Rating: *** 1/2 [3.5 stars out of 4]
Idaho outcasts make a statement in this offbeat comedy.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Napoleon Dynamite.
He is a student at Preston High School in Preston, Idaho. His interests include drawing, dancing, martial arts and jumping ramps on his bicycle. When something strikes his fancy, he proclaims, "Sweet!" And, though he is frequently picked on by bullies and irritated by his home life, he exudes an odd optimism that inspires those around him.
In short, he is one of the most original movie characters I have seen this year, and makes the low-budget movie that bears his name, "Napoleon Dynamite," a goofy charmer.
Napoleon (played by Jon Heder, who is set to graduate from Brigham Young University in August) lives with his energetic grandma (Sandy Martin) and his older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who spends hours a day "chatting with hot babes online." When Grandma is injured in a dune-buggy accident, Napoleon's obnoxious Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a preening door-to-door salesman who still relives his high-school football glory, moves in.
More annoyances await Napoleon at school, where the jocks pick on him and the popular girls, notably the perky Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff), studiously ignore him. Napoleon makes a few friends among his fellow outcasts -- like Deb (Tina Majorino), who earns money taking Glamour Shots around town, and Pedro (Efren Ramirez), an introverted Mexican-American who, with Napoleon's support, runs for student-body president against Summer.
Director (and Heder's BYU classmate) Jared Hess makes the most of his indie-film limitations. He brings a sharp look and impeccable comic timing to the low-budget production, and smartly sprinkles enough familiar faces (like Dietrich Bader, from "The Drew Carey Show," as a martial-arts instructor) in among the unknowns.
Hess co-wrote the script with his wife Jerusha (who, in a further sign of the movie's do-it-yourself vibe, also is the costume designer), and based these characters on his siblings and friends growing up in Preston. This helps explain why even the film's oddest moments -- like Rico's experiments with a mail-order time machine, or the school's Helping Hands team performing a sign-language version of "The Rose" -- come off as spookily authentic.
Hess has an affinity for his oddball outcasts, and understands they are quite happy being who they are. In a more conventional movie, Napoleon would blossom out of his nerdy shell, shed the moonboots and straighten out his permed hair. But Hess and Heder allow Napoleon to remain his geeky self from beginning to end, a guy who -- like his movie -- dares to be different and succeeds.
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 out of 4 stars]
Quirkiness and goofiness can carry "Napoleon Dynamite" only so far. Once you get past that, there's not a whole lot more to the film.
This is basically a collection of hit-and-miss skits that are stumbling around in search of a story line. Not that you really expect more than that from a comedy, but this one needs something.
Still, there's no denying "Dynamite's" unique voice. To simply write it off as simply a Generation-Y "Revenge of the Nerds" would be unfair. And when it's funny, it's genuinely funny.
Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is a gawky high schooler in Preston, Idaho. He's not popular at school, and his home life isn't much better, as he's constantly feuding with his older and possibly even more pathetic brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell).
Things gets worse when their grandmother and caretaker (Sandy Martin) is injured in an ATV accident. While she's hospitalized, their creepy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) comes to stay with them. He also involves Kip in one get-rich scheme after another (including trying to sell an herbal breast-enhancement formula).
In the meantime, Napoleon befriends a pair of fellow outcast students: Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and would-be fashion photographer Deb (Tina Majorino).
As they worry about the big dance, Napoleon encourages Pedro to run for school president, which pits him against the most popular student in school (Haylie Duff, older sister of Hilary).
All of which probably makes the plot sound more coherent than it is.
This is an amiable but rambling film, which owes quite a bit -- both in style and deadpan humor -- to Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers.
"Dynamite" isn't as strong or as emotionally resonant as those films, and there a lot of slow stretches and jokes that fall flat. Co-screenwriter/director Jared Hess probably needed an editor to help him weed out some of the ideas and to help shape the story a little bit better.
To his credit, he does make good use of his cast, which is made up mostly of newcomers and no-names. And though Heder's lead performance is a little self-aware at times, he does get the biggest laughs (especially his dance routine).
The more veteran performers are the ones who don't fare as well here. The usually amusing Diedrich Bader is painfully unfunny in a glorified cameo as a martial-arts instructor.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is rated PG for violence (rough-housing, bullying and some slapstick), some crude humor (including a flatulence gag) and scattered use of some creative profanity. Running time: 86 minutes.
Grade: A-
"Napoleon Dynamite" is a gloriously quirky, hysterically funny ode to rural dullness that is probably the fairest, most accurate film representation that Preston, Idaho, will ever get.
First-time director Jared Hess, who co-wrote with his wife Jerusha, lovingly mocks the denizens of his hometown, and of many other people's hometowns, through the muted, unenthusiastic characters who inhabit the film. This is a place where culture, fashion and mustaches stopped developing in the 1970s, with the exception of some girls' hairstyles, which managed to reach the mid-'80s. It's a town that viewers will identify as thoroughly dorky, while the residents themselves are oblivious to their gaucheness.
Fans of the Coen brothers ("Raising Arizona," "O Brother, Where Art Thou?") will recognize the sort of lovable oddballs here, chief among them being the title character (played by Jon Heder), a high school senior who draws fantasy creatures, fancies himself a nun-chuck expert, and generally behaves with unselfconscious individuality. Napoleon lives with his 30-year-old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), a pasty, ambitionless fellow who maintains a long-distance Internet relationship with a woman in Detroit. When their grandmother is injured in an ATV accident, their uncle Rico (Jon Gries) comes to stay, bringing his attachment to his high school football glory days (i.e., 1982) and a number of stupid get-rich-quick schemes with him.
Meanwhile, Napoleon makes friends with Pedro (Efren Ramirez), a new student from Mexico, helps him run for class president, and also attempts to find a date to The Big Dance. Apart from those minor threads, there is no plot to speak of; the narrative here is as insignificant as the town itself. This is a slice-of-life movie about a place where there is no life to slice.
And it's a complete joy to watch. Hess, expanding on his short film "Peluca," has created a wonderfully quaint, dull little town and a passel of entertaining characters to populate it. Heder, all droopy-eyed, slack-jawed and sleepy-sounding, is a riot as Napoleon, his faux-profanity and exasperated sigh earning laughs every time, along with his blissful unawareness of his own strangeness. (He knows he's a little different from most kids, but he has no idea the extent to which it goes.) I don't know what Heder will do with his career after this, but I'll be surprised if he ever creates a character as sharp as Napoleon Dynamite.
Every performer acts with deadpan perfection, including Aaron Ruell as Kip, Efren Ramirez as the indefatigable Pedro, and Jon Gries as the uber-loser Rico. The dialogue is funny, the timing dead on, the physical humor nicely executed. There are no life-altering conflicts, and very little learning, growing or hugging. It's one of the most agreeable, most likable films I've seen in a while. I noticed that even when I wasn't laughing, I was still smiling, happy just to be there.
Grade: A-
Sometimes an inside joke is a one-liner. And sometimes it takes the form of an entire movie. "Napoleon Dynamite," this year's surprise crowd-pleaser at the Sundance Film Festival, is a giant inside joke for those who know the peculiarities of rural Idaho.
The film's already a phenomenon, especially in Utah. 24-year-old director Jared Hess penned the script with his wife Jerusha; the two both studied film at Brigham Young University. The standards of that institution are apparent in "Napoleon Dynamite," which garnered national attention for being entertaining without including a single swearword.
The movie stars another former BYU student, John Heder, as Napoleon, a supremely geeky loner growing up in Preston, Idaho. Not much happens to Napoleon. He simply gets up, goes to school, and tries to make it through another day.
He lives with his brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), a 30-year-old deadbeat who spends roughly half his day "chatting with babes" on the internet. He also lives with his grandmother, who's recently been injured in an accident on the sand dunes. Due to grandma's condition, Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who normally resides in a van, comes to stay with Kip and Napoleon.
Kip's fine with the idea, and together Uncle Rico and Kip hatch a brilliant plan to sell various items door-to-door. Napoleon's peeved by the whole affair, especially at having to listen to Uncle Rico's regrets about not becoming a pro football player. Uncle Rico's also making it a lot harder for Napoleon to make and maintain relationships with various teenage love interests.
In the midst of all this, Napoleon becomes friends with Pedro (Efren Ramirez), who wants to run for class president against the most popular girl in school, Summer (Haylie Duff). With the help of an odd and insecure classmate named Deb (Tina Majorino), the three build a hilarious campaign against Summer.
"Napoleon Dynamite" doesn't go anywhere. But lack of a tangible storyline actually serves as a viable dramatic devise depicting the absolute nothingness of life in rural communities. Events can come in the form of a lame fist fight, a violent encounter with a cow, or a school dance. Nothing really ever happens, and that's the entire story of Napoleon's life.
Heder's deadpan performance as Napoleon is crucial to the success of the film. Very few could have played such a bleakly oblivious geek with such pizzazz--and also have the ability to perform a so-bad-it's-good-retro-dance scene.
If you get the inside joke of "Napoleon Dynamite," you might consider this one of the funniest movies of the year. Ricks College t-shirts, FFA events, wood-paneled living rooms, ATV accidents at the sand dunes, trips to D.I.--it's all here, and it'll make you laugh yourself sick.
There's not a single uncomfortable or inappropriate moment in the film's entire running time. That in itself is a major victory against the typical Hollywood assumption that a film has to be offensive to be funny and/or entertaining.
Creating a convincing drama is easy. We1ve all experienced pain, loss and regret -- just get some decent actors to play it out on camera in a halfway honest way and wait for the awards to roll in. If you really want to cement your credibility, get a good cinematographer to film it so the audience will have nice pictures to look at while they1re absorbing the overwhelming emotion.
Comedy, on the other hand, is an endlessly difficult genre that sometimes makes curing cancer look easy. People tell me that I'm funny, but I don1t think I could ever string together material that would be strong enough to make people chuckle for 90 minutes. And that's not even mentioning the herculean task of making a comedy appeal to a broad audience. "Yes Dear" draws in tens of millions of viewers every week on CBS, but five seconds of basking in its sheer awfulness is enough to send me into convulsions. I thought Christopher Guest's "A Mighty Wind" was easily one of the best movies of last year, a notion that causes some of my best friends to furrow their brows and stare at me in quiet confusion.
The fact of the matter is that no critic can tell you what is or isn1t funny because our senses of humor are so incredibly different. We can witness this undeniable truth in the case of "Napoleon Dynamite," the debut film by Jared Hess, which has inexplicably emerged from the arthouse to invade multiplexes. Hess basically creates about a dozen or so bizarre characters and puts them in situations where they1ll give perfect recitations of perfect lines that aren1t so much quotable in print as they are in person. This is due to the dynamic physicality the actors give their roles, especially Jon Heder as the unicorn-sketching, gatorade-guzzling, perpetually squinting antihero of the title. He films them in a retro minimalism that recalls Wes Anderson without overtly ripping him off.
I thought it was hilarious. So did most of the audience. So did Ty Burr of The Boston Globe, who called it "an inspired dead-end stunt that keeps delivering snarky laughs far longer than it has any right to." MaryAnn Johanson of Flick Philosopher heaped on the praise: 3[an] endlessly cheery film... highly intellectually involving." Roger Moore of The Orlando Sentinel simply awarded it the title of "the funniest film of the summer."
But others disagree. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times is the highest profile hater, remarking, "There is a kind of studied stupidity that sometimes passes as humor, and "Napoleon Dynamite" pushes it as far as it can go." Jeanne Aufmuth of Palo Alto Weekly opts for cheap provocation: "It mistakes insults for jests and racism for narrative guile." Todd McCarthy of Variety writes an entire review about the film's condescending attitude and then, I guess, attempts to demonstrate true condescension: "There are lots of laughs for those who enjoy the sight of bottom dwellers doing stupid things that make them look even more idiotic."
But these potent potables are really just narcissistic salutes to the writers1 supposed wit. Every negative review I1ve read of "Napoleon Dynamite" forwards the view that the film is bad because Hess dislikes and mocks his characters, a ridiculous and naive assessment that sloppily disregards the film's storybook / utopian ending in which everyone ends up happy and, excepting that, inadvertantly casts Bergman, Kubrick and Dreyer as hacks because they weren1t always rapturously in love with their characters.
Forget all that, though. I1ll tell you what you need to know about "Napoleon Dynamite" to know whether or not you1ll like it. Did you like "Rushmore?" Now imagine if it had no depth and was just about making you laugh. Would you like that? If so, that movie is "Napoleon Dynamite." If not, watch "The Princess Diaries 2" or something.
Indie films have an obvious edge over studio projects: They are free to be the best roadside chili dog in Monterey rather than another focus-grouped, taste-feel-engineered McWhatever. The sense of liberty and joy is sometimes palpable and self-justifying, as it is in Jared Hess's Napoleon Dynamite, an Idaho wild one that thrusts us into a high school senior year like no other. Hess has the low-budget-comedy wastrel deadpan -- the one Jarmusch stole from Warhol, and Wes Anderson has made semi-mainstream--down to a science, and his dry pause-and-cut idiosyncrasies are Swiss-timed. But more than anything, the film is an epic, magisterially observed pastiche on all-American geekhood, flooring the competition with a petulant shove.
At the discomfiting core of this delightfully plotless space-out is the titular uber-nebbish (Jon Heder), cursed with a name only Elvis Costello could think up, a toothy pre-man voice that sounds like basset hounds humping, and a talent for essentially nothing at all. Napoleon is so outrageously awkward it's a wonder the jocks at Preston High (which Hess actually attended) don't just beat him to death; it might be the ne plus ultra of cataclysmic pubertal portraits. Beyond even the misaligned-joint body language and entropic curls, Napoleon's a perfectly conceived and executed battery of melodramatic harrumphs, bruised exhalations, defensive squints, clueless pronouncements, and explosively irate retorts. The image of him defiantly hurling a class-prez campaign button down the crowded school hallway earns a laugh days after you see it. Out-cretinizing even Heather Matarazzo's doormat in Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse and Wiley Wiggins's unschooled freshman in Dazed and Confused, Heder's Napoleon is such a fantastic creation you can't help seeing him as both a catastrophically extreme case and the common flailing nerd we all still shelter in our deepest memory banks.
Set in a vague '80s vapor, Napoleon Dynamite is richly inventive but spare--little is, finally, at stake. But the comic details are thick as a brick, most of them willfully absurd: the Idaho landscape of desert highways, Chicano gang cars, chicken farms, and llamas; Napoleon's older, even wimpier brother, Kip (the rather amazing Aaron Ruell), landing a girlfriend he's not aware is a man; the boys' unsavory Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) videotaping himself throwing touchdown passes. Napoleon himself tries to "score" with "babes," finagles a date to the prom (hyper-aware of cliché, Hess minimizes this humiliating set piece, and doesn't even capitalize on Napoleon impulsively mouthing a tobacco chaw and then swallowing it), and coordinates a student-body election run for his only friend, the new, slightly dim Mexican kid in town (Efren Ramirez). But the unlikely climactic triumph aside, Napoleon Dynamite is more concerned with texture and daffy non sequitur, down to the supremely kitschy Casio score by John Swihart.
Mention should be made of Tina Majorino (remember her, from When a Man Loves a Woman and Waterworld?), who as a quiet, misfitty teen entrepreneur wipes her dainty feet on her generation's better-known starlets. But the center of Hess's cyclone is Heder and his tetherball-playing monster teen, who is both the film's forbidding hero and its great object of derision. Unlike the Solondz film, Napoleon Dynamite exudes little sense of social horror; it struggles to maintain a sunny disposition despite the traumatic social meltdown we witness and the apparent fact that Napoleon is headed not for a tech college but for a long, dire career in food service. He's all too emblematic of too many Americans, and if Hess's movie weren't so funny, it'd be a tragedy.
PHOTO CAPTION:
His own private Idaho: Heder (center) (photo: Aaron Ruell)
I saw ND twice. Once at CineVegas (where both screenings were sold-out) and last night at a packed promotional screening. Audiences love this movie. So do I. Made for a reported $400,000, ND is going to be a huge money-maker.
High schooler Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) lives in Idaho with his fed-up grandmother and 32-year old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell). When his grandmother falls off her dune buggy and lands in the hospital, his Uncle Rico (Jon Greis) comes to babysit. Napoleon, who doesn1t look at people when they talk to him, keeps his eyes closed most of the time, and speaks in one-word sentences, is miserable at school. He gets beat up a lot. He also lives in a fantasy world where he has martial arts skills. Napoleon has fuzzy red hair, is tall, gawky, and wears big glasses.
Oh yeah, and his bottom lip hangs open. P. Diddy and Chelsea Clinton also have the "hanging lower lip" thing going. It's not a sophisticated look no matter how many diamond necklaces one wears. Napoleon's brother Kip spends hours online in chat rooms. He is having a "relationship" with a woman named LaFonda. He is slight of build, has thin hair, a weak moustache, and wears glasses.
We have all known young men like Napoleon and Kip. They know they are out of sync but can1t do a thing about it. I once knew a kid who was worse off then Napoleon: Home-schooled, he went to folk dancing camps with his parents and called them by their first names. A sweet teenager, he would always stand inappropriately too close to people. He also had really bad hair and wore glasses. He and his parents had a secret language.
Uncle Rico is a door-to-door salesman (with a bad wig) who groans about what could have happened to him in 1982, his best year. Dismissive of Napoleon, Uncle Rico enlists Kip to help him sell plastic containers. Uncle Rico's door-to-door sales brings him in contact with Napoleon's classmates. He is further ruining Napoleon's life.
Napoleon befriends a brand-new misfit, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), fresh from Mexico. Pedro is not crushed by the social limitations of Idaho high school. He decides to ask out the most popular girl in school, Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff) as well as a shy girl Napoleon likes, Deb (Tina Majorino). He also decides to run against Summer for class president. If Pedro wins, Napoleon wants to be his secret service bodyguard.
The casting is terrific with all the actors committed to their characters. What makes this film so charming is everything is true to the story: The clothes, the dialogue, and the frustration of the characters. I was totally behind Napoleon, Kip, Uncle Rico and Pedro. In fact, Pedro's self-confidence was uplifting. I never laughed at any of them, just laughed at how strong each character was under such crushing obstacles as social graces, attractiveness, and the need to have "skills."
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE
Fox Searchlight
Credits:
Director: Jared Hess
Writers: Jared Hess, Jerusha Hess
Producers: Jeremy Coon, Sean C. Covel, Chris Wyatt
Executive producer: Jeremy Coon, Jory Weitz
Director of photography: Munn Powell
Production designer: Cory Lorenzen
Music: John Swihart
Costume designer: Jerusha Hess
Editor: Jeremy Coon
Cast:
Napoleon Dynamite: Jon Heder
Uncle Rico: Jon Gries
Kip: Aaron Ruell
Pedro: Efren Ramirez
Deb: Tino Majorino
Rex: Diedrich Bader
Summer Wheatley: Halie Duff
Running time -- 86 minutes
No MPAA rating
Rating: * [1 star out of 4]
Emily Kennard and Haylie Duff in Napoleon DynamiteRidicule rears its ugly head in this dreary comedy that was a most unlikely hit at this year's Sundance Festival.
Preston, Idaho is the scene of the title character's miserable existence. Napoleon (Jon Heder) is the consummate nerd, a geek so un-chic that his own red-meat eating relatives can't stand the sight of him. They're no picnic either: a slow-witted grandma who's kickin' it off-road with her dirt bike; a sad-sack loser of an uncle who sells door-to-door whatchamacallits, and a cranky sib who comes to life in the sleazy privacy of Internet chat rooms.
Napoleon navigates the tricky travails of Preston High with a bitter stupidity that's positively grating. All the cliches are accounted for: the popular girl (Hilary Duff's little sis, Haylie) who turns Napoleon's advances down cold; a sizzling passion for the misunderstood art of tetherball; and equally cretinous buddy, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), who claws his way up from social pond scum, leaving Napoleon behind to wonder where it all went wrong. Zzzzzzz.
There's a fine line between humor and humiliation. Pedro's sad demeanor as he strives for romantic gusto and mounts a campaign for class president invites censure and scorn, not laughs. Election managed to sling its politically wicked bows and arrows with a dark edge that was both stylish and witty. Napoleon plays it ignominiously, mistaking insults for jests and racism for narrative guile.
Director Jared Hess' tone is mockingly mean-spirited, making it virtually impossible to care for his motley crew of misfits. Ugh.
Rating: PG-13 for mature themes and language. 1 hours, 26 minutes.
Grade: B+
Napoleon (Jon Heder) is the quintessential high school misfit. Gawky and slack-faced under a red afro and windowpane glasses, he runs in a squatting shuffle, whines every single utterance and punctuates his eternal disappointment with a sigh like a slow leak on a Mack truck. With a fantasy inner life and an outsized weirdo vibe in his day-to-day routine, Napoleon is constantly pantsed, wedgied and body-checked in the halls by the bullies and buttheads of his school.
He'd be a walking sight gag in any other film, but Jared Hess makes Napoleon a special kind of hero at home in his eccentricities.
He lives with his even more socially maladroit older brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), a borderline functional 32-year-old whose personal life is a schedule of Internet chat rooms. And he's raised by an extreme-sports grandmother in a shag-carpet-and-wood-panel home out of the "Brady Bunch" universe.
