Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)

Amazon Prime's newest tearjerker begins with the line above, and well... they certainly did not lie. The film has a simple plot: a terminally ill man (John Cho) and his teenage daughter (Mia Isaac) road trip from California to New Orleans for his 20th college reunion. While there, he hopes he can reunite his daughter with the mother who left them. A perfectly straightforward story for a simple yet effective film.

The film's two main stars are an Asian man and a mixed teenager, so we already have a recipe for fantastic representation. John Cho is a Korean-American actor who is best known for his roles as Harold in the Harold & Kumar films, Sulu in Star Trek's reboot, and more recently, David in the hit thriller Searching. He has a wide range of both serious and silly roles, so he's always a delight to see. Mia Isaac, however, has made her debut with this very film! Mixed representation is surprisingly sparse and she seemed quite skilled even though this was her first work.

These two are honestly really the only important characters in the movie, however, we do see Wally (Mia Isaac)'s mother briefly who is African-American. There is also an interracial gay couple at the reunion who we get to know a bit but I loved them. Much of the rest of the cast is white but the few that aren't were nice to see.

There is no such thing as watching too many movies. I know that since my family and I have enacted social distancing, the amount of movies we’ve watched has skyrocketed. And if there can be a silver lining in the messiness and ugliness of the situation we’re all in right now, it’s that we have an opportunity to watch a lot of the movies that we’ve been meaning to watch and re-watch a lot of the movies that we’ve been meaning to re-watch. I know the other day I was looking through my Blu-ray collection and picked out the 1933 King Kong, a movie I’ve owned for about a year but never watched. It’s one of those movies I always said to myself, “Not now, I’ll watch it another time.” But because we’re stuck indoors with nothing to do, I finally said, “Screw it, it’s time to watch King Kong!” And I loved it!

With the popularity of my previous list (you can check it out here), I wanted to recommend another 19 movies for people to check out across Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, and Hulu. So here you are; go watch some movies! You can’t really go wrong with any of them.

1 | Apocalypse Now (1979) | Amazon Prime

Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola