Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Dude, Where's My Car?

Theme: Ashtray - Screeching Weasel

C'est magnifique.

It's obvious the makers of 2000's perfect time capsule Dude, Where's My Car? set out to make the dumbest movie of all time not just of the week, but of all time. The fact that almost any given movie released after, say, 2012 surpasses it in crayon chewage should scarcely be allowed to detract from their then-seemingly-epochal achievement. Ashton Kutcher (TV's Punk'd!) and Seann William Scott (The Dukes of Hazzard) star as Jesse and Chester (or vice versa), two stoner layabouts one solitary IQ point above the maximum threshold for mandatory helmet allocation or admittance to a Zack Snyder flick.

"MmmDUHHHRrr" - these dudes.

Waking one day after a blurry and forgotten night of excitement, intrigue and illicit substances, our MENSA benchwarmers find that, let's say, Jesse's car is missing, prompting him to utter the titular phrase, to which, let's say, Chester replies "where's your car, dude?" This exchange goes on for a few minutes, and it ain't the last.

Pictures you can hear, exhibit A.

The rest of the movie ostensibly concerns itself with our intrepid breakfast eaters trying to unravel the mystery of what wild and whacky goings-on transpired during their unremembered night of rampage, but nothing like a coherent timeline with causal linkages between beats ever materialises, no doubt to your immeasurable consternation. At some point, we and they learn, they got tattoos, stumbled across a sci-fi quest for the mysterious continuum transfunctioner, and let's say Jesse got it on with Kristy Swanson's character, cleverly named Kristy Boner, which the especially observant viewer may notice is a colloquial term for an hardon.

She doesn't wear this all movie, which I feel was an oversight.

This leads to a series of run-ins with our Swan Swan's bf, who is an hilariously one-dimensional bully with the memorable catchphrase "stoner bashin' time", whom Kristy cannot stand but is dating for some reason. The reason is that she can leave him at the end of the movie. This sort of writing by reverse-engineering is so characteristic of Hollywood slop that it works wonderfully as parody, and so the writers cannot help but undermine their aspiration to be dumb, because the whole film works that way: as a satire of actual movie conventions it's more over the target than Scream, Airplane! or the like. The continuum transfunctioner is a parody of the Hitchcockian MacGuffin, Kristy Boner is a parody of on-the-nose symbolic naming in pretentious scripts, her OTT bad jock boyfriend a parody of The Karate Kid, and Jesse and Chester themselves a parody of stoner buddy duos like Bill and Ted, Jay and Silent Bob, and Merry and Pippin.

I can't believe that hack Jackson omitted their SoCal accents and van with Frank Frazetta's Silver Warrior painted on the side. Respect the source material, fatass!

But we need not even bother to appreciate Dude for this inadvertent (or, perhaps, semi-advertent) hidden depth; for Dude reveals the secret wisdom that dumb humour will always make us actually laugh more than smart humour. Time and again in life I've cracked myself up to the point of tears looking at random people and imagining just going up to them and going "MnnNHUURRRRr".

The retard was me all along.