The nominal plot revolves around Napoleon's attraction to shy loner Deb (Tina Majorino) and efforts to help his friend and fellow social outcast, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), become class president. (Pedro's main qualification: He's the only kid in school with a mustache.) But the story is all in the character and off-balance personality of the film.
Imagine a John Hughes teen comedy remade by Jim Jarmusch and dropped into the town that time forgot. Hess doesn't deliver punchlines as much as a skewed perspective that finds humor in creative eccentricity. His poker-faced direction and the relentlessly blank performances of the high school cast give the screwy antics of the characters a deadpan, matter-of-fact absurdity.
The time-warp of the indeterminate era -- stray references to '80s pop culture collide with '90s technology, '70s thrift-store fashion and '60s garage-sale furniture -- only enhances the surreal austerity of his Preston, Idaho, setting.
A character study in personalities that defy classification, "Napoleon Dynamite" embraces its outcasts without compromising their cockeyed uniqueness. If you're sick of the gross-out gags and sex jokes of contemporary teen comedy, this defiant blast of idiosyncratic individuality just could be your tonic.
Rating: **** [4 out of 5 stars]
If one had to find a problem with teenage underdog movies, one of the most prominent ones would have to be that they always seem to want audiences to feel sympathy for the plight of their sad protagonists. In Napoleon Dynamite, even though the hero of the title (Jon Heder) is a four-eyed teenage misfit with no social skills and a truly frightening haircut - and he couldn1t care less. Napoleon Dynamite is confident about his ability to draw fantasy characters in the pages of his Trapper Keeper ("I'm pretty much the best at it") and isn1t afraid to voice his approval when something goes his way ("Sweet!") or get pissy when somebody asks him what he's doing that day ("Whatever I feel like doing, gosh!"). He's a hero for the ages; it's just not entirely clear what age.
Napoleon Dynamite isn1t much of a film, when you break it down outside the theater, when the cheers have died away and you1re left with the nagging question: But what was it about? Napoleon attends high school in a small Idaho town, living with his much older but just as dweeby brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell) and his grandmother who, at the start of the film, has just landed herself in the hospital after a four-wheeler accident. This precipitates sleazoid Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), with his dreams of lost football glory and ideas about door-to-door sales, moving into the house to watch the boys and generally make them feel crappy about themselves. There's the barest hint of a storyline about Napoleon getting a crush on a girl from his class, Deb (Tina Majorino), but that's really only there to give him somebody to dance with at the prom. Slightly better is Napoleon's friendship with the nearly-mute Pedro (Efren Ramierez), the new kid in school, and the battle they wage against the cool clique in order to win Pedro the school presidency. Oh, and there's a big joke about tater tots - Election it ain1t.
At first, Hess's script and direction feel crassly manufactured, even though it's likely that the whole thing is intensely personal. Moving so episodically from one set-piece to the next (Napoleon plays solo tetherball, hilariously; Napoleon tells a convincing story about hunting wolverines in Alaska for the summer; and so on), Napoleon Dynamite seems like an ode to Bottle Rocket-era Wes Anderson spliced with some rougher DNA from a Todd Solondz, only with little to no point. The setting is ostensibly contemporary, but the screen is loaded with nostalgic Gen-X in-jokes: throwing stars, friendship bracelets, and even a montage set to the theme from The A-Team. Is it all there just to get a condescending laugh or is Hess actually presenting a portrayal of a small town lost in time? The film moves ahead so haltingly that one has plenty of time to contemplate such things.
But, to return to an earlier point, Napoleon is nobody's victim. Yes, jocks might shove him into his locker and his spasmodic tetherball moves won1t win him the love of the school princess, Summer (played with sweet evil relish by Hilary Duff's sister Haylie); but what does that matter when a guy like him has such sweet nunchucks skills? The film's a raggedy piece of work, to be sure, but one that creeps up on you, and by the end of it all, when Napoleon busts out some awesome dance moves to help out a friend in need, he's pretty much guaranteed to win over the geek inside most of us. We1re only human, after all.
Rating: *** [3 out of 4 stars]
EXCERPT: "Leaves viewers with a welcome and all too rare feeling of movie-induced giddiness..."
Grade: A
This comedy was released on June 23. Currently becoming a teen cult phenomenon, the independent film, written and directed by 24-year-old Jared Hess, is gaining popularity week after week.
Even though it isn't showing in DeSoto County, I finally relented and crossed the state line to see what all the buzz is. On a Sunday afternoon, I was surprised to see the theater packed.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is a droll film about a Preston, Idaho, teenager's life.
Wearing nylon boots, Elvis- style glasses, a 'fro, and a blase look, Napoleon drifts through his bizarre family's antics such as granny's dune buggy accident, his brother's biracial marriage and the visit of his weird uncle, who still wishes it was 1982.
The other half of his life is mainly taken up by high school. There, he befriends a new Hispanic student, campaigns for a friend running for class president, plays solitary tether ball, draws "ligers," constantly gets slammed into lockers and is known as a geek.
In fact, Napoleon is so geeky, that even the nerds don't really co-exist with him.
The first thing I liked about this movie is that it wasn't trying to be something it's not. It's a fresh, down-to-Earth movie that tells Napoleon's life story realistically. Napoleon isn't your everyday dork trying to fit in and be cool.
Instead, he is happy being himself, not caring what other people think. He is direct and honest. Sometimes, he is even a bit blunt, lacking tactfulness.
Yet, you can't help but like him. From his tater tot-toting pockets to his magic animal drawings, Napoleon is realistically quirky. Somehow, he reminds us of how we all live outside of society's norms. He makes us remember all the uncomfortable moments in our lives when we stood alone.
For instance, Kip, his brother, meets a lady in a chat room. She comes to visit. Eventually, they marry each other. While society may frown upon such an inter-racial marriage, Napoleon declares how "lucky" his brother is. He sees his brother's happiness, not the racial issue.
Napoleon doesn't get stressed out over what society values or the exploits of his family. He just goes on living his own life and doing what he believes is best. Unlike some teens, Napoleon is loyal to his few friends. When the entire school student body makes such loyalty uncomfortable, Napoleon never waivers or disowns his friends.
This geek has admirable traits.
Most of all, it's just an entertaining film. It doesn't try to make a profound statement. It doesn't try to glitter or polish high school life.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is exploding box office records with a consistent, steady following. I'm giving it an A for blowing me away with its novelty. And, I'll probably be in line next week to see it again.
Hallie Woodward is a student at Olive Branch High School. Her grading system: A = Awesome, excellent; B = Better than average; D = Desperately staring at exit; F = Flunked, hoping for fire alarm to go off.
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 5]
Like a series of skits strung together into a feature film, Napoleon Dynamite is fitfully funny but ultimately hollow. Director and co-writer Jared Hess crafts a memorable figure in the title character (Jon Heder), a sort of nerd version of Beavis and/or Butt-head, who spends his time in rural Preston, Idaho, playing tetherball, feeding his grandmother's llama and hanging out with laconic best friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez).
Without anything resembling a plot, Hess simply surrounds the awkward, dim Napoleon with a cast of equally bizarre characters, and presents bits in what most closely resembles a three-panel comic strip: Napoleon's fey brother (Aaron Ruell) finds love on the Internet; Pedro runs for class president; Napoleon's oily uncle Rico (Jon Gries) tries to use a time machine to head back to 1982 and relive his high-school-football glory days.
The bits are hit-and-miss, though the funny ones are often very funny. Hess' characters, as distinctive as they can be, rarely go beyond caricature. His attention to detail has brought him comparisons to Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums), and while he shares Anderson's emphasis of the clever over the insightful, ultimately Hess' film is just about the gags, and those are mostly enough.
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 4]
Napoleon Dynamite should be required therapy for anyone with a self-image problem. No matter how much of a loser a person believes himself to be, he couldn't possibly be in worse shape than the protagonist of Jared Hess' wickedly funny high school comedy. With a low-key sense of humor and without the slightest whiff of sentimentality, Hess delivers a film about geeks that makes Revenge of the Nerds look like the Hollywood tripe that it is. Napoleon Dynamite isn't about a cute, cuddly, inoffensive movie nerd; the main character is morose, antisocial, and has a working understanding of what happened in Columbine. There's plenty of humor in the film, but the movie is often a little uncomfortable to watch, and Napoleon is not an easy guy to like. Rooting for him takes effort.
One of the reasons why Napoleon Dynamite works is because of its tone. Hess and his actors underplay everything. Similarities to the work of Wes Anderson may be coincidental, but they are present. In many ways, the comedy is funny because the actors aren't playing the material for laughs. These individuals believe in their characters, and that conviction comes across. And if Napoleon and his friends aren't entirely likeable, who says they have to be? As we're laughing at these characters, we're warming up to them.
John Heder plays Napoleon like a teenager who doesn't quite fit into his long, lanky body. The performance is dead-on. I don't know if Heder was a nerd in real life, but he certainly makes us believe. He subsists on a farm with his Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a 30-something ex-jock who lives in the past, and his freaky older brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), who spends most of his waking hours in Internet chat rooms. Despite looking like he's old enough to have completed college, Napoleon is still in high school, where he occupies the lowest rung of the social pecking order (getting slammed into a locker by someone bigger and more self-assured is a daily occurrence). Napoleon's only friend is Pedro (Efren Ramirez), the "new kid." Napoleon doesn't have a girlfriend, but he has his eye on Deb (Tina Majorino) - until Pedro beats him to the punch by asking her to the upcoming dance. So Napoleon has to settle for going with the daughter of one of his uncle's clients.
Not much happens during the course of Napoleon Dynamite. This is essentially a meet-and-greet movie, where we spend about 85 minutes getting to know the smart, sullen, socially maladjusted Napoleon. The biggest events are the dance and the school election, in which Napoleon becomes Pedro's campaign manager. And, as in all movies about losers, there's a chance for a measure of redemption, and Napoleon Dynamite shows its good heart by allowing for a ray of hope at the end. Director Hess (who wrote the film with his wife, Jerusha) has a dry wit and is unconcerned about mocking his characters, but he doesn't let the end credits come without showing them some affection. So, although Napoleon Dynamite may not be the most immediately endearing protagonist to grace the silver screen this summer, there's something memorable about him and the motion picture that bears his name.
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 4]
Seething with teen-angst irritability and an obstinate blind ignorance to just how much of an outcast he is, Napoleon Dynamite may be the biggest dork in the history of high school movies.
Completely lacking in social graces, the lanky, slack-jawed, sleepy-eyed, bed-headed and shoulder-hunched titular anti-hero of this off-kilter comedy (played with unabashed geek gusto by newcomer Jon Heder) can't even manage to speak to a girl without putting his foot in his mouth. But it isn't nerves that bring him down -- it's nerve, as in "you've got a lot of nerve, pal."
"I see your drinking one-percent milk. Is that 'cause you think you're fat?" is his idea of an opening line to a very disinterested girl in the cafeteria of his lifelessly rural-edge-of-suburbia Idaho high school. "You're not. You could be drinking whole."
His unwieldy attempts at forging friendships aren't helped any by the fact that he's decked out in -- from bottom to top -- moon boots (on a perfectly clement fall day), parachute pants with zipper-pouch pockets (where he keeps leftover tater tots from hot lunch), a shrunken sky-blue T-shirt emblazoned with a silk screen of galloping horses, thick and heavy 1970s eyeglasses, and a shock of unruly red curls that he tries in vain to part with a comb.
"Napoleon Dynamite" captures, to hilarious extremes, all the uncomfortable-in-your-own-skin humiliation of teen dorkdom through a character seemingly oblivious to it all as he helps his one friend -- a new kid named Pedro (Efren Ramirez) whose Mexican background has ill-prepared him for life in an Idaho high school -- run for class president against the head cheerleader (Haylie Duff, big sister of Hilary "Lizzie McGuire" Duff).
But the plot is not the film's source of humor; it's the vivid awkwardness of its incidentals.
It's the fact that jocks routinely -- even absent-mindedly -- shove Napoleon into a locker every time they walk past him. It's the fact that, in his Dungeons-and-Dragons fantasy of life, Napoleon is convinced girls don't like him because "I don't have any skills" like bow hunting. Of course, he also claims, "This one gang wanted me to join because I'm pretty good with a long pike."
It's the fact that Napoleon lives with 1) an uncle (Jon Gries) psychotically obsessed with door-to-door get-rich-quick schemes and his own high school days as a failed quarterback, and 2) an arrogant wimp of a 30-ish brother (Aaron Ruell), who is an even bigger geek than Napoleon. And it's the fact that the brother fancies himself a ladies' man because he spends all day in internet dating rooms.
That detail of technology is an inexplicable anomaly since the story otherwise appears to take place in the 1980s -- in all its hair-crimped, puffy-sleeved, "Glamour Shots" and digital-watches anti-glory. And while every scene of the film is thick with atmospheric minutiae and ironic wit, director Jared Hess (who co-wrote with his wife Jerusha) makes a more fundamental slip in the last act, when "Napoleon Dynamite" veers clumsily toward an unfortunately conventional, gift-wrapped ending of geek triumph that is out of character for the nerdy honesty of the film.
Even so, Napoleon stays true to himself in all his clueless, unjustified superciliousness -- and thus the uncomfortable laughs keep coming. Unless you ran with the cool crowd in high school, I can all but guarantee this film will make you smile.
| Bonus material added: "Napoleon Dynamite" has added a five-minute "epilogue" for its wide release on Friday. The footage was shot last month and includes a peek into the future of Napoleon and his friends. The film has grossed $4 million since its limited release June 11. |
Rating: **** [4 stars out of 5]
Here's the high school film for the rest of us - everyone who wasn't student body president, captain of the football team, class valedictorian or prom queen.
"Napoleon Dynamite," a darling this year at the Sundance Film Festival, is a wonderfully quirky revenge-of-the-nerd comedy with an amazing performance by Jon Heder as the awesomely named title character.
Sadly, that's the only thing awesome about Napoleon, the biggest loser in Preston, Idaho. He lives with his grandmother and his wimpy, brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), 32, who chats online all day with the babes. His Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) can't get over losing the state football title game 20 years ago.
Napoleon's mouth hangs open, his stare vacant, until he blurts out nonsense, such as this summer vacation summary: "I spent it with my uncle in Alaska hunting wolverines!" Or this pick-up line: "I see you're drinking 1 percent milk. Is that because you think you're fat? Because you're not. You could probably be drinking whole milk."
His vocabulary is chock-full of "gosh!" "dang!" and "idiot," not to mention these massive sighs that render his whole body limp. Then there's this gangly misfit's huge red afro, his moon boots and his choice "skills," which sadly fail to impress the chicks.
You'll cringe and feel sorry for Napoleon, who's one of the best movie characters in a long time. But watching him try to survive high school, make friends with a girl (Tina Majorino) and get his friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez) elected student body president is an absolute joy.
Mix in flying steak, a pet llama named Tina, a time machine and the Happy Hands Club and you have a wacky, weird high school film that John Waters and the Coen brothers could have co-directed.
Soo-weeet.
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 stars out of 4]
Just this past month, Turner Classic Movies presented a 19-film salute to the legendary Saul Bass, the man who almost single-handedly turned opening-credit sequences into an art form. Not one to merely throw blocky letters onto the screen, Bass would create elaborate, visually arresting intros that often were as entertaining as the movies that followed them (among his many credits were Psycho, West Side Story and The Age of Innocence). Decades after Bass helped jumpstart this celluloid innovation, it's gratifying to know that many filmmakers are still pouring resources and imagination into their respective pictures' credits: One look at the opening salvo of, say, Spider-Man 2 shows that this sub-medium is alive and well.
I suspect that Bass (who passed away in 1996) would have loved the opening credits in Napoleon Dynamite. Director Jared Hess presents the names of the cast and crew members either on plates of food or on common items that (as we soon discover) are used by the film's sad sack protagonist. One person's name is spelled out with condiments on a hamburger; another has his scrawled on a scrap of lined notebook paper; yet another can be spotted on the side of a Chapstick. It's a memorable opener, one of the best I've seen recently, yet it also hints at the problem that rests at the off-center of Napoleon Dynamite: What sort of movie is this anyway? The intro suggests a frothy comedy; the film that follows has many funny moments but ultimately feels more like an abject lesson in utter humiliation.
The name Napoleon Dynamite comes courtesy of rocker Elvis Costello, though the treatment of the character frequently owes more to Lou Costello. A sucker who never gets an even break, Napoleon (Jon Heder) is a case study in high school geekiness: A beanpole with an unruly nest of curly red hair (you suspect birds would set up shop there if the guy would ever stop moving), the societal misfit stumbles around with eyes half-shut and mouth half-open, the apparent bastard child of Carrot Top and Shelley Duvall. When he isn't getting slammed into his locker by the jocks, he whiles away the days at his Idaho high school playing tetherball with himself.
At home, the situation is no less gloomy. He and his 32-year-old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), an even bigger nerd who spends hours on the Internet chatting with "babes," live with their grandmother (Sandy Martin) and her pet llama. Once Grandma gets injured while jumping a sand dune on her ATV, the boys have to put up with the presence of their Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a lunkhead who constantly rhapsodizes about the big game against State back in 1982. But at least Napoleon has finally made a couple of friends who can take his mind off those who bother him (it's rare when he's not calling someone "Idiot!"). Pedro (Efren Ramirez) is the new kid in town, a soft-spoken, slow-witted Mexican immigrant who decides to run for Student Body President against a popular blonde cheerleader (Haylie Duff, Hilary's older sister). And Deb (Tina Majorino) is a sweet, shy kid who's trying to raise money for college by selling homemade keychains and offering glamour shot sessions.
Napoleon Dynamite is an odd little movie that often seems as unsure of itself as its protagonist. Napoleon himself isn't exactly ingratiating, and it's impossible to tell whether Hess and his co-writer (and wife) Jerusha Hess mean for us to laugh with him or at him. If it's the latter, then how exactly are we, the audience members, any different than the bullies who torment him for the duration of the movie? It's one thing to guffaw at a character whose ridiculousness invites affectionate ribbing (for example, Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau), but it's quite another to ask us to chuckle at a person so realistically depicted that he could easily have been attending our own high school (where I suspect most of us would have given him a wide berth as well). Clumsy as they were, even John Hughes' string of teen flicks revealed sympathy for their dorky protagonists, a measure of empathic understanding noticeably absent in this film.
If Hess' goal was to render an accurate portrait of the inner circles of high school hell, his movie is too fanciful to put over that notion. Unlike Todd Solondz's acidic Welcome to the Dollhouse, rife with stinging perceptions, Napoleon Dynamite ends up diluting its potency with some unbelievable side trips. Kip and Uncle Rico are clearly morons, but would they really spend good money to buy a "time machine" on eBay? (This culminates with a silly gag involving injured genitalia.) Would someone with as little to offer as the vapid and juvenile Kip really end up with a successful online match? And the story strand involving Pedro's bid for school office leads to a selfless act on Napoleon's part that unites the entire student body behind him -- ummm, in what universe?
Still, cruel or not, there's no denying that the movie is frequently funny, especially when Napoleon is having to cope with the imbecilic behavior of his brother and their uncle. Tina Majorino, a 90s child actress (Waterworld, Andre) who took off several years to concentrate on school, returns to the big screen with a delicate portrayal, providing the film with its sole semblance of genuine compassion. And as the gangly lead, newcomer Jon Heder delivers a fearless performance that's almost breathtaking in its wormy detail -- regardless of our reservations about the character, Heder nails the dude's idiosyncrasies with frightening precision. Now whether this pays off in multiple film offers remains to be seen: The pitfalls of typecasting combined with the actor's own unorthodox appearance may limit his appeal. But if there's a Revenge of the Nerds remake on the horizon, he's their man.
Rating: **** [4 stars out of 5]
Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is an oddball in Preston, Idaho, and he doesn't care. He lives in his own private world of phantasmagorical creatures (he sketches a "liger," which is a cross between a lion and a tiger) and concentrates on perfecting his tether-ball game. Some very interesting films have been made over the years about idiosyncratic teenagers, and this one is both wacky and endearing. It was a hit at the Sundance Festival and named Best Feature Film at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. Director Jared Hess has come up with a story that challenges us to put ourselves in his characters' skins as we retread our ways down those high school corridors where pain and humiliation are only a step a way.
Napoleon lives with his grandmother, who secretly has a boyfriend and rides her ATV on the sand dunes. When she is injured in a spill, Napoleon's Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) comes to look after him and his 32-year-old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who spends most of his time in a chat room with Lafawnduh (Shondrella Avery), his soulmate. Napoleon doesn't get along with Rico, who is constantly coming up with new schemes to get rich, such as selling herbal breast enhancements. He lives in a twilight zone of 1982 when he was denied the chance to become an all-star quarterback just when his team needed him most. No wonder he purchases a mail-order time machine and winces when it doesn't work.
Feeling isolated at home, Napoleon makes friends with Pedro (Efren Ramirez), a Mexican newcomer to the town. The two of them are shunned by everyone and yet they persist in outrageous dreams. Pedro wants to take Summer Wheatly (Haylie Duff), the school's most popular and attractive girl, to the prom but is turned down abruptly. Eventually, he decides to run for class president against her. Her campaign slogan is: "With me, it will be summer all year round."
Although Napoleon is attracted to Deb (Tina Majorino), a shy girl who is the town photographer, they have a hard time connecting. They are heart people who realize they are strange but are willing to live with it no matter what the consequences. Deb is the sweetest teenager in town always doing her best to make others look good.
