

The parts of this film that focus on the statistical work behind the scenes are the best parts of the picture.  Watching the ballgames was fun, of course, too.  But the addition of way too many scenes featuring Beane’s ex-wife and daughter, and the other personal struggles he was experiencing off the field, were absolutely awful.  They were trite, badly acted, and felt clumsily inserted — an afterthought clearly intended to alter the demographics for the movie’s audience and bring in more chicks.

Newsflash, filmmakers:  chicks dig baseball too.  And what’s more, we hate being pandered to.  Y’all should knock that shit off.

Nevertheless, despite this movie’s numerous weaknesses (to be honest, this is not Pitt’s best work either), I was definitely entertained and, what’s more, the film really piqued my interest in the book.  Watch for a review of that coming in the next few months.

And in the meantime, only 24 days until ball players report for Spring Training — hurrah!

[Netflix it | Buy it]

Genre: Drama
Cast: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Chris Pratt, Stephen Bishop, Reed Diamond

MOVIE: Donner Pass (2012)

This little horror flick, which was recently recommended to me by a woman who worked with the script editor, doesn’t offer up much in the way of logic when it comes to its interpretation of what really happened to the Donner Party, but still ended up being surprisingly entertaining.

Essentially, the premise is that, way back in 1846, George Donner led his party of pioneers west into Sierra Nevada on purpose — to eat them.  He’d somehow already tasted human flesh (no explanation of where or when, but whatever), and, as we all know, once you get the taste for humans, no mere cow will do.  So, in other words, the Donner party didn’t get lost and trapped and die off slowly and then eat each other to survive — instead, Donner lured them up there, killed them one by one, and ate them to feed his “hunger.”  Think Ravenous, only with teenagers instead of Guy Pearce and the principal from Ferris Bueller.

Teenagers?  I’m getting ahead of myself.  Flash forward to modern times, and now the area around the infamous Donner Pass is a popular ski town,  full of locals who believe in this legend — and claim Donner still haunts the woods, looking for victims.

A gaggle of teenagers are heading into the area to spend the weekend at one of their party’s parents’ cabin when a big storm hits.  Just as they arrive, they’re told by one local that there’s a manhunt going on — a woman was found murdered, her body viciously torn apart, and the police have a suspect they believe he’s still in the area.

Well, you can predict, I’m sure, where this is headed.  And it goes there, and it’s no big surprise (first to die: the boozer; second: the fornicator; and so on — we’re not in for anything terribly original here).  Nevertheless, I was impressed by the quality of the filmmaking — it’s shot well for a low-budget movie and acted reasonably well too (with one unfortunate exception — SPOILER FOR FOOLS:  the person who ends up being responsible for what’s going on is so badly overacting from the opening scene on through that only a fool (see?) wouldn’t be able to figure out he was somehow involved in the first five minutes).  Plus, the story, while totally ridiculous at times, still managed to be energetic and fun.

All in all, not a bad flick to rent on a snow day.  The ambience sure was right for it.  I’m stuck at home for the second day in a row because of a huge snow and ice storm here in Seattle, and I tell you, if I run out of groceries any time soon, the husband will be the first to go.  Well, okay, maybe the cat first, the husband second.  And then I’ll have the HUNGER, so look out!

Definitely worth the three bucks  it costs to rent it from Amazon (it’s also available at Red Box, the movie’s website says) — check it out if you dig these kinds of things.  I had a surprisingly good time.

[Prequeue at Netflix | Buy/Rent at Amazon]

Genre: Horror
Cast:  Desiree Hall, Erik Stocklin, Colley Bailey, Adelaide Kane, John Kassir, Eric Pierpoint

MOVIE: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2011)

I have one question for Guillermo del Toro (who co-wrote and produced this stinker) and that question is:  WTBF?  (What the bloody frak?)

This completely awful movie is about a family renovating a big old house that turns out to have, like, a portal to fairyland in the basement.  The fairies eat children’s teeth.  And sometimes whole people.

