Retro Review: Dude, Where's My Car?

  I've seen Dude, Where's My Car? once. That's it. Every time I see Ashton Kutcher and Sean William Scott together on television, I change the channel. I have no desire to ever watch Dude, Where's My Car again, no matter how many people of the marijuana-friendly persuasion suggest that I give it another chance. The story of how I came to loathe Dude, Where's My Car? is not a new one in the Blogorium, but perhaps this will be the complete story that allows me to put it to bed.

  At the time that Dude, Where's My Car? opened (December of 2000), I had already left the movie theatre I worked at and was working for a shipping company (if it helps, it's the competitor to the one Tom Hanks works for in Cast Away), and it was routinely kicking my ass five days a week after the relatively cushy projectionist job I was used to*. During the week, I really didn't want to do much of anything before going into work at 9 and after leaving at 3 a.m. However, I still had an "in" with the assistant managers at the old movie theatre, and this is where the Cranpire enters the story.

 I bring him up because he's not going to care much, and he's central to why I went to said movie theatre before work one night to see a movie I didn't want to see. Cranpire wanted to see Dude, Where's My Car?, and he doggedly pursued talking me into going with him so that he didn't see it alone. Why? I'm not sure. Odds are he can fill in that detail in the comments, but I went along with him (in his car, and that's important), got us in for free, and we plopped down in the auditorium to watch two stoners who lose their car and repeat lines ad nauseum.

 There were two other people in the auditorium: a pair of giggling teenage girls who thought Kutcher was "totally cute" or something like that. Really, they just giggled a lot - in fact, they giggled at everything in the movie, which probably would have driven the Cranpire to make some horribly offensive comment, had he ever heard them giggling. But he didn't, because Cranpire fell asleep.

 Memory tends to work in funny ways, so it retroactively makes sense this would happen - he subsequently slept through The Man Who Wasn't There and... something else. There were three movies that he went out to the theatre for and simply nodded off, but to me Dude, Where's My Car? was the most infamous.

 He may have made it through the trailers, he may not; it's hard to say because I didn't notice he'd nodded off until I was trying to salvage my disinterest in Danny Leiner and Phillip Stark's lame alien abduction / implied pot head comedy. I don't even remember IF there were jokes about getting high because as the inanity piled up, so too did my rage level at being talked into coming to see a movie I didn't want to see with someone who wasn't even awake to watch it. Worse still, I couldn't leave the auditorium with the giggling girls and the sleeping Cranpire because he drove and he drove a manual, which I couldn't drive. I was stuck there, trying to find any way to make a movie I already didn't like bearable before going to work and getting the hell beaten out of me.

 The kicker is that as the ending credits started rolling, like clockwork, Cranpire woke up. He missed the entire movie but had the impeccable timing to wake up just as the narrative itself was over and done with. Needless to say, I broke my usual rule of staying through the credits (a holdover from film classes in college) and he dropped me off at home so I could head to work.

 I've had no desire to watch the film since, and as the years pass, I remember less and less about the film. There was something about giant alien women and necklaces that grow their girlfriends' breasts, but what really sticks is the repeating of lines over and over again. "What does mine say?" "Dude. What does mine say?" "Sweet, what does MINE SAY?!" etc. As I understand it, Cranpire saw the film again sometime later with some other friends, and they loved it. It has been posited to me that I, in fact, saw the film with friends in Greensboro when I know that could not be the case. I saw Dude, Where's My Car? once. That's it, and that's what it's going to be. I give a lot of movies second (and third and fourth) chances, but not this one. It's not up for revisiting any time soon, and probably never.





 * Yes, this may sound contradictory to a prior Adventure in Projectioneering, but believe me when I say that as busy as I was juggling sixteen screens, it was nothing compared to five hours of non-stop boxes hurling into a truck from Monday to Friday. I wrecked both of my ankles, my left knee, and my back during the year-and-a-half I worked at said shipping company.