Jared Hess wrote the offbeat screenplay for Napoleon Dynamite with his wife Jerusha. They have created a colorful and cockeyed character in Napoleon with his overbite, large glasses, frizzy red hair, irritation with those who bug him, and frequent temper tantrums. He gets his kicks by riding his bike, performing sing-alongs with the Happy Hands Club, and cow judging with the Future Farmers of America. Near the end of the film, Napoleon gets a chance to strut his stuff, and it is well worth the wait to see him shine on his own terms.
Grade: C-
You could probably pull any 20 minutes out of Jared Hess' NAPOLEON DYNAMITE and exhibit it on its own as a promising student short. I bet it might even be funny if the dosage were reduced so significantly.
This obnoxiously quirky tale of teenage angst in some weird nowhere Idaho suburb reveals a cockeyed visual confidence and a bit of pleasant off-center timing, even while feeling sort of like the cinematic equivalent of a lousy Wes Anderson cover band.
The eponymous nerd is played with panache by Jon Heder, and his full-tilt commitment is something to behold. Wearing a bright Chia Pet of red hair and Coke-bottle glasses, and breathing exclusively through his mouth, Napoleon exhales most of his dialogue in a hoarse monotone while gracelessly clomping in and out of scenes. Sometimes after embarrassing himself even more than usual, Napoleon breaks into something of a bent-spine jog--like he's trying to run away while still being crushed by the weight of his humiliation.
Napoleon Dynamite (his name lifted from an Elvis Costello alter ego for no apparent reason) is a dork who gets picked on a lot. He's stuck in the care of his insufferable Uncle Rico (Jon Gries, giving one of my least favorite performances of the year) and puts up with an even dorkier 30ish older brother who wastes entire days online typing to "hot babes" in chat rooms.
Uncle Rico is obsessed with his high school football memories from 1982. In fact, he's going door-to-door selling home breast-enlargement kits so he can save up enough money to buy a time machine from eBay and at last return to the glory days.
(Yeesh. Ever get the feeling a movie is trying too hard?)
After setting up these bizarre, unpleasant characters, there's a fair amount of suspense as we wait for NAPOLEON DYNAMITE to deepen--to develop some sort of empathy and interest in its characters beyond the surface mockery.
I'm still waiting.
Joined by the equally inarticulate Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and a sartorially challenged love interest (Tina Majorino), Napoleon suffers day-to-day indignities and generally makes a tool of himself in every situation. Hess doesn't have much interest in a plot, and there's some half-hearted drama about a school election that doesn't ever really go anywhere. Eventually, the movie ends.
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE isn't insufferable while you're watching it, but there's a bitter aftertaste that's been nagging me for a while now. We're never asked to care about Napoleon and his friends, never given a rooting interest in their inner worlds or ambitions. We're merely invited to giggle as they're all routinely humiliated.
So I'm starting to wonder what, exactly, separates Hess from the bullies who feature so prominently in his film?
Rating: *** [3 out of 4 stars]
"Napoleon Dynamite" was the big buzz hit at the Sundance Film Festival in January, but, honestly, any movie that shows at midnight at 7,000 feet above sea level has already had much of its work done for it. Now that this shoestring oddity has descended to the lower altitudes, it can be seen for what it is: an inspired dead-end stunt that keeps delivering snarky laughs far longer than it has any right to. The film's attitude remains high, and it probably wouldn't hurt if the audience was too.
Directed by Brigham Young University film graduate Jared Hess and written with his wife, Jerusha, "Napoleon" suggests Todd Solondz's "Welcome to the Dollhouse" stuffed into the confines of an MTV interstitial skit. In segments so deadpan as to seem disconnected, the film sketches out the dire adolescent life of the title character (Jon Heder), a gangly Idaho Brillo-head whose nerdiness has achieved cosmic proportions.
Napoleon lives in ranch-house misery with his dirt-biking grandma (Sandy Martin), her pet llama Tina, and his 32-year-old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), a scrawny ankle-sock-wearing shut-in who spends all day chatting up "babes" on the Internet. (The brothers' sissy-fights are a highlight of the film's early scenes). He's a figure of derision to his schoolmates -- especially queen of mean Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff, already well on the road to becoming sister Hilary's evil B-movie twin) -- but Napoleon is too ornery to be a sad sack. His eyes screwed shut behind aviator glasses, arms and legs jutting out like a grasshopper's, the character just seems deeply and comically exasperated. How was school? someone asks. "Worst day of my life," Napoleon barks in response. "What did you think?"
He's a cartoon, in other words, but so peculiar and unique as to be nearly heroic. Plus, he has a way with women. "I see you're drinking 1 percent," Napoleon tells a girl. "Is that because you think you're fat? You could probably drink whole milk."
"Napoleon Dynamite" keeps bringing on the freaks, to the point where the estate of Diane Arbus should arguably have been cut a check. In addition to Napoleon and Kip, there's their Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a toupee'd ladies man whose latest shady business venture is selling herbal breast enhancers door-to-door; new kid Pedro (Efren Ramirez), another cafeteria outcast who mounts a surprising bid for student council; Ilene (Ellen Dubin), a Tupperware-obsessed housewife; and Deb (Tina Majorino), Napoleon's possible love interest and a portrait photographer whose instructions to her subjects run along the lines of "Imagine you're in the ocean surrounded by tiny seahorses."
There's a lot more of this -- every scene is a brightly lit 1950s postcard of precision kitsch -- but Hess keeps the laughs coming with timing worthy of Jim Jarmusch and a narrow but controlled performance by Heder as the film's King Geek.
Be warned, though: Some people find this movie cruel in the extreme -- an exercise in empty style that pins its misfits to the wall like captured butterflies. By contrast, its fans (and I'm one, with reservations) know that what makes Napoleon a hopeless spazzola is also what makes him better than all the Summer Wheatleys. He just hasn't realized it yet.
Similarities to "Welcome to the Dollhouse" are obvious, not to mention the entire oeuvre of Wes Anderson. "Napoleon Dynamite" is the more optimistic film, though, and also the lesser one. What remains to be seen is whether Jared Hess has another movie in him -- a real movie, about real people.
Rating: *** [3 out of 4 stars]
EXCERPTS: The hero of "Napoleon Dynamite" has the worst case of teenage nerd syndrome in movie history. Napoleon, a terminal mouth breather, has elevated cluelessness to a lifestyle. He views the world through half-closed eyes from beneath hair exploding in an orange frizz. He has an inexhaustible wardrobe of thrift store T-shirts decorated with unicorns and mustangs.Our man is a loner who devotes his days to perfecting his solo tetherball game (he still loses), drawing bad cartoons (his...
...Napoleon Dynamite has all the markings of a midnight show perennial...
Rating: **** 1/2 [4.5 out of 5 stars]
So, this is very much like a sequel to me. I was first introduced to some of these characters in a short film called "Peluca" that screened at Slamdance 103. I fell in love with the quirky humor of filmmakers Jared and Jerusha Hess, I just wished the effort had been feature length. Welp, I got my wish and this film is every bit as funny as I knew it would be. I'm a smart one. I know my A-B-C's.
Napoleon Dynamite is an uber-geek high school student - thick glasses, red, messy fro, walks kinda like he has a stick up his ass, looks like his mama dresses him - who spends his time drawing flatulent unicorns, scouring the local thrift store for shit like bad dance instruction tapes, jamming his pockets full with tater tots and engaging in plenty of other odd activites. As we observe Napoleon's daily eccentricities, we meet his grandmother who goes off to race a quad runner in the desert only to end up putting herself in the hospital, his brother, Kip, who spends most of his time chatting with women online, their bozo door-to-door salesman uncle who plots to build a time machine so he can revisit his football glory days, and Pedro, a new student who Napoleon makes friends with and convinces to run for school president.
The cast playing these eccentric characters is magnificent. Each actor perfectly compliments the Hess's original brand of humor that keep steady giggles bubbling from the audience, inspiring frequent bursts of uproarious laughter. This is definitely one of the most unique comedies you1ll see all year. No doubt about it.
Grade: F
Although this husband and wife effort ignited the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, critic Larry Carroll is among those who feel it is more along the lines of a comedic implosion.
The old saying goes that if you don1t have anything nice to say you shouldn1t say anything at all, so let's start this review with the following well-intentioned observation: the opening credits for Napoleon Dynamite are terrific.
They might just be the best of the year, in fact: displaying the names of the actors and filmmakers involved with cute, fun little shots of food being placed on a table. A peanut butter sandwich appears on a plate, with someone's name and position written in jelly; another name and title appears via a corndog and some ketchup. One by one, a hand places them on a table as a perky, quirky title song establishes a lighthearted, experimental mood. They1re everything opening credits should be - creative, unique, and keeping within the spirit of what the audience is about to see.
Then a huge sucking feeling can be felt as the movie begins and all that innovative, free-wheeling momentum is dragged out of the theatre. Within a handful of moments, it's replaced by the sad realization that you1re trapped in your seat for the next hour and a half, watching a self-aware, condescending film led by an actor doing a caricature that falls somewhere between the cartoon character Butthead and Poindexter from Revenge of the Nerds.
Napoleon Dynamite is the name of that character, an angry, dorky, hopelessly clueless loner as performed by first-time actor Jon Heder. Napoleon wanders around Preston High School breathing through his mouth, with his eyes barely open, telling other students that he knows how to use numchuks as they take turns slamming him into his locker.
At home, things aren1t much better: his brother Kip (Aaron Ruell, also in his debut) is an emotionless, buttoned-up recluse who spends his days selling Tupperware and hanging out in Internet chat rooms; Uncle Rico (Jon Gries, Jackpot) has some detachment issues with his high school football career and has evolved into someone who seems one step away from child molestation; and Grandma (Sandy Martin, Jawbreaker) is the only seemingly normal person in the household, and she skips the scene a few minutes into the movie.
After a long time immersing the audience in the bizarre world of Napoleon Dynamite, the film finally gets around to some semblance of a plot revolving around the teenager's desire to help his quiet friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez, The District) get elected class president. To do so, the duo will have to overcome the powerful support of popular girl Summer (Haylie Duff, Hillary's big sister) and figure out which of them should end up with fellow outcast and part-time Glamour Shots photographer Deb (Tina Majorino, Waterworld).
First-time director and co-writer Jared Hess (a 24-year-old Brigham Young University dropout with a $500 student film that got him into Hollywood and whose story is probably far more entertaining than that of Napoleon Dynamite's) is a gifted director who simply can1t rein in his own desire to out weird everything else around him. Every character in the script he concocted with his wife Jerusha is extreme (no normal people are around to contrast them), every set piece is purposefully awkward (a wall telephone is placed too high for no apparent reason) and most of the character's motivations make sense only to them. Like a confused film school student, Hess is happy to pay homage to David Lynch, The Coen Brothers, Alex Cox, Terry Zwigoff, Harmony Korine and a dozen other directors, but doesn1t have enough passion to say much of anything in his own voice.
Without his ability to tap into the unconscious and tell a story based on raw emotions, David Lynch would just be a guy who likes to have a llama walk through his scenes for no reason other than satisfying his own absurd sense of humor. When Napoleon walks over to his fence to feed his pet llama, that's exactly what Hess has reduced himself to - there's no point to it other than to say, "Look, a llama!".
And while that kind of unrealistic self-indulgence may be acceptable in small doses, in this film it's strung together in huge piles of nonsense - a bike pulling a guy on roller skates, a man shooting a cow, a character who shaves his head and then decides to wear an ill-fitting wig to cover his shame - that none of us are likely to see in real life, that have nothing to do with this film's plot, and that do little to make the characters more endearing to us. Anybody could take an old man and make them walk through a scene dressed as an astronaut with no pants on and carrying an armload of Twinkies - but being able to establish a reason why we1re seeing it is what separates the Coens and Richard Kelly from wannabes like Gregg Araki, Olivier Assayas and Hess.
What's worse, the central character is an underdog that you very well may not feel like rooting for. Napoleon is a bitter, miserable soul who spends most of the movie complaining while he takes turns putting down those around him and serving as his own worst enemy. Hess wants you to identify with him as an outsider; he wants you to hope that Nap and Deb end up together and, to a lesser degree, that Uncle Rico finds love with a severely underdeveloped character whose daughter goes to Preston High.
The audience is also supposed to hope that Pedro wins the election, apparently just because he's a mild-mannered minority and his competition is a corn-fed blonde with a smile on her face. At the end of the day, none of these plotlines is adequately built up or paid-off - instead, we just get more shots of weird stuff and pratfalls.
Napoleon Dynamite is likely to be billed as a cult classic, and that's fine, but understand that there are two types of cult movies: those that you only need to show someone to make them love, and those that polarize audiences and become noteworthy by so fully pleasing fifty-percent of the people who see it that they go on to become rabid fans. Underperforming gems like Heavenly Creatures, Office Space and Dazed and Confused fall into that first category, while films like The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, the Highlander series and this fall into the second. These are the films that polarize audiences - that some will memorize every word of as if it were scripture, while others will come out cursing the name of the director, his family, and his family's neighbors.
The film does have some redeeming qualities, including a minority lead character, a welcome (if unnecessary) sequence scored to the song from the "A Team", and the refreshing look of a movie that was actually shot on location, in Idaho no less. Those things can only bring a film so much goodwill, however. Napoleon Dynamite is a movie whose big emotional moment is supposed to pivot on a scene with the lead character up on stage, dancing wildly as a crowd stares at him in confusion.
Like Nap, his film flails away with a refreshing enthusiasm at first, but ultimately gets its music shut off without providing much of anything except an unfunny freak show.
Rating: **** [4 out of 5]
It was a bold move to make NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, a wry and sober comedy about family neglect and social ostracism that is deeply, truly funny. This is a film that dares to delve into the realms of the truly unlikable and to then go on to make the audience care about them. Maybe not enough to share a table with them in the high school cafeteria, but enough to want things to work out for them. Or as well as things can work out for people with the social skills of a zebra mussel.
Napoleon (Jon Heder) lives in a parallel dystopian universe somewhere in rural Idaho, where life is as tough as the landscape is spare. His thirtysomething brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), resplendent in khaki shorts, sandals and white socks under his slip on sneakers, spends his days in online chat-room while dreaming of overcoming his gerbil appearance by becoming a martial arts threat. Their grandmother, perhaps understandably, is a woman more interested in her pet lama and her dirt-bike racing than in them. When Grandma takes a spill during a particularly tricky dirt-bike maneuver, she calls in Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who has been reliving his last college football game since the he played it in 1982. This committed carnivore is an equally committed loser with bizarro Rat Pack fashion choices. When not wolfing down steaks and making life even more uncomfortable that usual for Napoleon, he's dragging Kip into questionable entrepreneurial endeavors, such as the Bust Must herbal enhancer. Meanwhile, academic life in the local high school consists of being slammed against his locker by the jocks and spinning wild tales of numchuck prowess and fashion model girlfriends for anyone who gets within earshot. When the new kid, Pedro (a spookily deadpan Efren Ramirez), arrives, Napoleon suddenly has a friend, sort of, and the natural order shifts just a bit into uncharted territory and uncertain waters.
Jared Hess, director and co-writer with Jerusha Hess, has created a low-key excursion into the cinema of isolation; made manifest the inner life of the geekiest of the geeks, the nerdiest of the nerds and discovered that angst is hilarious. It's a static place where every day is like the day before and only an imagination that transforms reality makes it all palatable. His shots are equally static, enclosing his characters in spaces into which they never quite fit proportion-wise, underscoring their misfit status. His genius is to focus almost as obsessively as Napoleon does on his various skill sets, on the minutiae of small-town life and its inherent eccentricities as lived by the rejects too far gone for any clique to offer refuge. A chicken farmer for whom Napoleon re-roosts chickens, foisting off on him a lunch of fly-ridden sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs washed down with something I1d rather not go into. There's the carefully studied boredom of his classmates when he presents his current event topic for the week, the one that involves the Loch Ness Monster, Japanese scientists, and Scottish wizards. Each indignity swallowed with a shrug that barely conceals the gurgling resentment that blows intermittently and with an anger that is as tentative as everything else our guy tries. Paradoxically, his Napoleon retains a zest for life that nothing in that life seems to justify. That's the essence of his appeal and of the surreal absurdity of the film.
Heder never tries to win us over by going warm and fuzzy. He remains resolutely off-putting throughout, slack-mouthed beneath his wreath of wiry hair, speaking with a defiant monotone that expects to be either ignored or assaulted, and using a gait that involves not quite moving his arms and remaining ramrod straight even while running. It's the absolute seriousness with which he imbues Napoleon, though, that is the most striking. Each moment is lived at a fever pitch of laconic melodrama.
There isn1t much of a plot. It's more a series of vignettes that segue into each other, punctuated with the oddities of the outcast, be it a putative time-machine that inflicts the sort of injury that might hinder future generations, or Napoleon's particular genius for discerning the defects in milk during a Future Farmer's of America tasting competition. There's a school election with Pedro making a spectacular underdog bid for class president against the reigning teen angel (Haylie Duff), and a school dance that both serve to bring up short different protagonists with varying degrees of fairness. And, of course, there's romance. Even geeks have hormones, and the flat-line longing that Napoleon develops for the nerd princess with the not quite perky pony tail (Tina Marjorino) is at once poignant and, well, just a little nauseating.
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE exists in that rarified world of Alan Cox's REPO MAN or Jim Jarmusch's DOWN BY LAW. It's a world very close to ours and yet, uniquely its own, fluttering just outside reality, but reflecting it all too sharply.
"Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story": ***1/2 (out of four)
starring Vince Vaughn, Christine Taylor, Ben Stiller, Rip Torn
written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber
"Napoleon Dynamite": ** (out of four)
starring Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez, Jon Gries, Aaron Ruell
screenplay by Jared Hess & Jerusha Hess
directed by Jared Hess
Maybe the only thing American Splendor really got right was the importance of the first Revenge of the Nerds as buoy (along with Martha Coolidge's Real Genius of the following year), marking that unquenchable spark of hope nurtured by the freakishly unapologetic intellectuals nestled in there among the Reagan-era "über-normals." Curious that the idea of "blessed are the meek" and "blessed are the merciful" in Christ's Beatitudes are so often subsumed by the scolding Old Testament Commandments (Moses, anyway, as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. points out) in right-wing platforms and Southern courthouses. Curious enough so that the premise of Revenge of the Nerds washes out as a contest between the liberals on the one side (smart, well-read, poor, black, gay, horny--recalling that the nerds of the film are "adopted" by a black fraternity)--and the conservatives on the other (white, privileged, stupid, shallow, religious), while the premise of Real Genius is that same liberal pool arrayed against that same conservative pool but summarized by our military-industrial complex--curious because in both films, the liberals are clearly the meek and the merciful while the white-collar conservatives are the manifest oppressors. I always wanted to think of Christ as a studied socialist hippie: at the least, His Barry Gibb look in the Western canon would finally make sense.
If there is poignancy in the timing of a film's release and, more importantly, in the timing of a group of like-minded films' releases (that appear driven by parallel developments rather than products of the sequel or knock-off instinct), then it bears examining, as President George W.'s administration has proven itself fond of late, the similarities between Bush Jr.'s and President Reagan's administrations, particularly as there are a great deal of similarities between certain chunks of films released during their respective terms in office. For each Revenge of the Nerds or Real Genius or Risky Business there is now a School of Rock and Envy and The Girl Next Door: the rise of the nerd class, the deplorable brainiacs who screw up the grading curve, do their homework, and don't pretend to be facile and brutal and WASPy to fit into an image of comfortable national conformity. Our constant squabbling about a child's right not to believe in a nation under God or Bush Jr.'s answer to Reagan's "City on the hill" refrain--"See, a C student can do pretty well for himself"--speak to that rage for brutishness and anti-intellectualism. Of all the things wrong with Al Gore, the unforgivable sin was that he knew things and he was completely humourless about it--to Gore, things like knowledge and aptitude weren't merely unfunny, they were also something of which to be proud. A big problem was his boastfulness and stiffness; a bigger problem was that he made people feel inferior for what he knew. And the biggest problem is that so many Americans don't want a leader who is, perish the thought, superior to them intellectually--who can say two sentences that make sense together, and have read books that we haven't. Who have, let's face it, read some books.
So add to the pool of George Jr.'s term's cinematic legacy the subversively funny and smart Dodgeball and the subversively dim-witted and populist Napoleon Dynamite: the one dissecting our institutions of media, cult of beauty, and veneration of professional sports, the other trafficking in them to massage a few angry yuks at the expense of its misfit gallery. Both ostensible underdog uplift comedies in the spirit of Nerds/Genius (indeed, characters break down along nerdsploitation lines, with Dodgeball going so far as to gift original Nerd Curtis "Booger" Armstrong a cameo), each deals with the idea that race and sexual leaning, just by the fact of them, relegates folks firmly into the outcast caste. Dodgeball satirizes the schism in our society between the meek and the monstrous and Napoleon Dynamite unspools like Gummo if Harmony Korine had played it strictly for laughs. Just because Napoleon Dynamite is considerably funnier than the execrable Saved! doesn't make it any easier to forgive for its portrayal of the left side of the aisle as a shambling crew of misfits trundling along behind their Marxist circus carts.
