Fishing with Gandhi

This is one of the funniest character comedies I've ever seen. It's obviously a low-budget film with minimal plot but offers original humor you just can't find in Hollywood movies. The Reichmuth brothers especially are brilliant, portraying central California's unique brand of yokel. Meanwhile, the San Francisco based characters resonate perfectly, using humor to target the neuroses of post-collegiate city life.

I saw it at a San Francisco film festival, and the place was breaking up. See it if you can find it.

If you're the sort of person who thinks of the WWF as soap opera for rednecks, or who finds the esteem with which Nascar is held by a certain segment of the population to be mildly amusing, you might love this movie. Imagine Beavis and Butthead as young adults, except that their cultural horizons have been formed by monster truck pulls, hoedowns, the timeless art of Pit Bull breeding, pickup trucks, corndogs, chewing tobacco, and you have an incomplete, but somewhat descriptive, portrait of Roy and Gill, the two main characters of this film. They're such stupid but affable good old boys.

Gill and Roy pick up a hitchhiker in their `brand new' (it's several years old, but to Roy and Gill, it's `brand new') Toyota pickup. The truck overheats every 20 miles or so, which gives the three time to get acquainted. The hitchhiker is longhaired hippie type who's returning from his mother's wedding. Roy and Gill think he's `touched in the head' at first, because he doesn't talk much (Roy and Gill talk completely hilarious rubbish non-stop); but they bond with him when they learn that the hitchhiker is returning from a wedding where his mother married his uncle. Roy and Gill immediately connect with the man, warmly offering him a corndog; and, instead of referring to him as `Led Zeppelin,' address him by his first name. It's a touching moment.

The unsuspecting hitchhiker undergoes a personal transformation as he travels with Roy and Gill. It's so heartwarming to watch. Why, at the outset, he has about as much force of personality as a mouse fart. By the end, he can mess with a person's head along with the best of them. His neck is much redder than it was at the outset, which, in this context, it a very good thing. And he has a gun.

I like this movie so much, I plan to buy it. It bent me sideways several times from sheer uncontrollable laughter, forcing me to rewind for lines I had missed.

This is laugh out loud funny. It is Sling Blade meets Dumb and Dumber, think about that for awhile. The twins in this movie are incredible and their subjects of conversation are beyond belief. Of course, this is a rather low budget film and sometimes the audio is less than perfect, which is sad, because you really want to hear all of the brilliant lines being spoken. This movie details the adventures of Dan who is returning from Oregon, where he has just attended a wedding, his mother marrying his uncle. Dan is given a ride back to California by two brothers that are, let's just say, "touched." The rest is for you to enjoy. This is not rocket science, just good fun.

This movie is extremely funny. Don't listen to the people saying it's not. The movie isn't as hard to understand as people are saying, you just have to pay attention and turn the sound way up. But it's worth it. The thing that some people don't appreciate is that you're just thrown into the dialogue of Roy and Gil like being dropped on a desert island and you have to figure out where you are. When you listen to them, sure they're Rednecks and extremely stupid, but they have a certain quality. I mean, they are out there in existence getting by just like the rest of us, so who's to say that they're hopeless or anything. They have their own logic, it just takes a while to understand that because they say such ridiculous things that serve as proof that in a strictly booksmart sense, they're probably on about the second or third grade level. But don't feel sorry for them. As for the rest of the cast, they're equally brilliant. Giles and Stephen are great at getting on each others nerves, and you can see when Dano finally gets home that the best dynamic for them is the three man. Chris Culdoon is similarly a stroke of genius. Anyone who appreciates movies driven by interesting and humorous dialogue instead of big budget effects and inane and predictable dialogue and stories won't be disappointed.

I saw the trailer for this movie and thought it would be hilarious, but BOY was I disappointed. I can see how it was SUPPOSED to be funny, but the entire plot was about how two incredibly stupid redneck brothers saw the world and tormented a poor hitch hiker who was returning from his mother's wedding to his uncle, only 6 months after his father had died. Maybe I would have "gotten it" a little better if the sound was consistent, but the whole thing to me sounded like a bunch of nonsensical redneck grumbling. What a waste of a film.