I saw a couple of 3D movies over the course of my weekend, and I’m coming to the conclusion that they need to reduce the markup. It’s not that I have the thing where it looks bad to me that so many people seem to have, it looks fine. But the thing is… it looks fine. It looks normal. I am perhaps jaded? But I sometimes have to pause and remember that what I’m watching is actually 3D, except for the times when they are going out of their way to make it obvious. On the bright side(?), the latest Harold & Kumar sequel went so far out of its way that it might have come all the way around to accidental 3D hyperbole.

As far as the flick itself, you know what you expect from the boys at this point, I reckon. But, in case, here is what you should expect: Cheech & Chong for the new millennium, complete with gratuitous T&A, more drug use than you can shake a stick at, random violence, and an outsized version of Neil Patrick Harris. And of course we get all of these things in abundance, plus they… well, they don’t learn the true meaning of Christmas, but they do learn a valuable lesson about friendship, family, and responsibility. Honestly, the presentation is a lot better than that sounds, but then again, it would be. The people behind this movie grew up with afterschool specials, of course they’re going to subvert them in entertaining ways!

As far as the Christmas theme? It’s still not as good as National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, because, how? But it’s the only other Christmas-themed entry in an ongoing series of movies that I would bother to recommend to people. Probably because of how irrelevant Christmas-as-a-theme really was in the scheme of things; it was setting, at best. So no worries on that account. And anyway, there’s a WaffleBot, which would be worth the rest of the movie all by itself, probably even if it had felt cloyingly Christmasy.