In Dodgeball, Peter La Fleur (Vince Vaughn) doesn't pay taxes, doesn't pay his bills, and has a car that has to be pushed to his "Average Joe" gymnasium. Because he doesn't care very much about collecting his members' dues, the bank has foreclosed on him and he's in danger of being bought out by Tony Little-esque fitness napoleon White Goodman (Ben Stiller). Le Fleur is a flower, and White Goodman has a name like a Nazi pilgrim. Like Saved!, Dodgeball boasts a wheelchair-bound character (there played by Macaulay Culkin), but unlike Saved!, the wheelchair-bound character in Dodgeball (Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn)) is aggressive, virile ("I have hookers in my room, my treat"), and not the slightest bit like the rubber effigy that ate Culkin. Former dodgeball champion Patches volunteers to coach the Average Joes (among them a black homosexual, a girl who likes unicorns as much as Napoleon Dynamite likes Pegasus, and various nerd archetypes) in the tournament contrivance that will win them enough money to avoid being bought out by Goodman.
Best in the sketch format, Ben Stiller is as good as he has been in years as the messianic, pathetic Goodman, who's addicted enough to food that he zaps himself with a car battery whenever his thoughts stray to donuts and is eventually discovered masturbating with a slice of pizza. Such is a literalization of the love/hate relationship the United States has with its lunch (read Michelle Stacey's fabulous Consumed: Why Americans Love, Hate, and Fear Food), delivered here with an extraordinary amount of verve and concision. Goodman's chain of fitness facilities features a central big-screen through which an image of Goodman appears to interact with his patrons, spurring them to physical exhaustion while ordering his minions to tamper with the scales in the women's locker room--the best image of the efficacy of Orwellian groupthink and intimidation since the underestimated Gattaca. When he and a group of rubber-suited, surgically and drug- (and radiation-) mutated thugs decides to enter the same dodgeball contest as the Average Joes, the picture evolves into a sharp satire of the hyperbole and hypocrisy of our beloved professional sports culture.
Lost in the furor over the revealing of Janet Jackson's sad breast at the Super Bowl halftime show is the memory of the gyrations of the cheerleaders, the sexual content of the commercials, and the substance of all the performances that came before the Tit. There is a disconnect in American culture between implication and what is implied--the eye can be drawn fetchingly toward the breasts and the buttocks in any number of beer commercials suggesting that women like to be fucked by dogs and bears (why does a Coors commercial refer to the length of a matchmaking dog's tail? Nine inches), but there is somehow nothing more threatening to the piously sanctimonious than an actual breast or buttock. But there is no separation between flesh and contest no matter the amount of war euphemisms attempting to obscure the homoeroticism of angry touch, and so Dodgeball has Goodman's office decorated with a pair of cast-iron Greco-Roman wrestlers before decking out its heroes in S&M gear due to a uniform mix-up. ("Good toss by that submissive," emerges as a classic throw-away quotable--as do most of announcer Gary Cole's references to Lewis Carroll and Sappho.) A late cameo by Lance Armstrong is as brilliant as an early cameo by David Hasselhoff, and the match nationalism of the picture reminds of The Saddest Music in the World, if only Guy Maddin had a sense of humour about himself. Dodgeball is a barometer of the United States circa 2004: provincial, deluded, mired in a time where a ballistic defense system seems like a better idea than disarmament and "optimism" has become the only politics that matter. It's wise enough about itself and the world that a late treasure chest full of happiness is labelled "deus ex machina," and it manages to stay silly enough in its crotch-shot theatrics to be hilarious without--save one unfortunate gag about a fat cheerleader--contradicting the intelligence that drives its satire with a steady, sure hand.
On the other end of the spectrum is Napoleon Dynamite, the Sundance-approved debut of Jared Hess (just as Dodgeball is the feature-length debut of commercial director Rawson Marshall Thurber), which finds endless glee in beating the holy hell out of the demented denizens of Preston, Idaho. Chief victim is the singularly unpleasant Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), a carrot-topped, buck-toothed moron living with his chatroom-addicted brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) and, after an ATV accident lays their grandmother low, his lost-in-time Uncle Rico (Jon Gries). It's a series of vignettes strung together by nothing until a late contrivance of school pageant nerd make-good tries to send its audience to the parking lot feeling as though they're in Napoleon's corner instead of the film-long jock position of laughing at just how much of a dweeb this guy is.
I wondered for a long time why it was that the jock and cheerleader characters weren't developed at all to provide a foil for the capering contortions of Napoleon, his best friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez), Kip, Uncle Rico, and eventual love interest Deb (oh look, Tina Majorino's still alive) before I realized that the bullies were us. A scene in which Napoleon is shoved--hard--against a locker, accompanied by the sound of flies buzzing (Hess' favourite commentary on his characters), happens as he stares vacantly through the fourth wall--the effect of said action being that we've essentially been put in the position of the pusher, so that the humour we derive from that action is the same as the titillation we derive from Norman Bates' peeping before murdering Marion Crane. I'm not saying I didn't laugh, I'm saying that I'm the asshole in the letter jacket for laughing. It's funny in the same way as beating that creepy D&D kid in the moon boots is funny, rendering comparisons to Todd Solondz's incisive teen comedies unfair and wide of the mark. I don't even have the energy to rail against the ways that blacks and Hispanics are parsed in the picture as, respectively, soul-infusion and intimidation. The best line in Napoleon Dynamite is the come-on ("I caught you a delicious bass"), and it's met with a chorus of jeering approval, mine included, while the best lines in Dodgeball ("Let the schadenfreude commence!") are met with general silence, save the braying, honking laughter of a heretofore silent minority massing to overthrow the small-minded dean and the oppressor Alphas.
Rating: ***1/2 [3.5 out of 4]
How refreshing is it to see a movie where you1re desperately searching for the right words to describe it to your friends so they1ll rush out to see it immediately? Instantly, you know you haven1t done the film justice and rely on the old adage of "trust me" before pushing them towards the box office to say the words "Napoleon Dynamite." The best way I1ve found to pitch the film is to imagine an out-there cartoon, something you1d find on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim or the internet's HomestarRunner.com, and watching it spring to live-action on the big screen.
The setting: Preston, Idaho
His name: Napoleon Dynamite
Napoleon (Jon Heder in an inspired performance) is your garden variety geekboy at school. Seemingly your sympathetic type, you may find yourself taking a little time warming up to him, as he's hardly the friendliest and quite pushy at times. His homelife consists of a 32-year old brother named Kip (Aaron Ruell) who spends all his time in internet chatrooms and a grandma (Sandy Martin) who likes to go off-roading ATV-style.
Napoleon's life consists of a string of events that any of us growing up in high school can relate to; especially the geeks. A school dance is coming up and Napoleon has no one to take. Since girls relate to what you can do, Napoleon takes a class from a television karate guru (Diedrich Bader, dead-on hilarious here.) A new kid, Pedro (Efren Ramirez) comes to school and the two outsiders immediately bond, giving Napoleon an official sidekick not unlike The Lone Ranger or Don Quixote. There's the bashful girl at school (Tina Majorino) who catches the eye of both of them and has her own bizarre talents in the photographic arts. When grandma is taken out of commission by a particularly high dune, Uncle Rico (a terrific Jon Gries, aka "Lazlo Hollyfeld") shows up to take care of the boys. (Yes, even 32-year old Kip.)
Just about every character in Napoleon is endearing; even the ones we1re clearly not supposed to like. Uncle Rico is a selfish pyramid schemer who quickly ropes the hapless Kip as his own sidekick. He's rude to Napoleon, who never misses an opportunity to lash back at the loser who still makes videos of his once precious throwing arm. And we just love to watch Rico and all his stilted lothario attempts on his sale calls. We can1t help it.
Napoleon himself not only become a comic cliché on first sight with his squinty, stiff look and catch phrase mini-tantrums but is a friend-in-true, willing to become the sidekick himself when Pedro needs him. Whether it's teaching his Slowpoke Gonzales the ways of the woman or spearheading his school campaign for office, Napoleon's final sacrifice is crazily funny and remarkably touching. Trust me, by film's end you1ll be hearing the words "vote for Pedro" in your head, wishing that he was up for the Democratic ticket in 104.
For the first time maybe ever, I find myself at a loss of words. Normally I will prevent myself from digging too deep in a review when it comes to plot twists and surprise endings, but this film doesn1t have that. It is one great big surprise and a twist for 90 minutes on any other film we could possibly buy a ticket for. It's a coming-of-age story for everyone, asking all of us to grow in our appreciation for offbeat humor. Napoleon Dynamite is one of the funniest films you1ll see this year. When it's over you may agree with the cartoon comparison and still not be able to describe it. You may find yourself searching for a comic strip or dialing around Adult Swim since out there these characters must be getting drawn somewhere. Trust me though, they can1t be drawn better than by writer/director Jared Hess and his co-writer (and spouse) Jerusha Hess. I don1t know what else to say. This review can1t even begin to do Napoleon Dynamite justice.
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 out of 4]
There isn't much Napoleonic grandeur in this Idaho-set high school comedy, which in spite of its most condescending instincts, does have its moments. It helps to approach this debut feature and Sundance hit in the context of being shot on a small-town dime.
When we watch geeky Napoleon (Jon Heder) get shocked by a so-called time machine (mostly metal, batteries and headwear), one does have to concede an attitude often missing from pricier screen endeavors. Yet husband-wife team (Jared and Jerusha Hess) apparently have no love in their hearts for the no-hopes they've created. Napoleon is socially maladroit and is a constant pummeling target for standard-issue jocks. His uncle (a funny Jon Gries) is a jock wannabe, convinced he should have been an NFL quarterback instead of a salesman of plastic dishes. Meanwhile, Napoleon's pal Pedro (Efren Ramirez) is in over his head running for class president against a vapid school queen (Haylie Duff, Hilary's sister).).
The Hesses, who are only in their mid-20s, know how to set up gags and even capitalize on them. But their opening salvo seems outrageous just for the sake of it. In Fourth of July terms, its pop is less dynamite than firecracker.
Grade: B
A defiant cadre of misfits take their place among the high school jocks and low riders of Preston, Idaho. When his grandmother (Sandy Martin, "One Night at McCool's') is hospitalized after an dirt bike riding accident, one such teen, despite the agonizing obstacles placed in his way by con man Uncle Rico (Jon Gries, "Northfork"), gets his best friend elected school president and gets the girl. His name is "Napoleon Dynamite."
This goofy American original works largely due to the determined weirdness of star Jon Heder, who creates a truly unique character. Heder is such a master of comic timing and physical ability that it will be intriguing to see how and if his talents will be utilized by other filmmakers. Cowriting brothers Jerusha and Jared (who also directed) Hess have used their own hometown to good effect, but their story weakens whenever focus strays away from their titular creation.
We're introduced to the carrot-fro'ed, ski boot wearing Napoleon as he boards the school bus. 'What are you doing today?' asks a much younger rider. 'Anything I want!' Napoleon retorts aggressively before tossing a plastic action man on a string out the window to drag along behind the bus. Napoleon protects himself from more averagely normal students with a cocoon of stories so bizarre they might be true, like how he spent his summer in Alaska with his uncle hunting wolverines, but he still weakens from high school's onslaught, calling brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) to pick him up or at least bring him his chapstick. Kip demurs, too busy at the moment making nachos before a session cruising chat rooms for love.
When Uncle Rico arrives to tend to the boys (Napoleon's a senior and Kip much older), his money-making schemes, which include selling bust enlargements, embarrass Napoleon in front of his friends and the two frequently engage in violent exchanges (somehow the Hess brothers make Rico flinging a steak in Napoleon's face funny). But Rico and Kip's adventures (Kip romances the unlikely Lafawnda (Shondrella Avery) from Detroit) aren't as amusing as Napoleon's adventures with Pedro (Efren Ramirez, "Jury Duty"), a Mexican transfer student who thinks he can romance the school's most popular girl, Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff, sister of Hilary), by baking her a cake. Tina Majorino ("Waterworld") provides the film's geeky heart as Deb, an aspiring portrait photographer who wears her hair in one ponytail on the side of her head and who quietly yearns for Napoleon.
The brother's screenplay largely works, although they can't resist side trips with characters like local 'Rex Kwan Do' owner Rex (Diedrich Bader) that don't pay off. These threads and non sequiturs like the Dynamites' pet llama reek of homage to Preston experiences which probably play funnier to the natives.
First time cinematographer Munn Powell keeps it simple, usually keeping his subject dead center in the frame for a deadpan look which complements the film's humor, and costumer designer Jerusha Hess (it's all in the family) adds visual interest with Napoleon's parade of novelty tees and Deb's awkward attempts at style. John Swihart's cheesy score is dead right for the proceedings.
"Napoleon Dynamite" spurs interest in more Idahoan tales from the Hess family, but it's the slack jawed, straight-armed Heder whose star is really born. His brilliant climatic show stopper followed by a geeky sweet school yard denouement make for a dynamite ending.
Grade: B-
Napoleon (Jon Heder) is one of the stranger residents of Preston, Idaho with his unruly mop of red hair, thick glasses, sullen attitude and penchant for moon boots. He lives with his adventurous grandma (Sandy Martin) and a 31-year-old live-at-home brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), who surfs the Internet looking for chicks. The redhead has problems fitting in at school but when a new kid, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), comes to town, things change for "Napoleon Dynamite."
First time helmer Jared Hess, working with a script co-written with Jerusha Hess, has created a no-budget, low-tech little film that has some interesting moments and one very good thing about it - the title character. Jon Heder's Napoleon is as unlikely a hero figure as I have ever seen. He's the penultimate geek with interests in medieval warriors and drawing. He lacks social skills and grace but, still, there is an honest freshness in the character that keeps you interested in his goings on.
There isn1t much of a story in "Napoleon Dynamite." Nothing really happens, as a matter of fact, until about the halfway mark. Even at that point, there is little tension except who will win the hotly contested class president's race between soft spoken outsider Pedro and his main competition for office, the school's head babe, Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff). The film is a series of slice-of-life moments as we watch Napoleon deal with new friendship, girls (especially shy but provocative Deb (Tina Majorino) who has eyes for our hero), bullies, martial arts and dance.
The "story" also follows other members of the Dynamite family. Nerdy Kip envisions himself as a bit of a bon vivant of the Internet and begins carrying on a long distance romance with LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery). The diminutive older brother eventually invites his remote lover to visit and, on her arrival, she shakes the unprepared Kip right down to his toes. Also arriving on the scene is Uncle Rico (John Gries), a former high school football star who tries to regain his past sporting glory and is always scheming for a get rich quick deal. He and Kip become the local distributors for "Crupperware" and proceed to try to sell to every woman in town.
The story lines that do no involve Napoleon tend to distract rather than entertain. As I watched Kip's romantic hijinxs or Uncle Rico's conniving ways I simply wanted to get back to Napoleon and his numerous plights, fights and successes. Helmer Hess does an adequate job in marshalling his youthful cast but, without Jon Heder, there would be little to offer. Heder presence, alone, is worth the price of admission.
"Napoleon Dynamite" plays like a demented after school special that exists in rural America but feels like it came from outer space. Napoleon comes across, at first, as an anti-hero on the outside looking in. By the end of the film, the geek becomes an idol as he develops all the right moves and helps his friend win the election. I can1t exactly say that you like the title character by the end, but you certainly gain some respect for him. I give it a B-
Rating: * 1/2 [1.5 out of 5 stars]
With a gentle, rude sense of humour, it's fairly easy to see why this small film is a cult hit. But unless you enjoy laughing at the stupid things everyday people do, avoid this film like the plague.
Napoleon (Heder) is a dweeby freak in his Idaho high school, the butt of everyone's jokes, and for good reason. He lives with his 32-year-old nerd brother Kip (Ruell) and his grandma (Martin), who injures her back and sends greasy salesman Uncle Rico (Gries) to stay with them. Meanwhile, Napoleon befriends a new student from Mexico (Ramirez), and the two of them try to get cool girls (Duff and Kennard) to go to the school dance with them (fat chance), while another girl (Majorino) secretly pines for Napoleon.
The film is essentially a series of silly, low-key scenes that ask us to laugh at the ludicrous behaviour of the characters. It's like American Pie on valium, slow and drained of almost all energy. There are some genuinely funny bits that lampoon small-town life (Rex Kwon Do!), but mostly it's just people doing the kind of everyday random things most people do. It's not remotely clever, it doesn't say anything and all of the characters are deeply annoying. The closest comparisons, Beavis & Butt-head, seem like social-satire geniuses next to these dimwits.
You get the feeling the husband-and-wife filmmakers think everything here is awash with warm whimsy and goofy good humour. But the movie actually bubbles with barely suppressed loathing for its characters and setting. It also ineptly calls upon tired movie cliches to drive the plot--a school election, the prom, a redemptive talent show, a nerd surprising everyone with hidden talents, a bombshell falling for a geek, and a cheap and totally unearned sentimental finale.
In the end we just long for even a glimpse of youthful energy--the film is beyond lethargic. We also crave something that's actually funny, besides merely amusing or nostalgic. Only sniggering audiences who feel superior to the quirky people on screen will enjoy this film. And something tells me that's not what the filmmakers had in mind.
Rating: 5 [out of 10]
L1été 2004 a permis à deux outsiders de trouver un public au travers cette période très chargée en gros canons. Il y a bien sûr Garden State qui fut un succès tout a fait honorable, mais il y également Napoleon Dynamite. Avec un budget de 400 000$, ce film des plus indépendants et rempli d1acteurs inconnus a pu franchir le cap des 40 millions $ de recette! Pas mal pour un film qui n1a été dans le top 10 que deux fois et dont le nombre de copies disponible a toujours été limité à moins de 1000 exemplaires. Fortement apprécié par le public et par la critique en général, Napoleon Dynamite avait tout pour me satisfaire. Cependant, le résultat est loin d1être à la hauteur des attentes. Bien sûr, le film est empli de personnages tordus et possède un style franchement amusant, mais Napoleon Dynamite n1a pas vraiment d1histoire, c1est un concept que l1on étire pour toute la durée d1un film. Si le film a été souvent comparé à un mélange entre Election et Rushmore, il n1en possède certainement pas la qualité du scénario.
L1histoire pourrait se résumer ainsi: Napoleon est un nerd vivant avec son frère et sa grand-mère. Celle-ci part en vacances et leur oncle vient habiter avec eux momentanément. Au même moment, un nouvel élève étranger débarque à l1école et se lie d1amitié avec Napoleon. À la veille des élections scolaires, Napoleon tente d1appuyer son ami Pedro afin qu1il puisse devenir président. Au même moment, l1oncle Rico décide de se lancer dans la vente de produits Tupperware et le frère de Napoleon débute une relation avec une fille rencontrée sur internet. Malgré le potentiel de cette histoire complètement tordue, Napoleon Dynamite se résume en une suite d1évènements anecdotiques. Si l1univers du film et l1étrangeté de ses personnages a de quoi charmer, le courant ne passe pas toujours. Pourtant, le potentiel était bien là, mais jamais le réalisateur n1arrive à en tirer profit. Cependant, on ne peut que sourire devant autant de personnages plus étranges les uns que les autres. Que ce soit ce mexicain à la moustache noire nouvellement arrivé, ou l1oncle qui se filme en train de lancer des ballons en étant convaincu qu1il aurait pu être un joueur de la NFL et qui tente de se procurer une machine à voyager dans le temps ou simplement Napoleon Dynamite qui dessine des animaux qui sont un croisement entre un tigre et un lion.
D1ailleurs, ce personnage devient presque instantanément culte et constitue le meilleur point du film. Tout en étant une énorme caricature de tous les clichés possible sur un nerd, l1interprétation de Jon Heder est tellement naturelle que l1on croirait qu1il ne joue pas vraiment. Chacune de ses présences engendre le sourire et l1amusement devant toutes les péripéties que traverse son personnage. Seulement la façon dont Napoleon termine parfois ses phrases à coup de Gross! ou d1Idiot! vous fera réaliser que le film est une grande farce remplie de personnages stupides qui semblent presque sortis d1une bande dessinée. Mais la sauce ne lève tout simplement pas pour en faire un film véritablement réussi. Les gags ne font pas toujours mouche et peuvent même devenir redondants. En plus, les scénaristes mettent parfois leurs efforts sur des situations qui n1ont que peu d1importance ou peu de potentiel humoristique. Le réalisateur, volontairement, utilise peu de plans et laisse les personnages entrer et sortir du cadre, l1objectif étant de donner une impression de réalité à ce portrait d1une étrange communauté. Sous la forme d1une série télévisée, Napoleon Dynamite aurait certainement trouvé une niche plus appropriée à son genre.
Bref, Napoleon Dynamite n1est pas vraiment l1excellente comédie que l1on annonçait. L1univers créé par les scénaristes et les différents personnages possède indéniablement un charme qui fait sourire et certaines situations sont amusantes. Mais dans l1ensemble, sans une véritable ligne directrice, le film ne possède pas suffisamment d1attraits pour en faire une comédie réussie. Beaucoup de positif dans toute cette histoire, mais un peu trop de déception. Franchement dommage pour un film qui aurait pu être un classique instantané. Tout de même agréable à voir ne serait-ce que pour la finale.
Rating: *** 1/2 [3.5 out of 4 stars]
You may not like him much. But you1ll find yourself rooting for "Napoleon Dynamite," who is arguably the gawkiest, geek-iest character in cinematic history.
