Product: Dude Where's My Car (With Borat Preview Disc) (2000)
Rating: 3.0
Intelligent no-brainer.
'Dude, Where's My Car?' pulls off the difficult trick of at once indulging the (let's be kind) 'limited' worldview of its stoner protagonists and mercilessly ribbing it. The film is the perfect expression of a particular stunted adolescent mindset, revolving entirely around parties, TV, soft drugs, caricatures of girls, cars, nerd-baiting and jock-evading, fast food and aliens, going round and round in circles. The heroes, as vacuous as Bill and Ted, and as crass as Beavis and Butthead, have a naive charm, exuberance and sheer good-natured good-humour that carries the film long after the material has run out (about a third of the way through). The leads have an infectious and believable bond, and I woulld travel anywhere to see the marvel that is Seann William Scott's big grin, part-lascivious, part-wide-eyed-wonder, how-the-hell-did-I-get-here-and-who-cares?I won't say it's necessarily bad faith on the part of the film-makers, but there is certainly a relentless undermining of the characters' worldview. The film is less about male camaraderie than male identity, and takes the form of a journey that promises a moral progress, in which boys become men. All the way through, the film plays with various sexual situations 'testing' the boys, from homosexuality to castration anxiety to deferred heterosexuality. Famous quest narratives are ironically invoked, from 'Jason and the Argonauts' to 'The Life Of Brian', with the car perhaps as an emblem of the mature masculinity or sexuality that is the boys' birthright but which has to be sought. The lack of 'realism' (where do they go to school? etc.), the profusion of fairy tale, magical, hallucinatory and dream motifs, all suggest this. The venerable plot starting point - amnesiacs moving in the present, trying to recover their past - is the clasic narrative of identity, one which has served the likes of 'Vertigo' and 'Mulholland Drive' well. Feels a lot longer than 79 minutes, though!