Until Jack Nicholson’s kooky Colonel Nathan Jessep made fun of Tom Cruise’s faggoty white uniform over lunch in A Few Good Men, I’d never heard of America’s Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Oh, for those carefree days of yesteryore.

Today, of course, most of us are sick-to-death of (and mostly just sickened by) references to all the terrible, terrible shit that’s gone down at Gitmo since America went torture-happy in 2002 and turned the base into a slightly less awful Abu Ghraib, where (according to our terrible, terrible 43rd president) the Geneva Conventions, legality, common sense and human decency no longer applied.

As of this writing, our hopefully much, much better 44th president has, according to Reuters, ordered a 120-day halt to all pending Guantánamo Bay prosecutions “to give the new administration time to evaluate the cases and decide what forum best suits any future prosecution.”

In the meantime, your pals here at the Screengrab would like to commemorate President Obama’s pledge to shut down one of the worst prisons in our nation's history with a salute to THE BEST PRISON MOVIES OF ALL TIME!

Read More...

After the surprisingly good-natured and occasionally hilarious Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle became a huge cult hit on DVD, it was only a matter of time before we were treated to a sequel.  Writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg picked up the directorial reins as well, and brought back Kal Penn and John Cho as the leads.  This was an absolute necessity, as it was their insouciant stoner charm that gave the first movie its lasting appeal; the big surprise came when it was announced that the new film would feature the boys being arrested and incarcerated in the most famous prison in the world.  Would the Harold and Kumar franchise become a sounding bell for radicalism?  Would the bodily secretion jokes and dope references take a back seat to fiery condemnation of America's notorious prison camp on foreign soil?  Was this movie actually going to teach us something?

Come on, folks.  It's Harold and Kumar, not Vidal and Chomsky.  The boys spend all of five minutes of screen time in Guantanamo Bay and the rest of the movie is devoted to more of the low-comedy high-jinks that one would expect from the people who made America's favorite stoner road picture.   George W. Bush is brought in mostly to make a weed gag, the bits where people learn a valuable lesson about racial profiling are as subtle as a hailstorm (if occasionally quite funny, as when Harold and Kumar encounter gangs of rural whites and urban blacks, and a memorable scene where Klansmen refer to the duo as "Mexicans"), and the movie's main argument against terrorism is to bellow "Fuck you!  Donuts are awesome!"  No one should go into this thing expecting carefully crafted political arguments from any point on the political spectrum, nor should they go into it expecting subtle comedy, crafty worldplay or an absence of jokes involving pubic hair.

Read More...