All of those who ever have suffered from low self esteem: Watch and learn that your circumstances aren1t so bad as the life of this junior-high misfit.
Napoleon has huge glasses, a mop of curly red hair, a bad attitude, a smart mouth, and not much to anticipate ... or so it seems. He and his brother, Kip, 32, live with their grandmother.
The astonishing Jon Heder is the title character, who is bullied and razzed through every torturous day of school. His older brother doesn1t work, but sits at the computer, where he is deeply involved in chat rooms -- in fact, Kip (Aaron Ruell) claims he has met the girl of his dreams in a chat room.
When Grandma is injured in an accident, the two oddball brothers are left on their own until the arrival of Uncle Rico (John Gries), an ex-jock who can1t seem to let go of 1982. He and Kip begin to hatch a plot to make some money so that Kip can pay the way for his girlfriend to visit.
One day, a new kid, Pedro (Efren Ramirez) arrives, and Napoleon shows him around. Napoleon also gets to know Deb (Tina Majorino), a quiet girl who also seems to be a kind of lost soul, although not nearly as bewildered as Napoleon seems to be.
The movie isn1t action-packed, and it really doesn1t have much plot. At times it's hilarious just because the characters are so bizarre. They float around in a world of normalcy in which people run for school elections and ask each other to dances, but they don1t exactly fit within this sphere.
The movie has "cult classic" written all over it. It's not a mainstream teen-age movie -- nor is it necessarily a movie for solely a teen-age audience -- and it's certainly not a vehicle movie for any up-and-coming stars (although these performers are bound to earn some attention).
When you go, and you know by now whether you should, let the credits roll. Just when you think the house lights are going up, you1ll enjoy another entire scene at the end.
P.S. That character of the popular blond girl is played by Haylie Duff, Hillary's sister.
Running Length: 1:26
Rated: PG for ... I guess the mention of breast enhancement? I'm really not sure.
Rating: 4 out of 10
"Napoleon Dynamite" is a low budget, independent film that is slowly making its way into theaters all across the country. The buzz on this movie is so good that it is drawing in good size audiences everywhere it plays. The question is why? It is a bizarre film about life among the nerds of the world, and though it features fairly good talent in the acting roles it is a dull film from start to finish.
Napoleon (Jon Heder) is a nerdy high school student who lives with his grandmother and brother Kip (Aaron Ruell). In school he is always the outsider and he has no friends, until he meets a new student at the school named Pedro (Efren Ramirez). They form an alliance and eventually include Deb (Tina Marjorino).
Napoleon's grandmother is in an accident and while she is in the hospital Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) comes to stay with the two boys. He is a man who lives in the past and dreams about what might have been if his football team had been state champions.
Nothing much happens in the movie. There are just scenes after scenes of Napoleon's awkwardness, and a few about Kip's Internet romances. There is no plot and when the movie ends nothing of consequence has happened. Even if you stay through the credits for some added on scenes, nothing happens.
Heder is very good as Napoleon. He has a unique style and attitude. Whether it would play in other roles or not is yet to be seen. Haylie Duff, who is Hilary's sister, is featured in a small role as a girl named Summer.
The movie is rated PG for mild profanity.
There is nothing dynamic about "Napoleon Dynamite." It is a slow moving movie that has a few laughs every now and then. This is a case of someone seeing something in the movie and then everyone else trying to get in on the bandwagon. Hey folks! The emperor isn1t wearing any clothes!
I scored "Napoleon Dynamite" a dud 4 out of 10.
Rating: *** 1/2 [3.5 stars out of 5]
And the geek shall inherit the earth.
Jared Hess' independent darling Napoleon Dynamite is for all the kids who were picked on in school: the geeks, the dweebs, the losers, the nerds, those who didn't have $100 sneakers, those with pimples, the girls with small breasts, the boys with large breasts, the kids who liked computer class and those who snorted when they laughed.
Jon Heder stars in the titular role, a confident loser if there ever was one. Napoleon has few friends and it's no wonder why. Not only does he look the part of a loser, he acts like a jerk with an occasionally bad attitude to boot. Still there's something endearing and likable about him. Perhaps it's his innocent naivety about the world around him. After all, he's just a high school kid in search of his 'skills'. Napoleon's confident in himself and his loserdom. He doesn't care much about what other people think about him.
With a lose plot that is little more than following Napoleon around his small Idaho town and meeting his quirky classmates and family members, the success or failure for Napoleon Dynamite rests on its moments. There's lots of them. And for the most part they're funny. In fact, I haven't laughed this hard in a while. But there was still a little voice on my shoulder that had me wondering at whose expense were the jokes coming from.
Napoleon Dynamite can be read as paying tribute to white trash as everyone seems to be shallow failures unable to realize that they're purpose is simply to be laughed at. Then there's the borderline racism that Hess approaches in the portrayal of Napoleon's best friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez). He's a recently arrived immigrant from Mexico. The principal speaks down to him like he speaks little English, he's the only person in the school who can grow a mustache and he knows a couple of Latinos who exist only to drive a hydraulic low-rider convertible and wear white undershirts.
Then there's that tinge of guilt I felt as Napoleon made a fool of himself. It reminded me when I was in high school and everyone would laugh at the 'geeks' and their outbursts and bad coordination. It's not that I was anywhere close to the cool crowd, but there were those below me on the unforgiving food chain of teenagedom that I was shallow enough to laugh at at the time, just like there were those who did the same to me.
As cruel as it can be, Hess is striving to make a point with Napoleon Dynamite. In the end, it genuinely plays out like a tribute to those who were never cool in high school. It's a call to be yourself in light of those around you and have confidence in whatever your 'skills' may be, no matter how geeky or nerdish.
I don't know if that fully cancels out some of the heavy stereotypes that are played upon, but this is still a funny and sweet film. Its characters are definite originals that are eccentric but still connected enough that you can see people you know, might have known or even yourself in them. Everybody in the world has some geek in them. Napoleon Dynamite catches the imagination and passion of it and simply lets it run.
Rating: * [1 stars out of 5]
The feature-directing debut of Idaho native Jared Hess is a cartoonish paean to its ber-nerd antihero. It's a simple collection of sight gags and pratfalls that mines the overly familiar turf of awkward adolescence without bringing anything truly original to the experience. Napoleon, played with admirable commitment by newcomer Jon Heder, is a high school student enduring the vicissitude of growing up in a small town, where he lives with his grandmother and older brother. The movie feels self-satisfied in its attempt to create a portrait of a lovable loser -- infusing him with quirky qualities meant to be endearing -- but in reality, plays like a revisionist goof, lumping together broad archetypes for cheap laughs while pretending to be the ultimate underdog movie.
Rating: *** 1/2 [3.5 stars out of 5]
Napoleon Dynamite, the titular character in the film of the same name, brings a new meaning to the term "geek." He is perhaps the ultimate pencil neck, a character who, thanks to his moon boots, parachute pants, maize-colored shock of Brillo pad hair, and half-glazed affinity for tater tots, makes John Hughes era Anthony Michael Hall look like a stud, grants the Square Pegs the ability to actually fit in a round hole, and turns the Freaks & Geeks into hot cheerleaders and football heroes.
Written and directed by Jared Hess, who first explored the otherworldly realm of small town geekdom in his short film Pecula - which actually used the talents of Napoleon Dynamite lead actor Jon Heder - has crafted a wonderfully quasi-linear tale (actually it's more like a bunch of interconnected vignettes) revolving around one Napoleon Dynamite and his trials and tribulations in his small, rural hometown of Preston, Idaho. As portrayed by Heder, Dynamite is a bugged out cross between Steven Wright and an autistic stoner. Tall, lanky, bequeathed with a frizzled fro, and droopy eyes hidden behind enormous Foster Grant-styled prescription specs, Dynamite is a social outcast of the highest magnitude.
And so, too, is his family. Comprised of the equally, if not more so geekly older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), a rather butch Grandma (Sandy Martin), and the stuck-in-the-'80s flashback uncle Rico (Jon Gries), the Dynamite brood takes the concept of dysfunctional to new heights. And let's not discount the rest of the supporting cast, which includes best friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and love interest Deb (Tina Majorino), both equally inept at mixing it up with any semblance of normalcy within the world of cheerleaders, thickheaded jocks, and out-of-touch teachers.
In many ways Hess' film owes considerable debt to the likes of Tod Williams' The Adventures of Sebastian Cole and Todd Solondz' Welcome to the Dollhouse, at least in terms of narrative structure and the deadpan exploration of the outer fringes of the high school social system. Napoleon Dynamite is less of a cohesive story than a wondrously hilarious strand of events strung together by the omnipresence of the title character. How else do you explain a story line the manages to weave a tater tot fetish, lost dreams of a former high school sports hero, faux Tupperware salesmen, a voracious llama, tether ball, self-defense martial arts, Internet dating, and the high school presidential race into a gut-busting sequence of right brain generated humor?
And while the cameos from recognizable sorts such as Gries (best known for his stint on The Pretender) and Diedrich Bader (Oswald from The Drew Carey Show), as well as certain siblings of mega pop stars (Haylie Duff, who portrays the bitchy blonde cheerleader Summer is the sister of Hillary) work to wonderful effect, the show effectively belongs to Heder. A veritable beanstalk in the Ichabod Crane motif, the actor has perfected the art of deadpan, taking it to the furthest stages of rigor mortified glee. Just hearing him talk about his nunchuck skills or watching him eat tater tots will have you literally losing your lunch from uncontrollable laughter.
Yet for all its quirky charm and extreme left-of-center deadpan hilarity, Napoleon Dynamite ultimately suffers from one fatal flaw. And it is a flaw so glaring that it unquestionably prevents the film from becoming the true idiosyncratic classic it should be. What, pray tell, is such a flaw, you ask? The film literally slams on its brakes with all the neck wrenching, whiplashing abruptness of an 18-wheeler jackknifing to avoid hitting a little old lady who has decided to take a leisurely stroll across a busy interstate truck route. So clipped is the conclusion, it almost feels as if A) there is a reel missing or B) it's as if the film's producers noticed it was creeping toward the magic 90-minute mark and feverishly exclaimed "Cut! Cut! If we go over 90 minutes we're going to lose the attention of our TRL-bred target audience." The truncated finale leaves the film feeling unfinished and the audience somewhat unsatiated. One can only hope that the inevitable DVD will contain some additional footage and make up for this shortcoming.
Romance is the genre that dramatizes our dreams of ideally effective action against the forces of evil. The white knight learns from his tutelary figure how to defeat the black knight, the ogre, the dragon, and the sorcerer in defense of the damsel and in doing so revives the entire community. He fights for the values that bind the community, earning the deepest gratitude of everyone in it who identifies with the forces of good. This gives dimension to his heroism and explains why he has been a focus of projection for boys since forever.
Irony is the genre that slaps us awake in the middle of those dreams. It apes the structure of romance but fills it in with realistic details that won't cooperate with the fantasy--e.g., Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Irony presents stories based on our lowest estimates of ourselves, saying to us, in effect, "You can fantasize all you want, but you're no hero and your plans never work out as satisfactorily as you hope." (Critics who complain that ironists look down on their characters manage to be correct and to miss the boat at the same time.)
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
In practice, however, irony and romance aren't so cleanly antithetical. There's often a breaking point at which irony turns into romance. It can be a drag, for example, in the Robin Williams or Jim Carrey comedy that goes soft, "redeeming" the character whose outrageousness has been our main source of entertainment. A lot of us prefer our irony neat, and Will Ferrell's Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is a straight shot of that good stuff. In last year's Elf, the turning point after which you knew that James Caan's daddy figure would be reborn and Ferrell would be happily integrated into his family came so early it killed the comedy. Anchorman makes up for that with total singlemindedness.
Ferrell plays the star local newscaster in '70s San Diego who resists the introduction of a female co-anchor even though he's dating her (having won the competition with his colleagues over who will lay her). The elements of romance are burlesqued from beginning to end--jousts in the form of vicious rumbles against rival stations' newsmen, a spiritual crisis brought on by the death of his dog, a heroic return occasioned by the need to cover a much-anticipated birth of a panda at the zoo, and a rescue of the damsel from the zoo's bear pit in which he and his resurrected dog collaborate. Ferrell is an even more poker-faced skit artist than Mike Myers, and he has a more specific and more generally serviceable specialty, playing characters who are oblivious to the chasm between how they picture themselves and how they come across.
Napoleon Dynamite
Anchorman was the funniest American comedy this year until Napoleon Dynamite, which is likewise a deadpan parody of a romance. The title character is a gape-mouthed, drowsy-eyed high-school kid in small-town Idaho who longs for the kind of skills that he imagines will make him popular with girls. (Among the things he considers "skills" are having a "sweet" bike and being able to grow a mustache.) To compensate for his lack of skills he fantasizes, exaggerates, and lies, and it isn't clear that he knows the difference. (He covers notebook pages with drawings of the "liger," a hybrid of lion and tiger "bred for its magical powers," and he talks about this beast not only as if other people could have heard of it but as if it were real.) Napoleon is a loser by most external standards and we're free to laugh at him because he's not even loveable. He has the petulance of an adolescent who's always ready to snap at people because they aren't able to guess what he's thinking. They actually have to ask him questions to find out. Idiots!
Jon Heder gives a classic slapstick performance, something along the lines of the silent great Harry Langdon, that sleepy-headed weirdo baby, after a hormonal growth spurt. You have to see Heder move; he runs, dances, and even swallows in gangly character. And he never appeals directly to the audience but understands that irony is a form of identification with character, with Napoleon's very awkwardness and preposterousness (as the co-writer and director Jared Hess makes clear in this interview with Screenwriter's Utopia).
Tina Majorino is nearly Heder's equal as the shy but enterprising girl who loves him. A gravely self-serious photo-i.d. photographer and lanyard artisan, she's got her own absurd dimness, an independent source of comedy, which is more than you can say for almost any heroine in Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, or Langdon. (Hess's wife Jerusha co-wrote the script with him and is probably responsible for the relatively soft-grained, characterful female slapstick.)
To maintain Anchorman's hermetic seal, Ferrell and the moviemakers no doubt had to win a staring contest with their distributor, and themselves. I hope Ferrell never blinks again. All the same, their movie is the work of fully-vested insiders compared to Napoleon Dynamite, which has a special grace, probably because Heder and the Hesses are young and unpracticed. (Their freshness is all over Jared's interviews with Screenwriter's Utopia and this one with IndieWire and this article in USA Today about Heder.)
In addition, all three are Mormons who met at Brigham Young University, which ought to turn all kinds of stereotypical notions on their heads. (Jared said to Screenwriter's Utopia, "I don't feel there is any Mormon culture in the film," but both Jared and Heder carried out two-year proselytizing missions and that experience may account for the number of people in Napoleon Dynamite who sell things door-to-door. ) These Mormon tyros make the big-industry comedians look square by comparison.
At times Anchorman gets by on being so purposefully bad it doesn't need to be that adeptly written or performed, though a considerable amount of it is. Napoleon Dynamite is more original, but it too works by parodying romance conventions: Napoleon has rivals and must defeat them at the climax, thereby saving his best friend and winning the girl. As in Anchorman, Napoleon's combat skills develop fully within the mode of irony, but his triumph sneaks up on you without your even being aware the movie has a plot. The characters' misadventures unspool in a series of first-rate blackout sketches, which play out leisurely but are cut together with the snap a young director could have learned growing up on The Simpsons. And verbally Napoleon Dynamite is the most entertainingly imitable comedy since Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (both in Heder's delivery and in such lines as his announcement to his girl, "I caught you a delicious bass"). It likewise features a melodrama involving nasty popular kids versus ironically heroic Z-list kids, but the melodrama in Romy and Michele is too insistent--like we care. The Hesses finesse it so you get the surge without disrupting the ironic circuitry.
Grade: B
Shaun of the Dead
Director: Edgar Wright. Cast: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield, Penelope Wilton, Bill Nighy, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Peter Serafinowicz, Nicola Cunningham. Screenplay: Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright.
Garden State
Director: Zach Braff. Cast: Zach Braff, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Ian Holm, Armando Riesco, Alex Burns, Jean Smart, Jim Parsons, Ron Leibman, Ann Dowd, Ato Essandoh, Denis O'Hare, Debbon Ayer, Method Man. Screenplay: Zach Braff.
Napoleon Dynamite
Director: Jared Hess. Cast: Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez, Tina Majorino, Jon Gries, Aaron Ruell, Sandy Martin, Shondrella Avery, Emily Kennard, Haylie Duff, Trevor Snarr, Diedrich Bader. Screenplay: Jared Hess and Jerusha Hess.
Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead boasts one of the year's best taglines: "A romantic comedy. With zombies." It's a terrific joke, at least for a film that intends the joke. Zach Braff's Garden State is also a romantic comedy, with zombies, although I'm not sure Braff really knows it. The films have a good deal else in common, principally that they both belong to that frequently queasy subgenre where young, drifting men learn to connect with their girlfriends,re-order their priorities, carpe the diem, etc. Shaun of the Dead plays a kind of con game with this basic structure: you can't tell if the filmmakers take seriously the romantic longings and arrested adolescence of the titular Shaun, or whether they're poking as much fun at the essential narcissism of the genre as they are at the conventions of the cinema du walking-dead. Depending on your view, Shaun of the Dead is either a zombie flick masking as a comedy, or a comedy masking as a zombie flick, or Beautiful Girls masking as a zombie comedy. (Garden State is just Beautiful Girlsall over again, masking as a new film.)
Different sequences in Shaun of the Dead make arguments for each possibility, and though there's all kinds of first-timer desperation and indecision dawdling around on the screen--oversold punchlines, uneasily balanced tones, unnecessary camera movements--the movie also has the cheek and the buoyancy to make a virtue out of its homespun, film-school dropout stylings. The low-level, layabout farce between Shaun and his juvenile, emphatically inert roommate Ed (Nick Frost) is clearly the heart of the movie, and both the actors and the screenplay are engaging enough to make you care about this slothful twosome. Simon Pegg, the spirited redhead who plays Shaun (and who also co-authored the picture), is an especially chipper presence,and the best joke in the film is that it never fulfills its generic obligation to push his friendship with Ed aside in favor of the obligatory girlfriend. Little else in the movie comes as a surprise. The supporting cast, all dizzy friends and daffy parents, connect all the same dots that every Working Title comedy has to hit (think Four Weddings and a Funeral, High Fidelity, Bridget Jones's Diary). The punchlines are clever, but you can usually see them coming froma few beats away, although the emergency zombie-impersonations are truly inspired. You enjoy the film without ever quite thinking that a Mr. Show sketch couldn't cover the same territory with quicker wit and a surer sense of scale. By the time the screenplay is requiring Shaun to shoot his mother point-blank while a hellish orange light pours into the neighborhoodpub, the film seems to have misjudged its ratio of sincerity to spoofishness, and it doesn't have enough surprises or enough genuine smarts up its sleeve to justify the rather listless and increasingly bizarre closing act. Still, it's a fun night at the movies, with the best Dire Straits joke you've heard in a while, and the final shot is well worth waiting for.
By contrast, there are times when the final shot of Garden State seems like it's never going to arrive. Compared toShaun of the Dead, writer-director Braff's feature debut doesn't waste any time bungling its ambitions and losing its tone. The first sequence of the movie puts Andrew Largeman (played, you guessed it, by Braff) in the middle of a distressed airplane, zoned out in his seat just as the fuselage is ripping apart and oxygen masks are falling into the hands of flailing passengers. This scene of terror in the skies is a wildly misjudged metaphor for Andrew's restive spirit, and if it weren't for The Terminal earlier this summer, Garden State would easily take the cake as the crassest and least likely appropriation of airspace anxieties in this era of Orange Alerts.
Garden State doesn't ask of Andrew what Shaun of the Dead does of its own frustrated protagonist--he doesn't have to shoot his mother, but that's because she's already dead by the time the movie begins, and she's barely in the ground before the film is already making cheap jokes at her expense. Andrew's aunt Sylvia trills an off-key, Jersey-toned "Three Times a Lady" at the funeral, and she's sewn Andrew a new shirt out of the extra wallpaper and upholstery fabric that dearly departed Mama left behind. Braff's impassive face, which he can't resist showcasing in serial but unrevealing close-ups, seems mostly intended to contrast the zaniness and petty annoyance of everything and everyone else on screen. The bad habits that Sofia Coppola indulged in Lost in Translation, dignifying her underwritten characters by humiliating and caricaturing everyone else in the film, are taken to new heights (or lows) in Garden State, which betrays an equally bald ambition to win the heart of every twenty something ticket-buyer who wants to be assured that their tiny suburban dramas and choked, inchoate emotions are the stuff of piquant romance and Everyman tragedy. Lacking anything like Translation's gossamer cinematography, its poetic editing rhythms, or its crowning Bill Murray performance,Garden State has an equal penchant for self-commodification but with much, much less to commodify. It's dispiriting to see such a pandering, market-tested, and clunkily written picture get so puffed up with a belief in its own integrity;the movie has a Shins CD where its heart should be.