Yes, it’s a scary movie about . . . the tooth fairy.  Which is to say, it’s a NOT scary movie about . . . the tooth fairy.

WTBF, I ask again.  Considering the fact del Toro clearly had no qualms about ripping off his own film Pan’s Labyrinth for a good portion of this movie’s first half, I would’ve expected it to at least LOOK good.  But though the creatures were kind of cute — you know, for evil teeth fairies — the rest of the film’s look was boring and stale.  Spooky old house, yawn.  Spooky old garden (complete with labyrinth), yawn.  Creepy dark basement, snooze.   There’s absolutely nothing original here whatsoever, the dialogue is pure crappola, and my god, I think Katie Holmes is actually getting worse with practice instead of better.

The one saving grace, for me anyway, was that I really liked the kid.  The kid is the best actor in the entire film.  Go, kid!  Here’s hoping your next movie does not waste your time the way this one did.  Life is short — trust me.  You’ll know what I mean when you hit your 30s.  Try not to piffle it away on piffle.  LIKE I JUST DID.

STINKEROOZLE!

[Netflix it | Buy/Rent from Amazon]

Genre:  Horror, Crap
Cast: Katie Holmes, Guy Pearce, Bailee Madison, Alan Dale, Jack Thompson, Guillermo del Toro

MOVIE: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)

My first thought as the opening credits to this spy thriller began was, “Wow, what a cast!”  Gary Oldman, Benedict “Sherlock” Cumberbatch, Colin Firth, Ciarán Hinds, Tom Hardy, and John Hurt?  Holy crazy bananas, Batman!

Not five minutes later, though, the cast was all but forgotten — this movie sucked me in immediately, and the actors, Oldman in particular, are so tremendously good I stopped thinking about them as real people and instead became fully engrossed in their roles.

For those who have never read the John le Carré novel, or seen earlier versions of the story on the screen, it’s about a mole in British Intelligence in 1973 and is the first in a series le Carré wrote about an older British spy named George Smiley.  The movie opens with a British secret agent, Jim Prideaux, being sent to Hungary to meet with a Hungarian general who wants to sell information to the UK.  The operation is blown, though, when the Russians get information about when and where it’s taking place and open fire, leaving Prideaux bleeding on the ground.

Word gets back to British Intelligence, and, amid the international hoopla that follows, the current head of the organization, known as “Control” (Hurt), and his number one agent, Smiley (Oldman) are forced into retirement (Control dying soon after of natural causes).  Bosses shift around, things settle, and a group of the top agents, known as the Circus, begin work on a new project that involves obtaining high-level Soviet intelligence material and then trading it to the US government for secrets of their own, a project whose real endgame Control and Smiley had long been suspicious of: Operation Witchcraft.

When Oliver Lacon, the civil servant in charge of intelligence, hears an allegation that there’s a leak in the Circus, he goes outside the group to bring in an independent investigator — George Smiley.  As Smiley begins to dig into the timeline, interview the various players, and build up evidence, he discovers that Control’s real reason for having sent Prideaux to Hungary was to reveal the mole’s identity.  He breaks into Control’s old apartment and there finds a set of chess pieces labeled with the photos and code names for each of his suspects:  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier. . . and Spy.

Though the plot is complex and difficult to follow at times (there’s a lot of jumping around in time, for one thing, without much in the way of assistance in keeping track), I never found this frustrating.  Instead, it’s what kept me glued to my seat, riveted by the multi-layered story unfolding on the screen.  The acting is incredible — when Gary Oldman is good, he is so very, very good, I must say — and the pacing is perfect.  By the end, I was squirming in my seat, anxious and paranoid — is HE the mole?  Is HE?  Is it SMILEY?  And I’ve read the book!  (Though, granted, I read it nearly 20 years ago. . .)

This is a great movie to see if you’re in the mood for a bit of a brain game, and one I have no doubt will get even better with multiple viewings.  Definitely recommended, and I hope they make at least one more of the Smiley books into a film with the same cast.  So much more fun than Bond!

