TRAILER OF THE DAY! Christmas At White Castle

I quite enjoy the first Harold & Kumar movie.  Aside from elevating the careers of Kal Penn and John Cho, I love the breezy absurdist tone throughout the film.  It also has a great running joke based on a clever use of the double negative that I quote all the time.  I literally could not get through the second one, and that's saying something, as it takes a lot to get me to walk away from a movie midstream.  It felt closer to one of those terrible Scary Movie/Date Movie/Epic Movie spoofs.  (Ironically, Epic Movie features a performance by Kumar himself.)

Here we've got the trailer for the third entry, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.

Some were quick to criticize the claymation sequence as a ripoff of Community's brilliant Christmas episode last season, despite the fact that this movie was shot first.  Besides, if you're going to riff on Christmas movies then claymation is the obvious choice, not the inspired one.  (Which isn't to say it can't be done well, e.g. Community.)  That being said, this looks like a marked improvement over the last entry and there are a few jokes in there I quite liked, particularly the Jesus and Santa bits.  The 3D gags feel like a toss up; it's always hard to tell how that will play until you're in the theater.  It does feel like there's too much NPH here.  The brilliance of his appearance in the first movie was that it was brief and shocking.  Seeing as his character on How I Met Your Mother is essentially the same as the fictionalized version of himself in these movies, it now feels very played out.

From my recollection, this script centers around Harold and Kumar being forced together years after a big falling out.  I think they have to find a tree on Christmas Eve?  At the very least it's nice to see them trying to vaguely progress the characters a bit.  I might be willing to give this one a shot, although to be honest, my expectations really couldn't be lower.  Then again, that could work in the movie's favor.