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| From http://cf2.imgobject.com/t/p/original/3KoZiWlgvmeDYiLk9oOMpEvZThb.jpg |
Dir. Danny Leinen
USA
Film #4 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema
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| From http://images.blu-ray.com/reviews/557_1.jpg |
I was going to view this only out
of fascination, remembering seeing pieces of the film, but watching it has gone
beyond that to opening a vast segment of my mind that is rarely allowed to be
opened, bringing a whole era of my adolescence out like a post-trauma
flashback. About a pair of stoners (Ashton
Kutcher and Seann William Scott)
who have to deal with a night’s aftermath that they cannot even remember, this
film of all things is the key to mapping out my early teenage years in terms of
culture and film, even more so in that the film isn’t good and is the mediocre
bridge between the late 1990s and the early 2000s where I went through puberty
and early teenage hood. Born in 1989, my adolescence was from 1999 onwards to
the middle of the 2000s, probably 2006 or 2007 when I was at college and I
started getting more into various types of music and cinema gradually. I still
remember the peculiar taste of the 1990s I grew up with, reconciling with it
through my film watching, but the early 2000s is this vague beast that has been
wrapped in cotton wool in my mind despite having many memories of it. Dude, Where’s My Car? has abruptly
revealed the truth of the era, a bucket of cold water over my head and woke me
up.
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| From http://static1.fjcdn.com/comments/t he+name+is+from+dude+where+is+my+car+i+_5c71ef29f6f64f5ed15e50b9570a7618.jpg |
After the post-modernism of the
1990s, the early 2000s for me is probably a lot more dated than any other
period, especially since it has yet to gain the protective shield of nostalgia
that the 1980s has. It was a period of the American
Pie films and bands like The
Offspring were popular. It is also a period which, despite having many
aspects of it that still stand up today in quality, was a crumbling mess of pop
culture, of the lingering taste of the nineties trying to interconnect with the
new technology, the sanitisation of a lot of it, and the effect of being
post-post-modern in mood, something we’re still trying to deal with in cinema in
2013 for myself regardless of the critical consensus of most people of the
current film climate. It was a period that never considered pop punk to be a
paradoxical concept, where everything was both cheerful and bright, or like the
lyrics to Disturbed’s first album, but
a lot of it feels lame and hollow in hindsight. It was acceptable to have white
man rap against heavy metal guitars, and while I still listen to some songs by Linkin Park etc., for the most part it
is cringe worthy, and a period of mass commercialisation of American skater,
college campus and ‘alternative’ culture that was blatantly sold of marketable
product despite the creators’ intentions. Now most of the albums from this
period litter the second hand music stands, as I am baffled I had songs by
bands like Zebrahead on my computer,
heaven is no longer a halfpipe, and Sega
no longer has a Dreamcast and is now in the pocket of their age old rival Nintendo. And like the early 1990s
straight-to-video horror films I evoked in The
Invisible Maniac (1990) review, comedy films like this one from the early
2000s are strange beasts with no place in cinematic history.
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| From http://www.uber-facts.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/tumblr_ma6gqr8eLs1rgonf4o1_1280.png |
Why, when Dude, Where’s My Car? has sex jokes, pot references and such types
of gags, does it have the look, tone and music cues of a family friendly wacky
comedy? You know, the ones where a person acquires an animal, usually a dog, which
they have to eventually fall in love with by the end and at some point
demolishes their home, and drools everywhere, in the narrative? It comes more apparent
that of a lot of early 2000s cinema, geared to rebellious teenagers, is
actually awkward and awkwardly put together. It immediately invokes the
infamous Freddy Got Fingered (2001),
which I finally viewed last year, a film that was said to be offensive and abhorrent
by film critics but turned out to be really ordinary, plastic looking cinema
that Hollywood was making at the time, with the vast gallons of elephant semen
being the only thing that separated it from the teen comedies. Dude, Where’s My Car?, a series of comedy
vignettes about the most vague night of debauchery possible, has a few laughs,
but it is mostly the worst aspects of the period put together, American comedy
that should not be criticised for its type of humour by critics but for how
stilted and lackadaisically put-together it all was, with their empty visual
looks and ‘alternative’ pop punk soundtracks. That this film looks and sounds like Beethoven (1992), but is actually about pot smokers having to contend with
disappointed girlfriends, amnesia and mystical alien technology instead of a
lovable and rambunctious dog, is even more incomprehensible in its plainness. Greg Araki’s Kaboom (2010) this is not – Araki
almost digging the graves for films from this period and kicking them into the
holes from behind with Kaboom’s
braver but more charming nature - a film that just reminds me of some of the
utterly generic music and items of the period. That could be viewed as
incredibly cruel on my half, but as someone who still loves quite a few things
from the era, even if people now would turn their nose up to them, I can also
cringe at the awful quality of some of this culture and see how airheaded it
was.
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| If only these two had a film of their own completely separate from this one (From http://static.yify-torrents.com/attachments/dude_wheres_my_car_(2000)/imphGM_large.png) |
The compromised Americana of Dude, Where’s My Car? – of pot smoking,
white men ‘ghettoing’ in a music video fantasy sequence, fast food drive-ins
etc. – is sorely lacking and flat onscreen, even more so as an Englishman with
a continental difference between me and it. It is all distracting series of
iconography on a screen, and probably is now for a lot of Americans my age or
younger an embarrassment too. This could be viewed as trying to use the
scorched earth policy on my adolescence out of shame, but its more the realisation
that, for everything I still keep to heart, things like this film, which produced
only a snicker or a laugh occasionally and is not creatively interesting in
humour or look, sadly make up a large part of the era and has reminded me of it
all like bathroom tap limescale in my mind which has forgotten about for years.
It feels cheap, and it’s sad to see the outtakes in the end credits where everyone
including the two main actors are enjoying themselves, as they all deserved
better than this. What I was left with, thinking about the film, is just how
many people will be willing to (re)watch Dude,
Where’s My Car? and whether they’ll have the same nostalgic feelings of
horror at what they see as I did.
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| From http://www.wikinoticia.com/images/ extracine/cdn.extracine.com.files.2011.01.b25557c3be5e43ede8771840d4272168.jpg |
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