[Prequeue it at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre:  Thriller, Spy
Cast:  Gary Oldman, Kathy Burke, Benedict Cumberbatch, David Dencik, Colin Firth, Stephen Graham, Ciarán Hinds, Tom Hardy, John Hurt, Toby Jones

MOVIE: The Artist (2011)

Have you ever seen a movie so absolutely wonderful from start to finish that at the end you stood up and cheered?  Damn the people around you and their funny looks?

I have.

Highly, HIGHLY recommended.  I’ve never seen anything like this film (a silent movie about the end of the silent movie era) — I have never smiled so long and so hard during a film that my cheeks hurt (Dujardin’s grin is so infectious, you won’t be able to keep your own face still), I have never made such an enormous fool out of myself as the final credits rolled, and I have never left a theater dancing.  I did all those things with The Artist.  And I cannot WAIT to do them all again soon.

DO NOT MISS!  Now this is how you start a new year of movie-watching right.  Good goddamn, it’s a delight.  An utter delight.

[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre:  Comedy, Drama
Cast:  Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller, Missi Pyle, Malcolm McDowell

BOOK: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (2011)

To fans of baseball, this book will be an utterly delightful novel of the game, with the added bonus of a well-written and engaging character drama on the side.  To those who couldn’t care less about sports, it’ll be a brilliantly conceived story about five people at a small private college who “come of age” (in a sense) simultaneously, with an unobtrusive framework of baseball holding it all together.

I am, in case you’ve forgotten since my last ballplayer Boyfriend of the Week write-up, a huge fan of baseball.  But the friend who gave me this book is more of the take-it-or-leave-it type.  I imagine we got some very different things out of this novel.  Yet, we both agreed on one thing for sure:  it is all-around excellent.

The story begins with a ball game.  High school senior Henry Scrimshander is an ace shortstop with an almost spiritual approach to fielding that gets noticed right away by the catcher of the college league team playing nearby.  As it turns out, Mike Schwartz is not just a genius catcher, he’s also the captain of the team at Westish College, a small private school in Wisconsin.  Stunned by Henry’s grace and instinct on the grass, Mike pulls every string he can find to land Henry a baseball scholarship to Westish for the next year.  Henry, thrilled to be able to continue playing ball, college or not, immediately becomes Mike’s protegé, and the two form a close friendship as Henry’s first year of college launches, spending every waking moment together training.  It’s not long before Henry is the team’s star player, eventually attracting the attention of big league scouts and agents battling to sign him before anybody else can.

At the same time, Henry is also forming a tight relationship with his room- and teammate, the quiet, bookish Owen, who is almost more like the team’s mascot than its infielder (they call him Buddha, and he spends most of the games reading on the bench).

Owen, on the other hand, is forming a new partnership of his own — a sexual and loving relationship with the president of Westish, the much-older Guert Affenlight, a man who had never before indulged in or even truly felt an attraction to another male, but who hasn’t been able to get Owen out of his mind since meeting him.  As their love blooms, Guert becomes more and more willing to risk everything to be with his new love, including his career and his relationship with his daughter, Pella.

Pella has just enrolled in Westish herself, after a failed marriage left her reeling and uncertain of her future.  Worried about the strange changes in her father’s behavior, she turns to Mike for insight and that pair ends up falling in love as well.  Henry to Mike, Mike to Pella, Pella to Guert, Guert to Owen, Owen to Henry:  and so closes the circle.

At first, our team of five connected souls are blissfully happy.  Everything changes, though, the moment Henry makes his first terrible error on the field, a wild throw that ends up beaning Owen in the head so hard he nearly dies.  This one bad throw knocks down what turns out to be a long train of dominoes, launching every character into crisis.  By the end, every tie between the five is fraying, every future is up for grabs, and every character is being sucked down by their own personal hell.  How this group of extraordinarily loyal and loving human beings get out of their funks is powerfully emotional and absolutely enthralling.

