Dude Where's My Car

While channel surfing early last night, one of the HBO's was showing what I think is a greatly underrated comedy of the last decade -- "Dude Where's My Car?". Now I am no kind of Ashton Kutcher fan -- I've never once watched That 70s Show and have never seen Punk'd -- and I don't exactly love Sean William Scott either (though he has been funny in several movies, come to think of it), but "Dude Where's My Car" is a seriously funny movie. There is something about that scene with the back tattoos that makes me able to watch it over and over and over again, and like many of the other good comedies of the past decade, most of the scenes in this flick are are actually pretty damn funny stuff.

Anyways, in watching this movie for the first time in probably five or six years, it occurred to me how much this is actually "The Hangover", but long before "The Hangover" was ever made. Not that "Dude Where's My Car?" invented this move either necessarily, but basically the movie begins with these male friends waking up the morning after a crazy party, totally hung over, their place completely trashed, and not remembering anything about what they did last night. In both films, however, the friends quickly notice that something is missing that they urgently need to find. In "The Hangover", it's their friend who is about to get married, while in "Dude", it's their car (duh). But in both films, what ensues is a hilarious misadventure that involves the friends working backwards from whatever clues they are able to find about what they did the night before, eventually ending up in finding their missing thing that they so desperately need.

What's especially interesting to me is some of the details that are eerily similar between the two movies. Like, both crazy nights involved the friends throwing around tons of money and being all crazy at a strip club. One of the first places the protagonists end up in both films is the strip club, where everybody seems to know them even though they have no clue who any of these people are. In both movies, one of the friends -- who has a wife ("The Hangover") or a girlfriend ("Dude") hooks up with a smokin' hot chick (in "The Hangover" it is Heather Graham, and in "Dude" it is Kristy Swanson) during the night of which they have no memory whatsoever. And, in what has to be the strangest coincidence of them all, in both movies, the friends actually inadvertently stole a bunch of money from a sexually ambiguous person who pursues them throughout the plot. In "The Hangover", it's that crazy Asian guy who also played the doctor in "Knocked Up" for those of you who watch all of these kind of movies, only in "Knocked Up" he was a regular guy, whereas in "The Hangover" he is an oddly effeminate, very strange-talking gangsta type. In "Dude", it's that Rene Russo look-alike stripper who stole 200 grand from her club and apparently gave it to the friends to return to her later, which they never did. It is hard to ignore this obvious parallel between the two movies, and frankly I find it hard to believe that the writers of "The Hangover" were not at least subconsciously influenced by having seen "Dude Where's My Car" previously. The plot commonalities are simply too great to ignore.

"Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude! What's mine say?"
"Saaaaaaaaaaaweeeeeeeeeeeeeettttttt! What's mine say?"
"Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude! What's mine say?"
"Saaaaaaaaaaaweeeeeeeeeeeeeetttttttahhhhhh! What's mine say?"


Classic. Go watch "Dude Where's My Car" if you haven't ever seen it.