Resourceful stage actors like Ron Leibman, Jean Smart, and Denis O'Hare get squirreled away in small parts where they're helpless to combat the improbable balance of cliché and total lunacy. What we're doing at the bottom of a rainy quarry in rural Jersey(where O'Hare and his wife inhabit a solitary trailer) is never quite clear, until we discover that the whole scene is a compulsory set-up to get Andrew, his kinda-girlfriend Sam (Natalie Portman), and his kinda-best friend Mark (Peter Sarsgaard)bellowing out their wordless anomie. It's a perfect though unwitting metaphor for the movie, crying out with nothing to say. Portman works hard to keep things jumping with an energetic, hummingbird performance that, against all odds, manages to be more than a precious rehash of her Beautiful Girls turn. She's stuck again as the romantic daydream of a blank slate,and she's marooned in the kind of movie that thinks giving her a black African brother is a joke in itself, but she's still a vibrant presence. She almost singlehandedly saves a scene in her own pet cemetery where Braff has to force out a heavily over-written but only half-felt account of his paraplegic mother's life and death, but even she is helpless to resist Braff's sheer perversity in writing, directing, and playing a scene of romantic communion inside the bathtub where Mom gasped her final breath. Portman also seems to be the muse for Braff's grand formal gestures, appearing in his big crane shot over the neighborhood, his big special-effect backward zoom, and his slow-motion dolly shot played for faux-hipster laughs. Everything inGarden State feels canned and compulsory, all the way to the mawkish airport conclusion. When your movie not only holds up Good Will Hunting as an honored inspiration but makes the Damon-Driver romance seem like Brief Encounter by comparison, it's not a bad time to call someone with some actual experience in directing. Not everyone can be Orson Welles, Zach. As it turns out, not everyone can even be Ted Demme.
A boy could get to feeling like the art of the scrappy, youth-targeted comedy has been lost, and that's where Jared and Jerusha Hess, the husband and wife behind the breakout hit Napoleon Dynamite, start to look like minor saviors. LikeShaun of the Dead and Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite mostly implies that its youthful filmmakers may not have seen a movie made any time before Easy Rider, if not The Empire Strikes Back. Napoleon Dynamite,though, actually seems to have absorbed some of the funky eccentricities and velveteen textures of disco-era image culture into an actual do-it-yourself sensibility. The movie plays, hilariously, like Revenge of the Nerds directed by David Gordon Green, which is a formula calculus too weird to be called "stealing." The zooming pans and panoramic vistas are as funny in context as is the hysterically mannered discontent of Napoleon himself, a frizzy-haired dork who is fully, disdainfully convinced that he is way cooler than the arrogant pricks who torment him after study hall. Napoleon is right and wrong about this. True, he has a misguided way of appropriating cultural refuse and emblems of terrible taste as though they were marks of distinction. But then, the imperious pride with which he wears bad suits, tosses out kooky terms of endearment (he tells his prom date, "Your sleeves are nice--I like how they puff up"), and executes deliriously daffy dances pretty much win us over. You start wondering if your idea of cool is anywhere as cool as Napoleon's. Jon Heder, playing our avatar of sideways funkiness,has devised at least eight different frequencies of contemptuous huffs at the losers in his midst, and he has an enormously self-conscious physical vocabulary as Napoleon, yet it's still a fairly easygoing performance. Heder keeps finding new ways to animate the character, and Napoleon never settles down as a stooge, a clown, or a young rebel. He just wants to be left alone long enough to draw half-lion/half-tigers and think of new ways to totally kick ass in the theater of his mind.
Lots of people have slammed Napoleon Dynamite for condescending to its characters, and I can't say I share their concerns at all. Napoleon and his acquaintances, including his pricelessly deadpan friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez), are so sui generis that it's hard to take them as representative of some class of people the Hesses mean to stick it to. More than that, the spry joy of the filmmaking and the uncluttered liveliness of the comedy ubiquitously imply that the movie was as much fun to make as it is to watch. It's hard to imagine that a film would devise such a sublime climactic set-piece for its star character if it didn't enjoy his exuberance. Compared, say, to Wes Anderson's pictures, which often seem hell-benton burying the pleasures of eccentric characterization beneath the piled-on layers of production design, highbrow ironies,and epicurean tastes in pop music, Napoleon Dynamite seems to shoot from the hip and to relish the spontaneity of improbable people played by game, frisky actors. There are a few overbaked performances and overstretched conceits even here--I never much warmed to Jon Gries' rendition of Uncle Rico, and the subplot involving the mail-order girlfriend LaFawnduh(!) is hardly less condescending than Garden State's African exchange student. But there's a real heart beating in this movie, which delectates in its retro aesthetic but enlivens it, too, with a new and funky point of view. Valour suits,flared pants, and skin-tight T-shirts have rarely looked so good, and the film takes such geeky pleasure in showing them off that we get caught up in the geekiness.
Shaun of the Dead wants to entertain us, but it plays things safe by finding something specific to poke fun at. it connects often enough with its audience that we're pleased, but not often enough that we're genuinely impressed, or at least I wasn't. Garden State just wants to be loved, and if we happen to express that love by plunking down for the soundtrack CD, well then, so be it. To be honest, Napoleon Dynamite also seems a little opportunistic, wishing with all of its corduroy heart to score with its audiences as a newfangled cult object. The key differences, though, are that Napoleon is illegitimately funny and fresh, it doesn't glom on to any obvious formula, and the movie infectiously celebrates its own hammy weirdness. As Missy Elliot has been espousing for some time now, finding your own inner freak is a beautiful thing. I wish my inner freak were as cool as this one.
Grades:
Shaun of the Dead: C+
Garden State: D
Napoleon Dynamite: B
Rating: ** [2 stars out of 5]
Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) may be the most unique person in Preston, Idaho. He's the loner in high school who spends his days drawing and playing tetherball by himself. He lives with his Grandma (Sandy Martin), her pet llama, his internet-obsessed brother (Aaron Ruell), and his wacky Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), the door-to-door breast enhancer salesman.
When a new student, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), arrives from Mexico, Napoleon believes his has found a kindred soul and together they concoct a plan that will make Pedro class president and Napoleon a hero - or at least help him get a date to the prom with another loner, Deb (Tina Majorino).
If you take Poindexter from Revenge Of The Nerds and give him as much charisma as, let's say a wet rag, put him in moon boots and let him master one facial expression - then you have Napoleon Dynamite. The minute you see him, you know who he is - an uber-geek. He has the look of a great character, but he doesn't have the story or the comedy to support his "greatness".
There are some brilliant moments of bizarre comedy, and huge gaps in between with stuff that isn't even slightly amusing. It's not broad humor, but more that droll, dry wit that usually appeals to our comedic tastes, but not for an extended period of time because it's the same punch line - stupid is as stupid does. This idea started out as a short film and probably should have stayed that way; there just isn't enough material to stretch into a feature-length movie.
Grade: B-
EXCERPT: "The movie merits a low-wattage recommendation even though it's short on things to say."
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 4]
The underdog with the superhero name is the mutant offspring of the last picked and the left behind.
His typical day makes your worst high school memory seem like a triumph by comparison and his self-absorption makes the average teenager's myopic world view seem downright global.
When he's not playing tether ball - alone - or sketching his favorite animal - the liger, a cross between a lion and a tiger - he's doing, well, nothing much else. He does enjoy the cafeteria tater tots so much that he stows them in his parachute pants pocket to eat later.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is a teen comedy only in the sense that most of the characters are teenagers. They include the mouth-breathing, Brillo-haired Napoleon; the Mexican immigrant Pedro, who is his best friend; and the dimpled girl next door whose ponytail juts out at a 45-degree tilt and who is Napoleon's secret admirer. Napoleon's older brother Kip searches for his soul mate in Internet chat rooms and their uncle misses the 1980s so much that he looks into the feasibility of time travel.
But Napoleon has dreams, too. He wants to be Pedro's bodyguard if his friend is elected student council president. Now that would be sweet!
The slow burn and deadpan dumbness of "Napoleon Dynamite" is a perfect fit for its minimalist aesthetic.
Its quirky, lurching, uncomfortable-in-its-own-body, adolescent physicality comes from Jared Hess, a Brigham Young University film graduate and writer-director making his feature film debut.
Hess grew up in the same small Idaho town where the film was made and the characters and insights are an exaggerated version of the things he observed and the people he knows, some of whom he is actually related to. It's as hard to describe the film as it is to the explain the main character, played by Jon Heder, a fellow BYU alumnus making his feature-film acting debut.
Napoleon is a defiantly delivered collection of absurd mannerisms and dialogue surrounded by an asthmatic wheeze and delivered in the annoying whine of a child not getting his way by a pale and flabby beanpole whose eyes are half-closed whenever he speaks. It's as if Hess is filtering Wes Anderson's "Rushmore" through the outsider sensibility of "American Movie."
Anyone who thinks the film condescends or is being cruel to these characters by mocking their taste or personal style hasn't been insulted lately by what passes for film comedy.
The characters' stubborn individuality - and the modest victories that come from defying everyone's expectations but your own - help make "Napoleon Dynamite" seem almost as heroic as its name.
PHOTO CAPTION:
Jon Heder is "Napoleon Dynamite." The uber-nerd goes through life hanging out with his friend Pedro, nursing a crush on the girl next door and drawing pictures of ligers.
Rating: * 1/2 [1.5 stars out of 4]
There is a kind of studied stupidity that sometimes passes as humor, and Jared Hess' "Napoleon Dynamite" pushes it as far as it can go. Its hero is the kind of nerd other nerds avoid, and the movie is about his steady progress toward complete social unacceptability. Even his victory toward the end, if it is a victory, comes at the cost of clowning before his fellow students.
We can laugh at comedies like this for two reasons: Because we feel superior to the characters, or because we pity or like them. I do not much like laughing down at people, which is why the comedies of Adam Sandler make me squirmy (most people, I know, laugh because they like him). In the case of Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), I certainly don't like him, but then the movie makes no attempt to make him likable. Truth is, it doesn't even try to be a comedy. It tells his story and we are supposed to laugh because we find humor the movie pretends it doesn't know about.
Napoleon is tall, ungainly, depressed, and happy to be left alone. He has red hair that must take hours in front of the mirror to look so bad. He wants us to know he is lonely by choice. He lives outside of town with his brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), whose waking life is spent online in chat rooms, and with his grandmother, who is laid up fairly early in a dune buggy accident. It could funny to have a granny on a dune buggy; I smile at least at the title of the Troma film "Rabid Grannies."
But in this film the accident is essentially an aside, an excuse to explain the arrival on the farm of Napoleon's Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a man for whom time has stood still ever since the 1982 high school sports season, when things, he still believes, should have turned out differently. Rico is a door-to-door salesman for a herbal breast enlargement potion, a product that exists only for the purpose of demonstrating Rico's cluelessness. In an age when even the Fuller Brush Man would be greeted with a shotgun (does anyone even remember him?), Rico's product exists in the twilight zone.
Life at high school is daily misery for Napoleon, who is picked on cruelly and routinely. He finally makes a single friend, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), the school's only Latino, and manages his campaign for class president. He has a crush on a girl named Deb (Tina Majorino), but his strategy is so inept that it has the indirect result of Deb going to the prom with Pedro. His entire prom experience consists of cutting in.
Watching "Napoleon Dynamite," I was reminded of "Welcome to the Dollhouse," Todd Solondz's brilliant 1996 film, starring Heather Matarazzo as an unpopular junior high school girl. But that film was informed by anger and passion, and the character fought back. Napoleon seems to passively invite ridicule, and his attempts to succeed have a studied indifference, as if he is mocking his own efforts.
I'm told the movie was greeted at Sundance with lots of laughter, but then Sundance audiences are concerned with being cool, and to sit through this film in depressed silence would not be cool, however urgently it might be appropriate.
Napoleon Dynamite (Fox Searchlight) was this year's up-from-nowhere hit at Sundance, where "quirky" regionalism plus a sort of East Village zombie deadpan goes over big with the folks who are too cool for school. To me it looked like a Mormon stab at Wes Anderson--which might be, for some people, an enticement. The director, Jared Hess (who devised the script with his wife, Jerusha, both recent graduates of Brigham Young), uses the Idaho farm landscape cannily, as a great blank stage on which affectless nerds move in horizontal lines, like sleepwalkers, or stagger back into the empty landscape toward the horizon line. The movie has some indelible moments, but it tends to put your brain at half-mast.
Half-mast is how the movie's teenage protagonist moves through the world. Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is neither Napoleonic nor dynamic, which is, I guess, the joke. (The name, an Elvis Costello alter ego, makes Hess the second Mormon after Neil LaBute, in The Shape of Things, to use Costello to no particular end recently.) He's tall and skinny with frizzy hair, and he breathes through a sea-anemone-shaped mouth nearly filled by two giant front teeth. What you notice, though, are his eyes--or, rather, the lack of them. Most of the time, Napoleon stares under lids three-quarters closed at a spot several inches to the east of his lap. When the new kid at school, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), turns out to be a mouth-breather who stares dopily in the same direction, you know it's a love match. They can look at nothing and trade monotonic non sequiturs all day.
The director loves those non sequiturs. This is the sort of movie where there's a shock cut from the placid farm of Napoleon's grandmother (Sandy Martin) to a buggy speeding toward a sand dune, then an insert to show you it's grandma in the buggy. Then grandma realizes she's about to hurtle into oblivion. While she recovers from a cracked coccyx, the resourceful hustler Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) comes to look after Napoleon and his older brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), a 30-year-old stay-at-home bed-wetter who spends hours in an online chat room with a Michigan woman named LaFawnduh. Uncle Rico has never gotten over a football loss in 1982, and he makes the brothers watch a video in which he throws one football after another in the direction of the camera. "This is pretty much the worst video ever made," says Napoleon. "Like you would know that," sneers Kip.
I loved that exchange. And after about 40 minutes (of 86), I began to enjoy the one-thing-after-anotherness and the minimalist wit of the actors embodying many different species of nerd. Soon, a plot sort of half kicks in, and Napoleon finds himself half-working to get a date for the prom and the unassertive Pedro elected school president. The wit is in what isn't said--in the paralyzing horribleness of Napoleon's courtship, the revulsion of the girl when he sketches a supremely unflattering portrait, and the sight of the pair entering the prom to the strains of "Forever Young," as if anyone would want to be watching this.
Well, there are blessings. Just when we're sinking into a Todd Solondz morass, Napoleon Dynamite becomes a sort of half-romance, when Napoleon half-expresses affection for the shy Deb (Tina Majorino) by presenting her with a large frozen bass. The climax is the only all-out moment: a triumphant dance number in which the tension between Napoleon's frozen face and suddenly elastic, bopping body is jaw-dropping. Napoleon Dynamite is too low-wattage to be a true nerd anthem, but it's charming in retrospect, when you're freed from the narcoleptic pace to think back on the queerly beautiful tableaux and well-timed gags. It's like Wes Anderson on Quaaludes.
PHOTO CAPTION:
Quirkiness ... Mormon-style
Rating: *** 1/2 [3 1/2 stars out of 5]
If Wes Anderson had directed "Dumb and Dumberer," it would have been a lot like "Napoleon Dynamite."
Named after an old Italian man writer/director Jared Hess met on the streets of Chicago, the pic is as random and absurd as its genesis. Set and shot in Hess' rural hometown of Preston, Idaho, it follows its titular misfit (Jon Heder)--a tall, gawky lout with a tight red 'fro and sweet silver moon boots--as he navigates the requisite teen rites of passage: school dances and class presidential elections. Meanwhile, Napoleon is largely left to his own devices as his 32-year-old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) spends his days looking for romance in Internet chatrooms, his quad-running grandmother (Sandy Martin) breaks her coccyx, and his Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) constantly reminisces about his "glory" days as a football player while going door-to-door selling herbal breast enhancers and in general ruining Napoleon's life.
When his best friend-by-default Pedro (Efren Ramirez) decides to oppose the stuck-up Summer Wheatly (Hilary Duff's sister Haylie) in the student elections because he's the only guy at school with a mustache, the boys draw upon their knowledge of piñatas, cows and a surprise special talent to triumph in the name of all social outcasts everywhere.
The appeal of "Napoleon Dynamite's" humor will admittedly likely fall along generational lines. Hess' script, co-written with his wife Jerusha, is compulsively quotable: As a pickup line, Napoleon says, "I see you're drinking one percent. Is that because you think you're fat?" And Uncle Rico boasts, "How much you want to bet I can throw a football over them mountains?" And there are countless indelibly absurd images, edited with a keen eye and ear for comic timing: Napoleon slinging hot dish at his grandmother's pet llama Tina; Napoleon towing Rollerblader Kip into town on his bike; Napoleon sprinting down a dusty country road in a suit and tie so that he won't be late to pick up his date for the dance.
Moreover, Heder's droopy-eyed, slack-jawed delivery is a hoot. Constantly scowling and perpetually bitching, he delivers every line in a shout. Both as written and as acted, every single character in "Napoleon Dynamite"--from Napoleon's love interest Deb (Tina Majorino), who sells handicrafts door-to-door, takes Glamour Shots photos and pulls all of her hair into a ponytail on one side, to LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), Kip's online girlfriend who transforms him into a playah--is richly characterized and distinctly drawn. And, even as the ridiculousness escalates, they each show a lot of heart
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 4]
Jared Hess' "Napoleon Dynamite" will, fortunately, have to follow Abel Gance's "Napoleon" in listings, as it does in virtually every other respect.
Its hero, no Bonaparte, is instead a nerd, dweeb, spaz, jerk, twit, geek, doof, dork, dip, dud. This is not Brad Pitt as Achilles.
Napoleon lives in the wide, parched and rather bare back-end of Idaho. Long and skinny, with strange tics, rioting red hair and a face that seems caught between panic and sleep, he (Jon Heder) is lost in some personal Russia, without a road back to France.
Far from the dumbest kid in high school, the absurdly named noodle has an aura of futility but also impish tactics and allies. Napoleon's brother is little Kip (Aaron Ruell), who seems to be an embryonic 35 and has a sunken chest that begins somewhere in his brain. Kip nurses hopes of mail-order love (or lust), while Nap spends his workout time at one of those playground poles where you swing a ball on a rope.
Hess' film, if not quite original, is a true bite of site. It takes the flourishing infatuation with nerds past "Revenge of the Nerds," "Rushmore," "Chuck & Buck," "Gummo" and "Welcome to the Dollhouse" into a zone where dorkiness is so pervasive that even Diane Arbus would have passed this place by, her lens cap tightly closed.
Mediocre but motivated is Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a muscled smoothie who sells plastic cookware to bored wives and wears a '70s Wal-Mart wardrobe. If Rico is energy, anti-energy is the new kid in school, migrant Pedro (Efren Ramirez), a gentle boy, Latin in courtesy, but such a solemn siesta of thought and speech that his run for school president seems like a Ralph Nader fantasy.
It's a vacuum-packed Idaho spud of a world, but funny. Hess' precisely grooved cast includes peachy Shondrella Avery as LaFawnduh, the mail-order dream; Tina Majorino as hopeful Deb; Dietrich Bader as a martial arts maniac. Jon Heder, full of cranky, baby-man snits and sneers, his voice in a form of senile puberty, advances well past Carrot Top and more than fills the comic niche left by Jim Varney.
Everything is seen head-on and square, boxed for premature death. The visit to a huge chicken shed is scary, a sort of poultry Treblinka. The high school is the kind of place where a great many of us felt like nerds, but very few of us had, like Napoleon, a llama who gazes at him as if to say: Loser.
Rating: *** 1/2 [3.5 stars out of 4] Artistic Rating: *** 1/2 [3.5 stars out of 4]
Comments: Scathingly funny. Voted most unforgettable character.
Directed By: Jared Hess
Starring: Jon Heder, Jon Gries, Aaron Ruell, Efren Ramirez, Tina Majorino, Diedrich Bader
Written by: Jared Hess, Jerusha Hess
Rated: PG for thematic elements, language
Running Time: 1 hr: 26 min
Nudity Alert: mild or none
Sexuality Alert: mild or none
Lanuage Alert: mild or none
Violence Alert: moderate
Drug Alert: mild or none
Scriptural References:
1 Corinthians 12:22-23
2 Corinthians 10:7-10
Acts 4:13
High school nerds everywhere have a new king. Napoleon Dynamite, the surprise indie hit of the summer, is scoring big with younger audiences who can't seem to get enough of the titular slack-jawed loser.
The film is riding a ground swell of enthusiastic support as it begins to open in more and more theaters nationwide. There are two reasons why. The first is a brilliant and memorable characterization by newcomer Jon Heder. The second is a solid screenplay co written by director Jared Hess that absolutely nails its depiction of the "uncool" members of high school life.
Inspired by the unusual characters with whom Hess grew up in rural Idaho, Napoleon Dynamite follows its title character through his days as a social misfit and school outcast. How else might you explain a guy who wears moon boots, carries tater tots in his pants pocket for an afternoon snack and spends his free time playing tetherballS alone?
He's not entirely easy to like. Surly, argumentative and opinionated, Napoleon alienates just about everybody around him as he marches to his own idiosyncratic beat. Perhaps he comes by it honestly because his family tree apparently grows nothing but geeks, freaks, and losers. His 32-year old brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell) spends most of his day chatting with "babes" on the Internet and his uncle Rico (Jon Gries) is forever stuck in his glory days of the 1980s.
When Pedro (Efren Ramirez), the new kid from Mexico, arrives at Idaho's Preston High with a "sweet" bike and a personality that mirrors Napoleon's, a friendship is formed. And when Pedro wonders if he should run for student body president, it is Napoleon who says "Heck yeah," pointing out that he's the only kid in school who can grow a mustache. He even offers to become his campaign manager and bodyguard.