That’s the non-baseball part of the book.  The baseball part is full of ball game commentary and insight, excerpts from Henry’s favorite baseball philosophy book (The Art of Fielding, by Henry’s hero, record-holding shortstop Aparicio Rodriguez (who I’ve theorized is an amalgam of Luis Aparicio, a real famous shortstop, and Alex Rodriguez, a primo example of the way in which real-life stress on the brain can devastate performance on the field)), and one of the most masterfully spot-on explanations of why baseball lovers love baseball I have ever read — the perfect rebuttal to anyone complaining the game is “too slow.”  It goes like this:

Baseball, in its quiet way, was an extravagantly harrowing game.  Football, basketball, hockey, lacrosse — these were melee sports.  You could make yourself useful by hustling and scrapping more than the other guy.  You could redeem yourself through sheer desire.  But baseball was different.  [Mike] Schwartz thought of it as Homeric — not a scrum but a series of isolated contests.  Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball.  You couldn’t storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football.  You stood and waited and tried to still your mind.  When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was.  What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error, but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?

Just getting the inside perspective of the game from a shortstop like Henry — a combination of studied player and natural — gave new weight to the complexity of the game for me.  It’s not the hustle of a basketball game, which seems to be more about reaction than forethought.  Nor is it the massive crush of football.  It’s a game played deliberately, thoughtfully.  And that is why those of us who love it love it so damn much.

This novel is one of the most unique books I’ve read in a long time. A sports story loaded to the brim with emotion and insight.  A character study punctuated by the author’s clear passion for America’s pastime.  It’s a story of love from every angle — boy and girl, boy and boy, friend and friend, kid and sport, writer and writing — and a wonderful one at that.  This is a novel I’ll be passing around my friends and family (you’re next, Mom!), and one I look forward to reading again some day.

This is Harbach’s first book, I was astonished to discover.  Fingers crossed his next one is already in the works.  If it’s as good as this one was, I’m sure to love it, no matter what the topic.  Just as you, baseball lover or not, will surely love The Art of Fielding.  Highly, highly recommended!  (Incidentally, this’ll be turning up on my list of favorites from 2011, which will go up on the BotW site early next week — I finished it right before Christmas, so it counts!)

[FICTION]

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BOOK: The White Devil by Justin Evans (2011)

I’m way behind on movie and book reviews again — I left for a week’s vacation for the holidays (sans computer, go me!) and then, naturally, went down for the count with a nasty cold and subsequent sinus infection.  But I’m finally back in action, and since my “Best of 2011″ lists are about to go up on the Boyfriend page, I want to whip through a few last-minute 2011 reviews here this weekend.  Getcha all caught up.

This book was the book I bought to read on my vacation, after reading several reviews of it that recommended it strongly, including one by Stephen King.  Stephen King!  Have I learned nothing in my 38 years of life?  I was so excited to pick up a new ghost story — total sucker for those — that the Master of Horror had said was not only spooky as hell, but literarily grand as well.  Oh, Stephen King.  You have absolutely abominable taste, sir.

This boring, overwritten, overwrought novel is set in a fancy-pants private school for teenaged boys in the UK, the Harrow School.  As the story opens, American 17 year-old Andrew Taylor has just bought his way into the school after having burned his way through several US institutions by selling drugs and getting expelled.  He’s ready to start over and knows a mention of the prestigious Harrow School on his college applications is the only way to save his future bacon.

It takes Andrew some time to adjust, but he finally begins making friends with the boys in his dorm, as well as his resident adviser of sorts, Professor Piers Fawkes.  But when one of Andrew’s new friends dies of a mysterious and sudden pulmonary illness, gasping out his last bloody breath in Andrew’s arms, Andrew soon finds himself accused of murder by his peers.  Trying to boost him back up a bit, Fawkes casts him as the lead in his new play about the poet Lord Byron, one of the school’s most famous alumni, saying Andrew looks uncannily just like him.  But as soon as Andrew begins to delve into the world of Byron and his history at Harrow, he finds himself being visited by a vicious spirit he soon comes to realize is also connected to the great poet.  And is the monster responsible for killing his friend to boot.

