HAROLD AND KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANEMO BAY - everyone's a little bit racist!

Roldy is an up-tight hard-working Korean-American investment banker. Kumar is his Indian-American pot-smoking med-school-dodging best-friend. The movie picks up from the end of the sleeper hit HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITECASTLE, in which our two heroes got high, got the munchies and went in search of the perfect hamburger. In this movie they head to Amsterdam so that Harold can hook up with the hot chick in his apartment building - Maria. But en route they get accused of attempting to hijack a plane, when all they were really trying to do was get high. They're shipped to Gitmo, quickly escape, and then travel across the American South in search of a presidential pardon and, for Kumar, true love!

All the stuff we loved in the first movie is here in the sequel. Harold and Kumar (John Cho and Kal Penn) have great comic timing and there's another great cameo from Neil Patrick Harris aka Doogie Howser MD. Some of the stuff we hated in the first movie also persists - the random shagging of the big bag of weed dream sequence, for one. But underneath the gross out humour and the ludicrous plot, HAROLD AND KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANEMO BAY has an actual, proper, well thought-out message!

The comedy genius that was Tom Lehrer once wrote a song called "National Brotherhood Week"....

"Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics / And the Catholics hate the Protestants / And the Hindus hate the Moslems / And everybody hates the Jews

But during National Brotherhood Week / National Brotherhood WeekIt's National / Everyone-Smile-At-One-Another-hood Week / Be nice to people who / Are inferior to you / It's only for a week, so have no fear / Be grateful that it doesn't last all year!"

And that's basically the message of HAROLD AND KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANEMO BAY. It sucks if you're Korean or Indian, so people assume you're a Communist or a terrorist. But then again, it sucks if you're from rural America and people assume you're a provincial dolt with in-bred kids. Even George W Bush gets a break: we assume he's an asshole but maybe he's just another kid pressured into joining the family business?!

So there we have it. H&K tell it like it is: everyone's a little bit racist. Now, who'd have thought such a popcorn movie would dare make such a political statement?!

HAROLD AND KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANEMO BAY opened in April in Singapore, Canada and the USA. It opened in Iceland in May and in Australia in August.

DIRTY LOVE - insultingly bad

DIRTY LOVE may be the worst movie of 2005. It features US Barbie-doll alleged comedienne Jenny McCarthy and Carmen Electra. The plot, such as it is, is that the Jenny McCarthy discovers that her boyfriend is a cheat and has an emotional breakdown. "Jokes" include a skit where Jenny McCarthy is walking through a supermarket aisle looking for sanitary towels and leaving a trail of menstrual blood on the floor. Presumably, it is also meant to be funny that Carmen Electra spends the entire movie imitating an African-American accent and idiom. I found the whole movie insulting as a woman, as a woman of colour, and frankly, as an intelligent cinema-goer. That is was released at all, let alone at a festival like Sundance, is shameful to all involved in the production and the festival programmers. DIRTY LOVE went on to receive a host of Razzies - the anti-Oscars. But I feel that these anti-awards imply that it was so bad as to be funny. It wasn't. It was so bad as to be insulting. Avoid at all costs.

DIRTY LOVE premiered at Sundance 2005 and hit US screens last year. It went to straight to video in the UK and is released on DVD today.

HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITECASTLE – superior gross-out comedy

HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITECASTLE is the perfect Friday night, gross-out, frat-boy comedy. It has a neat but simple plot, lots of great one-liners, some good visual gags, and a happy ending. This is not rocket science – just comedy that works. The basic idea is that Harold and Kumar – to young guys just out of college – get stoned, get the munchies, see an ad for Whitecastle hamburgers on TV, and decide to go to Whitecastle and eat those luscious burgers. That’s it! On the way, they get sidetracked by psychos, the need to buy more pot, an invitation to a student party and other sundry classic plot devices. And then, finally, they get to Whitecastle. I’d love to tell you that they learn a lot about themselves along the way, and there are some nods to a more profound message in the movie. Harold is a pent-up young investment banker who learns to say “f*ck it, let’s just have a good time.” Kumar is guy who is fighting against his family’s desire for him to become a doctor, just like his dad and brother, who eventually realises that rebellion aside, he actually *wants* to be a doctor. But in all honesty, I would be struggling to call these plot strands “character development”. Fundamentally, this is just a great buddy movie, performed by two guys with superb comic timing and good chemistry – Kal Penn and John Cho. Oh yeah, I should also mention that it features cool cameos from Ryan Reynolds and cult-status self mockery from Neil Patrick Harris a.k.a Doogie Howser MD. Somehow it doesn’t sound very funny when I type this up, but the line “Doogie Howser stole my car!” had me rolling in the aisle. Genius.

HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITECASTLE was released in the US last year. Re-branded as HAROLD AND KUMAR GET THE MUNCHIES, the movie opens in the UK today.