Fishing with Gandhi

Fishing With Ghandi is one of those movies that you can quote every line with you friends and watch over and over again. Cow Monkey is their latest movie. Please check out the site royandgil.com and order your VHS tape of Cow Monkey or DVD of Fishing With Ghandi.

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.

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.

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.

In spite of its rather poor sound quality, this is one of the funniest films i've seen (~45 times). Borrowing some character and plot elements from Hamlet, and adding a few of its own, Fishing With Gandhi explores the farcical reality of coming to grips with grief and the failures of language in dealing with difficult emotions. The dialogue is intense and often outrageously funny (note, for example, the twins' memorable discussion of "electrical heart explosions"), and the characterizations weirdly familiar. Granted, due to the poor sound quality it took me ~10 viewings to figure out exactly what was going on - but that's really part of the joy of this film: every viewing offers new discoveries, most of them hysterical.