From there, a series of additional deaths, the discovery of a love affair that turned to murder, a ghostly sexual assault scene I really could’ve done without, and a whooooole lotta boring inanity.

Among the many problems I had with the extremely bloated mess of story lines in this book was the absolute lack of any creativity whatsoever.  The ghost is pale, gaunt, and breathes with a death rattle.  Yawn.  The two main characters, Andrew and the first female student at the school, Persephone, bond over their troubled pasts and fall into an equally troubled love.  Zzzzz.  And the ending — oh brother.  Ghosts real or not aside, the stuff about tuberculosis was wildly inaccurate, and the story of Byron’s homosexual love affair, based on a true story (sort of) is so twisted and nasty it almost felt cruel to me.  And the way they finally get rid of that pale, rattling ghost?  Golly, that was easy.  And convenient.  And dumb, dumb, dumb.

I ended up reading this entire novel primarily because it was the only book I had with me.  Big mistake.  Had I given myself an additional option, I would never have made it past page 50 in this stinker.  Badly imagined, boringly conceived, this book is an absolute waste of your time.  LEARN FROM ME!

[FICTION, GHOSTS, CRAP]

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BOOK: Charity Girl by Michael Lowenthal (2007)

Here’s something from United States history I had never heard before: during World War I, the U.S. government arrested over 20,000 women suspected of spreading STDs to American soldiers. Of those arrested, over 13,000 tested positive and were held against their will for months at a time. They were not allowed to contact their families — not even to let their mothers know they were still alive. To friends and family left behind, they had simply vanished into thin air.

Even worse, they were threatened with legal action, but never actually given lawyers or taken before a judge. Instead, for months or even years, they were subjected to brutal and humiliating medical treatments, as well as the open disdain of many of the men and women put in charge of “helping” them. Though many of the women held contracted their STDs from the very soldiers they themselves were accused of infecting, the men suffered no sanctions whatsoever — it was always assumed the women were to blame. Arrested on dubious charges (in some cases, women were picked up and carted off merely for wearing a dress someone found too “provocative” in an area where there happened to be soldiers stationed), held without legal proceedings, and subjected to humiliation-based abuse — gee, sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?

And it is that undercurrent of modern-day relevancy that makes this novel all the more compelling. It tells the fictional-but-based-on-fact story of a young woman, 17 year-old Frieda, who ran away from home after her oppressive mother attempted to marry her off to a man twice her age. Frieda hits the big city and quickly gets a job at a local department store, wrapping parcels for customers of the ladies undergarments section. Many of the women Frieda meets and befriends are what were called “charity girls” at the time. Young and often more than a bit naive, charity girls would trade their attentions and affections to men for gifts or entrance fees to local dances. They weren’t prostitutes, exactly — not promising sex for money, but instead offered their company and perhaps a kiss or quick feeling-up for jewelry, meals, or evenings out. In war-time, poverty was fierce, and these young girls just wanted to be able to continue to enjoy some of the niceties of life.  It seemed, to them, a small price to pay for some happiness.  Though Frieda isn’t quite a charity girl herself as the story opens, she’s begun flirting with it, and when she meets a charming young soldier named Felix, it doesn’t end up taking much for him to successfully seduce her.

Felix disappears, and a few weeks later, Frieda is greeted at work by a stern woman who tells her Felix has tested positive for an STD and the government knows Frieda is to blame for it. She threatens Frieda, but doesn’t end up taking her away — not yet. Nevertheless, Frieda’s boss knows who the woman is and what she does, and he wastes no time in firing Frieda, leaving her starving and penniless within a few short weeks. Desperate, Frieda scrapes together enough money for a train ticket, and heads off in search of Felix, who has written her promising to help if he can.

