By Danny Leiner, 2000.
Starring David Bannick, Robert Clendenin, Andy Dick (uncredited), Ashton Kutcher, Mitzi Martin, Christian Middelthon, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Seann William Scott, Hal Sparks.
Rating: 7.5/10, 6/10.
The first time I saw Dude, Where’s My Car?, I had a lot of admiration for it. I went in expecting a movie so stupidly non-funny that it would become funny in my ruthless mocking of it. You know the sort (and you probably know my sort, too, from that). On the contrary, though, I found it intelligent, genuinely funny, and on the whole daring for its genre.
The second time I saw Dude, Where’s My Car?, I lost a lot my admiration for it. It seemed a lot more vacant than I remembered. Where I was thinking I was about to see a relative genre masterpiece, I saw something much closer to crap.
I think the truth is somewhere in between the two. It is certainly not a masterpiece, but it is also far from crap. Director Leiner and writer Philip Stark (who, I find on the Internet Movie Database, are currently at work on Seriously, Dude, Where’s My Car?, which if you ask me is taking a good thing much too far) have created something that may seem on the surface to be just another one of the disposable teen comedies that were so popular around 2000, but actually goes much deeper than that. There’s something in its gleeful distance from reality that resembles classic surrealism, and even at times (dare I say it) some of the more bizarre and frightening philosophies, like dada and nihilism. Reading other reviews of it, I keep coming across statements along the lines of "Dude, Where’s My Car? delivers exactly what it promises: a stupid, unfunny comedy." This confuses me, because what I would say about the movie is that it exactly, deliberately does NOT deliver the same thing that it promises to. If you haven’t seen the movie, here’s what you probably know from the trailer: the hot guy from That 70’s Show and the guy with the weird jaw from American Pie wake up after a night of partying to find their car missing, and they go off in search of it. That’s it. What you probably don’t know is that their search leads them to bizarre cultists, sadistic impound officers, cops who are less successful at the sadism, frenchmen, ostriches, pot-smoking dogs, and, above all, aliens. There’s some kind of genius at play here when all of those elements—and seriously countless others—all end up being significant when the movie eventually turns into a struggle over the fate of the universe.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that Leiner and Stark have subverted the teen comedy genre while staying utterly true to it; they have created a movie that at no time rises above the muck that birthed it, and yet somehow does. A perfect example: a transgendered stripper wreaking havoc on a male character’s masculinity would not be out of place in Road Trip or American Pie or Tomcats or any of the rest of them, but that the stripper is instrumental in the destruction or salvation of the universe, and the specific way she plays a role in the movie, are certainly unique (I have no idea if that sentence made grammatical sense).
It’s also very hard to say, a lot of the time, if the movie is celebrating or condemning the questionable values of the culture it pretends to be (and is) a part of, or if it does neither. The movie is full of homophobic and (especially) misogynistic characters, actions, and imagery, but something tells me that, at the very least, the movie’s creators have examined these tendencies in other movies and are very aware of their presence here. When one of the competing teams of aliens takes the form of a squadron of beautiful, leather-clad, Russ Meyer-chested women, my first thought was something along the lines of "Sweet Jesus, are these actresses human beings or objects?" (spoken in an ultra-dramatic voice). But consider: when, pretty much every time they enter a scene they are greeted with the word "guys," the lead buxom says "We are not guys. We are hot chicks with large breasts." If taken ironically, as I believe it was meant to be, that is some pretty self-aware dialogue. These same femaliens (ha! ha! ha! I crack myself up!) also have near-complete control over our heroes with their sexual charms, which ended up making me, at least, reflect on the way that the teen movies are often inadvertently condemnations of heterosexual teen male behavior as much as they are irresponsible vehicles of the objectification of women. Here, though, I believed that this was on purpose, enough so that it led to the most ridiculously complicated syntax I’ve ever written. The people behind this movie, I am led to believe, are most definitely straight men who are interested in physically perfect women, but who also have problems with the thoughtless way most movies in the genre focus on the men’s interests to the extreme exclusion of the women’s.
The treatment of homophobia was similar. There was the aforementioned transgendered stripper, who, when she reveals her physical sex, sickens Kutcher. But this scene was exaggerated beyond the reasonable demands of teen comedy, and in fact it reminded me a lot of the use of vaginal imagery in a lot of horror movies. This, combined with the fact that we eventually come to sympathize with the stripper, offsets the fact that her character is there largely for comedy and makes one question whether she actually is something to be laughed at. Aside from that, there are two amazing and genuinely shocking scenes of homoeroticism between Kutcher and Scott—the kissing scene and the tattoo scene. In the kissing scene, they are stopped at a stoplight when a fancy sportscar—containing Fabio (in his best guest appearance since Jill Sobule’s "I Kissed A Girl" video) and his girlfriend. Fabio and our heroes engage in some masculine engine revving, competing over who has the more manly car. It escalates until Fabio moves on to grab his girl and kiss her. Ashton and Scott look at one another, shrug, and do the same. Fabio and his girlfriend look disgusted and drive away, but Leiner’s camera does no such thing, lingering on the kiss (which is DAMN hot, if you ask me) for long enough, I would suspect, to make all the straight 16 year-old boys in the audience to start questioning things. It’s presented under the protective guise of comedy, but it’s just unnecessary enough, lasts just this much too long, to seem like something more. The tattoo scene, on the other hand, is much longer, and never blatantly homosexual. In this scene, they are changing—together—and when they take their shirts off, they see that they both have words ("Dude" and "Sweet") tattooed on their backs. They try to tell each other what their tattoos say, with much confusion. They go back and forth, all the while shirtless and beautiful, until they get angry at one another and start to wrestle a little—but in a way that looks much more like an embrace. Again, DAMN hot, completely unnecessary, and with a quality that is both subtle and banging-over-the-head, like much of the movie.
I am probably reading far too much into what is simply a fairly entertaining, intellectually vacant movie, but something makes me think I’m not. Either way, the movie has at least a few moments that are inarguably funny—I’m thinking of "I Heart U" and the bubble wrap jumpsuits and Mr. Pizzacoli’s name, in particular, though there are many others. If you’re curious, or if my review has made you curious, I’d recommend going out and seeing it. Don’t get your hopes up too high, and don’t get them down too low. Keep an open mind, know that you’re about to see something that could be fantastic just as easily as it could be utter crap, and come to your own decision.