Heder is a laugh riot as Napoleon. By underplaying all of the character's quirks and absurdities he brings an aura of familiarity to the role. It's as if we kind of remember someone like him in high school. Of course, we never got to know him real well because, back then, it wouldn't have been cool to be seen with him.
Hess does a great job in coaching his cast to adopt a graceless style that adds to the general and genial geekiness of the film. While Heder sets the standard, Efren Ramirez, Tina Majorino, as a shy and awkward love interest, Aaron Ruell, and Jon Gries all make strong contributions to the edginess that makes the movie all the more compelling and amusing.
Even though we spend the majority of the time laughing at Napoleon's goofiness, Hess shows that he has a soft spot for the character. At one point Napoleon laments that no girl would want to go to the big dance with him because he has no cool "skills" requiring numchuks or the bow staff. As the film progresses we are pleasantly surprised when Hess allows his super-dork a moment to shine.
What most of us were too immature to see when we were in high school is that the world is big enough for all types - even the Napoleon Dynamites among us. God embraces everyone and has called everyone to a purpose. Who knows? Today's dork might very well be tomorrow's hero.
Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary: And those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness. 1 Corinthians 12:22-23 (KJV)
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 5]
Gosh! It's "Napoleon Dynamite," a trashy Midwestern remake of "Rushmore" with lots of wry laughs, bad food, and a pet llama called Tina. Written and directed by the young husband-wife team Jared and Jerusha Hess, the film was an audience favorite at Sundance and won Best Feature at the US Comedy Arts Festival.
The formula is almost identical to Wes Anderson's brilliant film: take an oddball outsider with lots of energy and bizarre ideas, give him a funny sidekick, a peculiar family, a geeky love interest, an immature adult antagonist, and plop him into a high school crawling with bullies, jocks, bad fashion, bad food, and all the other nostalgic detritus of American adolescence. Steep in deadpan humor and wry jokes, add just a pinch of truth, and you've got yourself a high school hit.
At the film's center, Jon Heder plays the droopy-eyed hero of the title. But he's no Jason Schwartzmann, and Jon Gries as Uncle Rico can't compete with Bill Murray. Perhaps this comparison isn't quite fair either--"Napoleon Dynamite" is much sillier than "Rushmore," and some of the jokes are gutbustingly funny. While it doesn't add anything new to the formula, it's a genuinely hilarious comedy.
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 stars out of 4]
The general rule of entertainment is the more of an outright dork a character is, the more ultimately lovable he must be. So it comes as a pleasant surprise that the title character of Napoleon Dynamite, played by newcomer Jon Heder, is really just an awful kid.
For Napoleon, woeful fashion sense and a gaping lack of social skills are not keys to a beneficent inner life or any great, untapped wisdom. Rather, Napoleon is a truculent mouth-breather who lies pathologically and treats everyone, from a yearning fellow geek to his grandmother's pet goat, with impatience and contempt.
Napoleon sulkily goes about his life getting slammed up against lockers by popular kids and crafting mediocre drawings of "ligers," a cross between lions and tigers. He finds an unlikely friend in Mexican immigrant Pedro (Efren Ramirez). Both enjoy speaking as little as possible and smiling even less. There are a few love interests, a climactic school election and even a dance.
Napoleon Dynamite is the hugely original creation of 24-year-old Jared Hess, who co-wrote the script with his wife, Jerusha Hess. Hess grew up in Preston, Idaho, the setting of Napoleon Dynamite, and he astutely and even lovingly captures the tiny rural town. You're forgiven for thinking the movie takes place in the '70s or '80s, thanks to Napoleon's permed hair and moon boots, his friend Deb's (Tina Majorino) side ponytail and stirrup pants, or the ambient kitsch that informs all the costumes and sets. But this is a modern-day movie.
Despite its staunch indie roots, the cast of Napoleon also makes room for some mainstream elements, such as Haylie Duff -- older sister to Hilary -- as a popular, sneering cheerleader, and the aforementioned Majorino, a former child star (Corinna, Corinna).
After performing well at the Sundance Film Festival and the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, Napoleon is getting a major push from Fox Searchlight (partnering with MTV). But despite its high school backdrop and kid-friendly PG rating, this comedy is not going to feel very funny to most audiences, and probably won't appeal to viewers younger than 16.
Napoleon could be seen as the gruffer, sloppier, less witty cousin to Wes Anderson's superb Rushmore -- hardly a hit itself. But how commercially viable Napoleon Dynamite proves to be will hardly matter to those who discover something kindred in it. Although it sometimes feels like a one-note joke stretched out too long, it's still probably the most unique comedy you'll see all year.
Napoleon Dynamite is not just the title of director and co-writer Jared Hess1 debut feature, but also the name given to its lead character -- a four-eyed beanpole of a teenager with an elastic-intensive wardrobe and a mass of unkempt reddish-blond curls that resembles the rubber top of a giant human pencil. Mostly, though, it's a catchy catchphrase in search of a movie -- a thrift-shop Wes Anderson pastiche masquerading as the latest in cult-film haute couture. Hess1 film arrives more or less fresh from Sundance, where it was acquired by Fox Searchlight during the festival's first weekend for an estimated $3 million, but judging from the reaction there -- and at a local screening I attended two weekends ago -- the movie seems destined to divide audiences. Either you find Napoleon Dynamite the epitome of all that's right with American independent cinema today or exactly the kind of movie by which independent movies may sow the seeds of their own demise.
Set in Hess1 hometown of Preston, Idaho, Napoleon Dynamite is about its titular supergeek (Jon Heder) and how his fondness for one-man tetherball games and sub-Jackass stunts performed on an undersized bicycle do little to endear him to the other kids in school. Neither does Napoleon harbor much fondness for his 30-something older brother (Aaron Ruell), who whiles away his days in online chat rooms, nor for his ATV-racing grandmother (Sandy Martin), who insists that Napoleon care for her pet llama. And when Napoleon speaks, the words come out in an exasperated huff, as though the world and all its denizens were just one big, cruel burden placed on his shoulders for the devil's amusement. Of course, similar things could be said of the iconoclastic misfits at the center of almost any youth picture that prefers oddballs to prom kings, including three fine entries from earlier this year -- Noi, The Girl Next Door and Mean Girls -- and, in particular, Anderson's Rushmore, a film on which Hess seems to have overdosed. (Like Anderson, Hess is a detail fetishist, and while he lacks anything resembling Anderson's fluid sense of visual direction, he's packed Napoleon Dynamite with the hideous relics of his own coming-of-age: knee socks, moon boots, Velcro-sealed Trapper Keepers, top-loading VCRs.)
But those movies had outsider heroes we could actually relate to -- we could get behind their Sisyphean struggles to make their voices heard in the world and break out of their socially dysfunctional prisons. Napoleon Dynamite, conversely, does nothing but hold Napoleon (and his entourage of eccentric friends and relatives) up for ridicule; they1re a bit like the sissy characters in pre-Code Hollywood films, or almost any characters in the lazier exercises of the Coen brothers. Up to and including a breakdancing finale that some have mistakenly identified as the movie's compassionate turning point, Hess is so eager to make us guffaw that he solicits only our crassest instincts, asking us to revel in the misfortunes of those who look or talk "funny" or -- in what makes for an unsavory underpinning to much of the film's alleged humor -- who live somewhere in the neighborhood of the poverty-line. If Napoleon Dynamite really is, as reported, a semiautobiographical exercise, it is one of the most astoundingly self-hating such exercises in memory.
Yet the trick works for some, as it did for the throngs of college-age moviegoers who burst their appendixes laughing through a recent promotional screening. And indeed, there's a sense in which Napoleon Dynamite is more promotion than movie -- from Fox's agreeing to distribute the film to more than 1,000 theaters to its aggressive Internet advertising campaign, even to a Napoleon Dynamite frequent-viewer club that rewards repeat ticket buyers with eligibility for prize drawings. And so it may be that Hess has passed with flying colors through his own initiation ritual, delivering the sort of mass-marketable crossover product that helps make the indie-film world seem ever less like a creative universe unto itself and more like a lobster tank full of aspiring Hollywood hacks ripe for the boiling.
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 5]
Dynamite is right: Twenty-four-year old writer-director Jared Hess and his 23-year-old wife and co-writer, Jerusha Hess, may have little previous filmmaking experience, but like their titular hero, they've got "skills." Their first feature is one of the most original and quirkily endearing debuts since Wes Anderson's BOTTLE ROCKET. Awkward, imperfectly socialized teenager Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) lives with his grandmother (Sandy Martin) and even geekier older brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), in a small ranch house under the clear, blue, wide-open skies of Preston, Idaho. With his often elasticized waistband hiked high above his hips, pant legs tucked into his moon boots and the whole ensemble topped off with a novelty T-shirt, Napoleon is every dork who's ever been pounded by a dodgeball or shoved into a locker. Like so many before him, Napoleon's compensated by developing a belligerent edge and self-confidence in the strangest things; he's particularly proud of his ability to draw, and is convinced that his doodles of dragons, warriors and strange beasts like "ligers" -- half lion, half tiger, totally wild -- will prove to be a sure way to score sweet, sweet chicks. Napoleon has his eye on Deb (Tina Majorino), a shy, easily overlooked classmate who's saving for college by selling homemade boondoggle key-chains door-to-door and shooting glamour portraits of Preston locals in her parents' house. But before Napoleon can make his move, she's swiped out from under him by Pedro (Efren Ramirez), the blank-faced new kid in school who has become Napoleon's friend by default. Napoleon can deal with the disappointment, but what's totally ruining his life is the surprise appearance of sleazy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries, complete with gold chains and porno mustache) who moves out of his gold Dodge van and into Napoleon's house after Grandma injures her coccyx ATV-ing in the Idaho desert. A former football semistar whose gridiron career never extended beyond Preston High, Uncle Rico now dreams of making it rich peddling 23-piece plastic-container sets and herbal breast enhancers. Kip partners up with Rico, but Napoleon just wants him out of the house. Imagine a drier, funnier WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE (1995) minus the cruelty, and you'd have a pretty close approximation of this totally unexpected delight. Both Hesses and a surprisingly large number of their very talented cast and crew are graduates of Brigham Young University's film program: Could BYU one day join the esteemed ranks of USC and NYU?
Rating: 8 out of 10
Imagine Dumb and Dumber as an independent art-house flick. This Sundance Film Festival crowd-pleaser follows the dorky exploits of the title character, a tall, skinny kid who seems born to scorn. You can1t walk by him in the high school corridor without slamming him into a locker.
Jon Heder plays him with a single, slightly pained but determined expression that seems to work in all circumstances. Once you meet Nap's family, it's clear why he's the way he is. They1re just as comically weird. So are his friends.
The hit-or-miss plot hangs on a class election. Can the geeks really unseat the glory boys? But, unlike in a zillion other teen flicks, it doesn1t matter. The jokes here revolve around the characters and not the circumstances. You1ll laugh. You1ll feel silly for doing it. Then you1ll do it again.
Rating: 75 out of 100
In the grand independent film tradition of Welcome to the Dollhouse and Rushmore comes yet another film about misguided but lovable geeks in small-town America. This seems to be a trend among films at Sundance and American independent comedy dramas in general. Like The Station Agent, Lawn Dogs and other films, Napoleon Dynamite fits into the misfit sub genre. It's nothing new (remember On the Waterfront?), but it seems the fastest way for young filmmakers to make a hit movie is to write a screenplay about small-town quirky people and sell it as middle-brow art to the cinema-going middle class in cities big enough to have art house theatres.
Napoleon Dynamite stars Jon Heder as a geek who makes every other geek on film look good. This guy is so uncoordinated, so despised by his classmates, and so downright unlovable, that it is hard to think they could have even made a film about him. But rather than being condescending to the small-town Idaho population, this film instead celebrates Napoleon as a freak, yes, but also a guy with a good heart. When Napoleon's grandmother leaves him and his 31-year-old do-nothing brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) in the hands of his idiotic Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), he must deal with family squabbles, the school prom and an election. Enter the new student, and Napoleon's only friend, Pedro (Efren Ramirez). Together with Pedro, whose ability to grow facial hair, have a kick ass bike and "score with chicks", makes him a definite friend to have, Napoleon goes about fighting his battles, for freedom from his uncle and brother, and for acceptance at school.
This film captures the doom and gloom of high school experienced by many of us very well, along with the limitations of life in a small town. It also shows us that those who buck the trends and who are completely original are often the most interesting people. Gries gets many of the funniest lines. The go-nowhere brother is still living in the past, way in the past, trying to relive past high school football glories. His new career, selling Tupperware, is off to a pretty good start when he enlists the help of his nephew Kip, a man obsessed with Internet chat rooms and his cyber girlfriend LaFawnduh. Napoleon cannot take either of these two guys anymore and they equally loathe him. But a love interest creeps into his life when the neighbour from two farms over, Deb (Tina Majorino), stops by to sell hand-woven crafts and Napoleon's awkwardness freaks her out. But when Pedro asks her to the prom, Napoleon is forced to go ask one of the popular cheerleader girls. Of course, this is all an elaborate prank, but he fails to really recognize this and instead Pedro, the kind soul that he is, realizes that Napoleon and Deb would make a pretty good couple. In return for this, or maybe not, because we are always unclear what Napoleon's motivations are, he thinks it is a good idea for Pedro to run for school president. Pedro has about as much of a chance as Ralph Nader but through the help of Kip's internet girlfriend who has come to visit, and some pretty impressive dance moves to a song by Jamiroquai, Napoleon saves the day.
You must see it to believe it because this film is entirely original. See this one soon, and you1ll be voting for Pedro as well. The movie's final line will have you in stitches. It's the most romantic line ever said on film!
Rating: 1/2 star out of 4
A hit at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the soulless Napoleon Dynamite earned Jared Hess inexplicable comparisons to Wes Anderson by virtue of the detail-oriented film being produced on a shoestring budget, except its utter contempt of character puts it on par with the worst anti-humanist comedies of all time (Dumb and Dumberer comes immediately to mind). In a remote town in Idaho (circa the present, except everyone wants to return to 1982 for reasons unknown), a dim-witted, aesthetically challenged loser named Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) spends much of his time feeding his pet llama, throwing pieces of meat at his Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), fighting with his brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), and condescending to the world at large, namely his Mexican best friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez). An elaborate non sequitur, Napoleon Dynamite traffics in one depth-less character after another and watches as they blindly engage in a spectacle of shallow bumblefuckery. Hess contents himself by throwing one random joke after another at the screen (a bully smashes the tater tots Napoleon keeps in his side pocket, the boys at the local chicken farm are served egg juice by their farmer bosses, Pedro's thugged-out cousins intimidate the honkys with their juiced-up vehicle, and so on). Naturally, all the audience can do is watch which ones manage to stick. (For me, just one: Napoleon's idea of a pick-up line is, "I caught you a delicious bass.") Hess's idea of nuance is afflicting the ostensibly straight Kip with an offensive lisp or subjecting the comatose Pedro to repeated racial barbs. In one of the film's more insulting sequences, the high school principal questions the boy's ability to speak English while Napoleon confuses him for a cafeteria worker or a janitor (really they1re all the same, right?). Napoleon learns to dance using a tape of D-Qwon's Dance Moves (because black people can groove, get it?), the Internet-obsessed Kip falls in love with a black girl named LaFawnduh who drives in from Detroit (because that's where they all live), and a white girl who runs against Pedro for high school president clinches her opening speech with the following: "Who wants to eat chimichangas next year?" Because there's nothing funnier than country bumpkins acting like idiots for 90 minutes straight, the one-joke Napoleon Dynamite happily offers itself to cynical audiences, some of whom have read the film's breakdancing sequence as an act of compassion (as if Napoleon is in it for anyone but himself). To his credit, Hess seems to recognize how rotten to the core his film is, and as such his characters spend much of the time staring comatose at the fourth wall before flies begin to slowly gather around their faces.
Rating: **** [4 stars out of 4]
To hear Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), the titular hero of Jared Hess' idiosyncratic and warmhearted teen comedy, tell it, he enjoyed a very exciting summer "hunting wolverines in Alaska" with his uncles. In his own hyperbolic mind, at least, he may even believe that tall tale and the ones about being a genius computer hacker, a talented artist, a martial-arts nun chucks specialist, and a real ladies' man. Not that it's likely that it would matter even if a tenth of what he claims were true. In his hometown of Preston, Idaho, he's still the boy who gets shoved into his locker by the other kids at school and gets no respect at the home he shares with his grandmother (Sandy Martin), chat-room-obsessed older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), and pet llama Tina. No wonder his speech is a symphony of sarcasm and barely contained fury.
And after Grandma injures her coccyx while out off-roading, Napoleon's life gets that much worse when his sleazy Uncle Rico (the brilliant Jon Gries) moves in. He's supposed to take care of the boys, but instead lures Kip into a door-to-door sales scheme, while his mere presence tortures Napoleon. It is only when Napoleon befriends new kid in town Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and begins to see classmate Deb (Tina Majorino) in a new and desirable light that Napoleon's life begins looking up--and even then, the question remains: Will he ever find anyone to play tetherball with him?
In certain superficial ways, Napoleon Dynamite resembles Todd Solondz' Welcome to the Dollhouse, at least in the many ways it finds to humiliate Napoleon. But Hess and his co-writer and wife Jerusha's vision is warmer than Solondz'. Napoleon's life may be seemingly filled with trials, but he has a knack for enduring and transcending the worst of them. And while the popular kids might see him as one of life's losers, time and again he contradicts that assessment as he battles back from each setback with indomitable can-do attitude.
In a way, Napoleon Dynamite is as much modern folk tale as it is coming-of-age comedy. Though set in the present, there is a certain sense of Preston as a place out of time--and not just because of Rico's ancient Dodge van, '70s-era hairpiece, and nostalgia for the 1982 football season where he could have been the big game's hero if only the coach had let him leave the bench. The whole town seems stuck in 1975 with only Kip's adventures online and Napoleon's references to hacking to suggest more modern times.
With characters as outsized as Napoleon and Rico and sometimes absurd situations, the film runs the risk of devolving into a live-action cartoon. That it never does is a credit to the Hess' strong screenplay and to the actors--in the most ridiculous of circumstances, script and players still manage to locate an essential humanity. Napoleon with his big hair, bad clothes, and bluster may not be the typical movie hero--and in teen movie terms, no one is going to mistake this kid for Ferris Bueller--but for anyone who remembers the tribulation that was high school, he'll do.
Grade: B+
Going to high school is hard enough, but being an utter outcast can take a toll on a guy.
Such is the case with Preston, Idaho, high school student Napoleon Dynamite.
OK, the name is absurd (it's also Elvis Costello's alter ego), but "Napoleon Dynamite" is a fine indie comedy from twenty-something director Jared Hess.
Hess -- like chic geek filmmakers Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and Alexander Payne before him -- knows his characters - sad sacks and misunderstood nerd geniuses who inhabit straight-laced Middle America and make the best of a bad situation.
Napoleon (Jon Heder) leans more toward the sad sack side of the scales. Not that he isn1t smart. In fact, this squinty-eyed mouth-breather can distinguish three different kinds of milk at an FFA event. That's one skill most of us probably don1t have.
But that doesn1t make up for the fact that Napoleon is gangly and awkward, sports oversized prescription specs and wears thrift-store T-shirts tucked into his pants. He also has a thing for wearing snow boots in warm, dry weather. This poor misfit is a living, walking eyesore.
Napoleon lives with his unemployed older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), a mousy pervert (think cartoonist R. Crumb) who spends his days meeting ladies on the Internet.
The head of the household is their four-wheelin1 grandma who is hospitalized early in the film after getting into an accident while riding on the sand dunes outside town.
As the fast-livin1 granny recovers, creepy, scheming door-to-door salesman Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) moves in to watch the brothers. Uncle Rico dresses like it was the height of the disco era and drives a burnt orange Dodge van to match. It's as if Jimmy Carter were still president, even though the movie takes place in present day.
Napoleon, meanwhile, is getting beat up in high school and struggles to even play solo games of tetherball. But then he befriends a new student, a young Mexican migrant from Juarez named Pedro Sanchez (Efren Ramirez).
Napoleon thinks Pedro is suave with his mustache and bold moves with the babes. Eventually, Napoleon helps Pedro run for class president against popular blonde cheerleader Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff).
If you1re thinking there's one storyline here, you1d be mistaken. While the movie is about Napoleon it is also about the eccentric characters that inhabit small-town Idaho, a place that hasn1t quite caught up with 21st century America.
We do get to see Napoleon meet a sweet female classmate named Deb (Tina Majorino) and watch Pedro ask her to the high school dance, leaving the afro-ed Napoleon a bit perplexed.
There are some truly amusing scenes, such as when Uncle Rico buys a "time machine" off the Internet, in hopes of going back to 1982 and reliving his high school football days.
And it is a scream when Napoleon tells a friend about his "liger" doodles. A liger, for the uninitiated out there, is a cross between a lion and a tiger. Too funny! In fact there are so many funny scenes there isn1t enough space to mention them all.
One thing I should mention about Napoleon, as compared, to say, overachiever Max Fischer in Wes Anderson's "Rushmore," is that Napoleon is a bit more annoying. He's not terribly lovable but you do feel for him at times.