On her way to the base, though, Frieda is tricked into trusting another young soldier who claims to know Felix and offers to take her to him. Instead, he forces her into an abandoned building and attempts to rape her. Just as she has finished fighting him off, however, she is grabbed by another man who is convinced she’s there to prostitute herself to the first soldier she lays eyes on. He takes her to an old brothel that has been converted into one of the aforementioned detention centers for STD-positive women. And so her months of agony begin.

This is a truly shocking tale, made all the more horrific not only by the fact this actually happened, but by the fact most of us, I’d wager, are completely UNAWARE this ever happened. And while I will say I didn’t think this novel was particularly well-written, nor did I find the characters terribly three-dimensional, the content of the story itself is what makes it a book not to be missed. Stick this one on your list, everyone. You should know about this. Recommended!

[FICTION]

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MOVIE: Shame (2011)

Stunning.

Flawed.

And that’s about all I can really say about this film.  Anything else would be too much.  For me, I mean.  To say.  To think.  To feel.  To write.  To share.  It is hard and heart-breaking, and also in desperate need of tighter editing.  Fassbender is brilliant.  Mulligan is me at 19, possibly for similar (though not identical) reasons.  And I hope I never, ever see this movie again.

That’s all I’ve got.

Oh, except for this:  this film is rated NC-17 and we were carded THREE TIMES going in (ticket counter, ticket taker, bouncer at entrance to theater itself).  Why?  The sex is not explicit, and the full-frontal nudity is not gratuitous.  Grow up, MPAA.

[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre:  Agony
Cast:  Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale, Nicole Beharie, Hannah Ware

MOVIE: A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas (2011)

I’d never seen a whole Harold and Kumar movie until this one, but had seen enough pieces here and there to suspect I might have a good time.  And, as it turned out, though I didn’t run right home to rent the other two after seeing this one, I definitely got some solid laughs out of it.  In large part, I suspect, because I saw it with two incredibly sarcastic friends who delightfully refuse to take life too seriously.

The plot isn’t important here, but in a nutshell, Harold is about to get married and is no longer friends with his lazy, slovenly, going-nowhere pal Kumar.  When Kumar gets a gift addressed to Harold, though, he decides it’s time to visit his old pal’s new house and maybe say hello.

Of course, everything goes disastrously wrong, and when a series of events result in Harold’s father-in-law-to-be’s special home-grown Christmas tree going up in (pot) smoke, the two old friends find themselves on a midnight quest for a replacement that leads them through a variety of ridiculous situations and features a running gag about a baby who keeps accidentally getting high.  (We’re all going to hell, my friend commented, as the baby inhaled a bunch of cocaine and we laughed like crazy people.  Totally worth it, I replied.)

This is the first 3D film I’ve seen since Avatar where I felt like the 3D effects were fascinating and fun instead of merely intrusive, and here it’s largely because the 3D is used as a dumb gimmick on purpose.  Be prepared for oodles of marijuana smoke to come floating up so close to your face you can almost smell it (um, not that I’d know what it smells like, of course — hi, Mom!).  That, plus lots of other incredibly silly gags made this movie exactly what it needed to be:  an entertaining, brainless romp, with a smart and endearing edge (I say endearing because I went in not knowing Harold or Kumar, and left with a fondness for them that was almost sisterly in nature — good guys, those two.  Not what I was expecting, to be honest).

As funny Christmas movies go, you could do a lot worse.  I did get tired of a few of the gags by the end (endless rounds of ethnic jokes get old after a while for me, I confess), but it’s definitely worth a gander if you’re a fan of the other flicks in the series, or if you just feel like seeing something completely stupid this December.

[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]

Genre: Comedy
Cast:  John Cho, Kal Penn, Neil Patrick Harris, Amir Blumenfeld, Paula Garcés,Danny Trejo, David Krumholtz, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Patton Oswalt, Elias Koteas