The ethnic taunts the boys endure lead the movie into various melodramatic subplots and it's interesting to see that melodrama, treated seriously rather than comically, debases even an intentionally unambitious comedy like this. Some obnoxious, racist kids end up going to prison for a jumbo bag of pot that actually belongs to Kumar. In a movie that features an African-American professor thrown in prison for nothing, how can it possibly be a funny outcome for anybody to be jailed for something he didn't do?

And I don't mean to whine, but there sure are a lot of fag jokes for a movie that makes such a big deal about ethnic and racial prejudice. Plus, although I know the scenes of prejudice are supposed to be exaggerated, I couldn't tell what they're an exaggeration of. A med school admissions interviewer in the northeast corridor who thinks to say "colored" before "African-American"? Racist, monster-truck-driving, kayak-toting, skateboard punks in Hoboken? Whatthefuck?

Turning to what really matters: are the guys funny? Kal Penn (Kumar) sure is as the handsome juvenile hero's feckless pal who gets them into one "fine mess" after another. Not as good as Stan Laurel or Jerry Lewis or Chris Tucker, but then the material isn't as consistent. Still, Penn is hilariously single-minded in the beginning, blowing a med school interview by taking a cell phone call, or using his roommate's grooming scissors on his pubes, or raving excitedly about the "dirty pussies" at Princeton.

As good as Penn is, though, those Princeton girls made me laugh harder longer. Their squint-and-grunt expressions in the game of "battleshit" are priceless, and scatological humor featuring women is even rarer than interesting roles for Asian-Americans in mainstream movies.

On the minus side, John Cho (Harold) isn't a comedian, not even as the straight man exasperated by his clownish partner. In Better Luck Tomorrow (2003) Cho amazingly could suggest his character's conflicting drives and feelings without dialogue--his face could look both opaque and transparent in the same shot. That's appropriate here, too, but it's not funny perhaps because there's nothing cartoony about him. He's a dramatic actor and his skills are too subtle, and not sunny enough, for this material. He also strikes me as very comfortable in his masculinity (he looks pretty hot in the animated burgerland fantasy) and so casting him as a shy young man who's unable to assert himself just diminishes him. Cho's body language contradicts Harold's supposed diffidence, and in fact the only time he clicks in the movie is when Harold gets angry at the White Castle. (Though Cho does squeeze out a funny, tight smile when pointing out to a racist cop that his name, unlike Kumar's, is inoffensively familiar.)

The Manchurian Candidate

Speaking of Whatthefuck? the remake of John Frankenheimer's 1962 classic The Manchurian Candidate botches everything distinctive about the original to such an extent you think, "If they didn't get it, why did they want to remake it?" The remakers don't approach the older movie like fans but like engineers humorlessly addressing a technical problem: how to update the components without compromising the structure.