Hess, who learned his trade at Utah's Brigham Young University, is part of a growing group of creative Mormon directors like Richard Dutcher ("God's Army," "Brigham City") and Kurt Hale ("The R.M." and 3The Singles Ward").
I think Hess did a great job with "Napoleon Dynamite," even though the ending is a bit too tidy. Still, I hear an alternate ending is already making the rounds. I guess we1ll have to wait for the DVD to see it.
Rating: **** [4 stars out of 5]
I admit to being pretty disenchanted with the indie-film scene. It's become so enmeshed in its own formula of calculated quirkiness that it rarely shows any more originality than does the most heavily test-marketed Hollywood extravaganza -- and sometimes less so. I'm equally over the indie-film snobbery that works on the belief that if a movie was made for $50,000, it's automatically more valuable than one that was made for $50 million. And because of this, I'm automatically skeptical of the Next Big Thing to emerge from the land of the no-budget film, with everyone rushing in to applaud.
In the case of Napoleon Dynamite, I was also not overly enticed by the trailer. No, that's an understatement: I thought it was absolutely dreadful (and still do). But upon seeing the film itself, I understand that the trailer couldn't have been much else -- there's simply no way to give the flavor of this peculiar, oddly charming little film in a series of clips running two-and-a-half minutes. The flat monotone of the main character doesn't lend itself to excerpts.
Yes, Napoleon Dynamite has some of that forced indie quirkiness, but it also possesses a certain wayward originality -- or at least a mix of influences that seem original. The closest approximation I can come up with to describe the film is to ask you to imagine a Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tannenbaums) screenplay directed by John Waters.
Napoleon Dynamite is an outgrowth of a short film by director/co-writer Jared Hess; Peluca, which also starred Jon Heder, had a similar story -- and a nine-minute running time. (The Internet Movie Database review of Peluca celebrates the little film's greatness, but comes from someone from Provo, Utah -- perhaps one of Hess' friends from his old alma mater, Brigham Young University? No matter.)
Hess' other previous credits are all as assistant cameraman for religious four-wallers -- mostly for the Mormon church, but also, oddly, for the Billy Graham production The Climb. And while Napolean Dynamite marks his first shot at a feature of his own, it owes nothing to his four-waller background. And, more often than not, it scores.
I have no idea what Hess' actual religious beliefs might be; the only probable vestige of his background in the film is his treating door-to-door sales as a viable way of making a living (these days, about the only thing that's sold door-to-door is religion). In the world of Napoleon Dynamite, the occupation seems perfectly believable, especially since it's plied by characters whose grasp on reality is tenuous at best.
Working from a screenplay co-authored by wife Jerusha, Hess has fabricated something both less and more than a story. There's not much of a conventional narrative here; in its place is a freakish kind of alternate world recognizable as being somehow akin to -- but hardly the same as -- the one we inhabit.
The setting is Preston, Idaho -- a place that seems to belong to no specific time, and yet to every time. There is indeed a real Preston (population 4,000), and the film was shot there. But Hess' take on the place is along the lines of David Lynch's vision of our own state's Lumberton in Blue Velvet. We get not the town, per se, but an impression of it. The near-brilliance of Hess' perception comes from his not allowing his characters to behave -- or even understand -- that they exist in a backwards backwater; they think they're modern and normal, and just the same as the rest of the world.
One of Preston's least glorious residents is über-nerd Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), the film's central character. He's strange -- gawky, awkward, yet peculiarly belligerent. Considering he lives with his ATV-riding, pet-llama-keeping grandmother (Sandy Martin) and his nebbishy chatroom-lothario brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), it's surprising that Napoleon isn't even more of a social disaster.
The plot -- such as it is -- is set in motion when Grandma breaks her coccyx in an ATV accident, allowing the brothers' no-account Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) to descend upon the household as their self-appointed guardian during her hospital stay. It's a not unreasonable move on the part of a man who appears to otherwise live out of his van.
Uncle Rico is one of the film's more perversely fascinating characters. He actually is stuck in time -- 1982 to be exact, the year in which he peaked (as a high-school football player), and after which it all went downhill for him. He spends his time videotaping himself throwing a football, being generally disagreeable and selling a variant on Tupperware door-to-door (at least until he switches to peddling an herbal breast-enhancement treatment). At the same time, he's not much more out there than is Kip, who has met the love of his life, LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), in an online chatroom, and is bringing her to Preston.
In the midst of these tangents, we find Napoleon becoming enamored of the quirky Deb (Tina Majorino) and making friends with Pedro (Efren Ramirez), a new student recently arrived from Mexico; Pedro is, if anything, even more awkward than Napoleon. It's all exaggerated, yes, but it's also all grounded in the recognizably real. Best of all, most of it is very funny, and in a way that really stays with you. And in the end, Napoleon emerges as the poster child for the nerd in all of us in this sly and charming movie.
By the way: You'll want to sit through the end credits, since they're followed by a fairly lengthy scene that didn't make the final cut of the body of the film.
Rating: *** 1/2 [3.5 stars out of 4]
Your appreciation of "Napoleon Dynamite" will depend on your willingness to embrace your inner geek.
"Napoleon" asks us to laugh at its title character, a super-dweeby high school student whose exploits include using a time machine and helping a friend run for political office. That stuff is explosively funny, but the movie is after more than that. Having laughed at Napoleon, we begin to feel uncomfortable about whether it's fair to laugh at somebody who makes us feel superior. And that uncomfortable feeling is just what "Napoleon Dynamite" wants. We are supposed to feel bad about snickering at Napoleon because feeling bad puts us in a place where we sympathize and realize we have more in common with Napoleon than we might think.
It occurs to me that I'm making "Napoleon Dynamite" sound like work, and it's not. That's the stuff you'll think about afterward, if you take time to think about your reactions to the film. But, as you're watching it, the main thing you'll be doing is laughing your dang head off.
You'll laugh at the pathetic way Napoleon's Uncle Rico crosses his arms over his chest to make his biceps look bigger. You'll laugh at Napoleon's narcoleptic speech patterns and sad pick-up lines ("I see you're drinking 1 percent. Is that because you think you're fat? You're not. You could be drinking whole milk, if you want to."). You'll laugh at the I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I level of discourse. You'll laugh at the admirably un-smug performances by the actors, who are so believably zonked out they may not be castable in any other movies, and I mean that as a compliment.
But the achievement of the film is that, having forced us to laugh at -- not with -- its characters, it pulls a switcheroo. The supposedly cool people in "Napoleon," one of whom performs an insane dance routine to the Backstreet Boys, are even geekier than the geeks. And when Napoleon unleashes his own version of break-dancing, there's something awe-inspiring in the sincerity and commitment of his moves.
That scene makes clear how much affection "Napoleon" has for its characters. We laugh at all the nerdy behavior in the movie, and there's a reason that's OK: Because, deep down, we know we are all nerds.
Bottom line: A one-note, lightweight, condescending comedy about the rubes of Idaho.
Sundance Film Festival
PARK CITY -- Jerry Lewis, meet Wes Anderson. "Napoleon Dynamite" from director/co-writer Jared Hess tries to marry Anderson's deadpan style of portraying oddball behavior with the goofy antics of a Lewis-like outsider/anti-hero. Set in Idaho, the film views all its characters as potato-heads with limited mental faculties.
It should be reported that Sundance audiences roared with laughter at these rustic rubes and Fox Searchlight acquired the film for $3 or $4.75 million depending on whom you asked. It should also be reported that Sundance audience of the past have roared with laughter at comedies that fall flat in domestic release. Whether such history repeats itself depends on how down market Fox Searchlight takes its promotion of this comedy. This is certainly not one of its prestige offerings.
The dim-witted, gawky protagonist, named Napoleon Dynamite," is a misfit's misfit. His red hair puffs up in a curly explosion above a face that wears the same quizzical, pained expression for the entire movie, no mean feat for a young, physically adroit, tall actor named Jon Heder. Napoleon is the kid everyone picks on and no one wants to play with.
He comes from a family of nerds and dolts. Brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) spends his days surfing Internet chat rooms searching for a soul mate. Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) spends his days bemoaning the 1982 high school football season, where he missed his shot at the pros, and selling plastic kitchen wear and herbal breast implants to bored housewives. When Grandma gets banged-up flipping her dune buggy on a date, the unwanted Uncle Rico moves in to "take care" of the family.
Then Napoleon's only friend, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), newly arrived from Mexico and nearly as dorky as Napoleon, impulsively decides to run for student body president against ever-popular though stuck-up Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff). Napoleon tries to lend a hand along with the shiest girl in school, Deb (Tina Majorino).
The plot is mostly a collection of skits and bits all predicated on the daftness and klutziness of central characters that make the "Dumb and Dumber" pair look like slick operators. By hammering away at this single note, Hess does bludgeon laughs from the most reluctantly audience members. And Heder does have a knack with physical humor and eliciting audience sympathy when none should be forthcoming. But the joke is always the same, and even the most easily amused may grow weary of that sameness.
Hess' production crew drives home the point that the story takes place in the land of the lost. Munn Powell's cinematography emphasizes the flat horizontals and verticals of the Midwest landscape. Cory Lory Lorenzen's production design and Jerusha Hess' costumes -- she is also co-writer and wife to the filmmaker -- make clear that nobody here has any sense of style or taste.
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE
Fox Searchlight
Credits:
Director: Jared Hess
Writers: Jared Hess, Jerusha Hess
Producers: Jeremy Coon, Sean C. Covel, Chris Wyatt
Executive producer: Jeremy Coon, Jory Weitz
Director of photography: Munn Powell
Production designer: Cory Lorenzen
Music: John Swihart
Costume designer: Jerusha Hess
Editor: Jeremy Coon
Cast: Napoleon Dynamite: Jon Heder
Uncle Rico: Jon Gries
Kip: Aaron Ruell
Pedro: Efren Ramirez
Deb: Tino Majorino
Rex: Diedrich Bader
Summer Wheatley: Halie Duff
Running time -- 86 minutes
No MPAA rating
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 5]
Fans of Wes Anderson will recognize and hope for what Idaho newcomer Jared Hess has created with the Sundance sensation Napoleon Dynamite: A good first effort that points to even better films to come.
Think Bottle Rocket, Anderson's wildly uneven but frequently hilarious debut from 1996, and you have the book on Napoleon Dynamite. It's not as hilarious as it thinks it is, and it's sometimes too weird for words, but it is often pretty funny. If Hess lives up to his obvious potential, something along the lines of Anderson's Rushmore might be next (or perhaps Alexander Payne's Election, to cite another influence).
The title character of Napoleon Dynamite, played with deadpan panache by new face Jon Heder, is a carrot-topped teen geek who says "sweet!" a lot, but whose goggle-eyed and dentally challenged mug is perpetually frozen in sullen disinterest. He lives in a backwater part of Idaho where everybody is an idiot striving to be a character.
Napoleon doesn't really know what he wants to do, but he's plenty peeved about not getting what he wants. He's also prone to spinning tale tales about imaginary successes.
"What are you doing today?" a kid asks him on the school bus.
"Anything I want!" Napoleon retorts, and to prove it he tosses a plastic action figure out of a bus window, dragging it on a string in a gesture that must seem defiant in Preston, Idaho (the Hess hometown where the film was made).
Napoleon lives with his grandmother (Sandy Martin), his thirtysomething brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) and a pet llama named Tina, none of whom offer him much in the way of emotional sustenance. Grannie likes to spend her days racing dune buggies, Kip is perpetually surfing for love in Internet chat rooms and Tina refuses to eat her canned ham, dammit.
When an accident lands Granny in hospital, her place of authority in the Dynamite household is assumed by Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a failed football player who "almost made State!" in 1982 but who has accomplished little since. Rico is an ideas man, or thinks he is, with schemes about buying time-travel machines on the Internet and selling herbal breast enlargement treatments door-to-door.
The movie seems as if it is heading somewhere, but Hess and his co-screenwriter (and wife) Jerusha Hess are in no hurry to get to it.
Midway through this meandering tale, Napoleon signs on as campaign manager for a painfully shy Latino classmate named Pedro (Efren Ramirez), who decides to run for class president. Pedro has an uphill battle: He's possibly even geekier than Napoleon, and he's running against a popular blonde classmate (Haylie Duff).
But this Napoleon won't go meekly towards his Waterloo, and he's also found his own Josephine: Painfully shy girl-geek Deb (Tina Majorino), who wears her hair in a sideways pony tale.
The pleasures of Napoleon Dynamite lie not in the story, which eventually seems to stop of its own accord, but in the many comic bits enlivening the proceedings. These include Napoleon tearing a strip off Kip for refusing to bring his ChapStick to school and the inventive opening credits, where plates of food are arranged to spell out names.
Vote for Pedro. And check out Napoleon Dynamite.
You haven't seen anything till you've seen Napoleon Dynamite do the funky chicken.
Well, all right, it's not the funky chicken. You can see some funky chicken buried in it if you look carefully, though most of the moves show the influence of the Los Angeles dance masters Popin' Pete and Kool DJ Herc. Napoleon's freezes do need some work, and his back swipes and corkscrews could be a little smoother.
Still, you can't miss him. Not because he's a great dancer, but because he's about seven feet tall, he has a red Afro, his mouth is half open and his eyes are half shut, and most of the other boys like to beat up on him. And he's the most E.T.-looking white kid you ever saw.
Napoleon is big but weak, so soft he can't ball his hand into a fist. That makes him the clown prince of Preston, Idaho, and, as played by Jon Heder in the magnificent "Napoleon Dynamite," he's one of the most winning movie creations in years.
Of Napoleon it cannot be said that he marches to a different drummer. No, what he marches to is an instrument so unique it has no name and its melodies are beyond the capacity of the human ear to receive. Napoleon, maybe 17 (though Heder turns out to be 26), has a stretched-out, pillowy body that he cannot quite control and that keeps ramming into things. He has the eye-hand coordination of a Ukrainian weightlifter pickled in a vat of vodka. When he runs -- slowly, tragically, like a glacier melting -- he holds his elbows close to his body as if they're made of porcelain and will break. No wonder it's so much fun to crush him against a locker on the way to math class.
As a consequence of his advanced studies in exile, loneliness and disconnection, exacerbated by a family whose dysfunction is epic, Napoleon has cultivated a rather thorny personality. He's extremely acerbic; he's cruel and unsupportive; he's a chronic liar, a teller of self-aggrandizing tales so lame you wonder why he tries. ("My girlfriend's in Cleveland and she was going to fly in but she had a modeling assignment.") He's also transparently needy, throwing himself at those he suspects are snacks in the high school food chain. So what's not to love about a misfit so galactically misfitted as this?
It's a signal irony that a movie shot for $200,000 by a Mormon couple (director Jared Hess and his wife, Jerusha Hess, also the co-writer) in Idaho opens nationally on the same day as Steven Spielberg's $100 million "The Terminal" and that "Napoleon Dynamite" is every inch the superior product. It's tight, resonant, funny as hell, seriously bent and whacked, and also wonderfully healing.
That's because it's about diversity, really. Its text may be whiteness, but its subtext is blackness. It's about a couple of mutant white kids pushed to the margins of their own tribe who embrace black culture and find liberation, peace and dignity, to say nothing of emotional nourishment. It ends up saying, quietly and without strutting, this great American thing: We are each other and we are more alike than different, and we can profit so much from that connection.
Napoleon and his even more pathetic brother Kip (hysterical Aaron Ruell), a 32-year-old bespectacled pervert in Bermudas and knee socks trolling the chat universe for undercover officers to talk dirty to, live in a tiny house in a West so vast and barren it makes you yearn for a friendly McDonald's. The far-off mountains are picturesque but between here and there lies a Siberian plain the color of dead goats. The brothers are nothing, they have nothing, they do nothing, they are going nowhere slow. Their one connection to the galaxy is grandma, who in the early going breaks a bone in a dirt-bike accident (Granny has a life!) and so Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) -- a loser so big, his hobby is videotaping himself throwing a football to recall the glory day in 1982 when he almost got into the game -- moves in for the free lodging.
As a director, Hess's specialty is the deadpan announcement. He sets the camera down, lets his characters enter the frame at their own pace, make an announcement freighted with serious dementia, and then he cuts rapidly away, so that you're really laughing not at what was said, but at his refusal to underscore it in a conventional way.
Plot? Not a lot. But enough. Napoleon, desperate for friends but too repressed to be friendly, clumsily engages Pedro, a transfer played equally deadpan by Efren Ramirez; his outstanding trait is that he owns the only mustache in school. Pedro is also either foolhardy or clueless as he tries to date girls way up the social ladder and then finally runs for class president against Summer Wheatly (Haylie Duff), the coolest of the cool girls.
So you might say that the film is about the revenge of the nerds: how Napoleon and Pedro usurp the high school pecking order. But it doesn't concentrate on that. The Hesses' storytelling style is whimsical, episodical, in the end anecdotal, and almost, but not always, winning. We follow Kip's attempts to woo a woman in a chat room who turns out to be the savior of his life; we go with Kip and Uncle Rico as they try to sell Tupperware to farmers' wives; we go with Napoleon to a new job at a chicken farm and behold the horror of a million squawking eggbirds in a stalag of mesh wire under a corrugated tin roof.
Mistakes are made. A riff about a time machine that Uncle Rico orders off the Internet to get back to 1982 is ridiculous, even if Gries (son of the excellent director Tom Gries) is always funny, with his hairpiece and his entrepreneurial delusions and his eternal overestimation of his charm.
The manipulations by which it turns out that Napoleon must dance before the whole school in order to deliver the election for Pedro are quite thin, though it's organically rooted in the plot as part of Napoleon's secret plan to de-geekify himself by studying a hip-hop dance tape. But the movie builds to the moment when Napoleon, in his space boots and T-shirt, with his red foam of hair and his tiny eyes blown up by his aviators, must do the thing itself . . . the music comes on . . . the feet begin to twitch, the legs begin to shimmy, the hips begin to pump.
At that moment you realize how expertly Heder has hidden his true grace and how hard he has worked on finding a body and a style of movement for Napoleon and how totally convincing the artifice has been. Now, shedding it, he finds the magic. It's really the best six minutes of movie I've seen this year: the big ungainly boy seizing the moment, giving himself up to the music and transfiguring before our very eyes into something that, although still damned strange, is utterly compelling and even poignant.
"Napoleon Dynamite" rules.
Heart of dorkness
The movie that Garden State made me think most of, for some reason I haven't quite figured out yet, is Napoleon Dynamite. Both films are absurd in their own special ways, it's true, but they come at the absurdity from opposite ends of the spectrum. Garden State, for instance, has a scene with a guy who plays a knight at Medieval Times who speaks Klingon -- not on the job but as a hobby. Napoleon Dynamite would make the whole movie about that guy, but he'd have no idea what an enormous nerd he is, and that would be part of the joke.
If Garden State is about heightened reality, Napoleon Dynamite is about heightened unreality: one of its pleasures is the appreciative realization that comes from discovering that no matter how geeky you were back in high school, none of us approached the painful -- and hilarious -- nerdity of Napoleon Dynamite, who navigates the mean halls of Preston (Idaho) High with admirably oblivious aplomb. This endlessly and cheerily ridiculous film isn't one I was able to get truly emotional involved with -- it's too self-possessed and too self-conscious for that, and Napoleon is not a real warm kind of guy -- but it is highly intellectually involving in its schizophrenic, love/hate dissection of high school and adolescence.
See, director Jared Hess (who wrote the script with his wife, Jerusha) is working with a kind of negative nostalgia here, a kind of "Oh God high school was awful, wasn't it?!" combined with an inescapable desire to relive it. It might be called a retro high school dystopic fantasy, one that's half in love with the idea of yearning to be a teenager again and half eternally thankful that those days of dorkness are over. There is, on the one hand, Napoleon himself -- actor Jon Heder makes one of the most impressive feature debuts of recent years here, as does Hess -- who sketches imaginary creatures in his notebooks and is clueless about girls and dances with abandon and lies about girlfriends supposedly living in other states; he embodies, in his geeky freakiness, the uninhibited freedom and sheer terror of being a kid. On the other hand, there is Napoleon's Uncle Rico (Jon Gries: The Rundown, Twin Falls Idaho), a sad man still lamenting lost high-school football championships and wishing he could go back in time with the knowledge he has now as a loser of a grownup. There is, somewhere in the middle, Napoleon's thirtysomething brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell, another memorable screen debut), an overgrown kid who's finally making a real attempt to grow up. And this ambivalence about adolescence exists in a neither-here-nor-there physical and temporal setting, where people have cell phones and surf the Net but dress like it's 1984 and have top-loading VCRs and Dragonslayer posters.
It's as if Hess, as a clued-in adult, went back in time with the knowledge he has now, and figured out that life is just about screaming at the edge of an infinite abyss in the middle of New Jersey, or Idaho, and the infinite abyss is yourself. Even if you don't realize it.
Grade: B
The lowdown: A slice-of-life lament starring Napoleon Dynamite, the biggest geek in the geek town of Preston, Idaho.
The funky opening titles of "Napoleon Dynamite" announce a cult classic-in-the-making. Plates of nasty-looking high-school cafeteria cuisine are placed before the camera, the credits spelled out in food.
"Nappy D," as the already faithful call it, concerns a dyed-in-the-wool high school geek, a ferociously curly-headed mouth-breather who practices roundhouse kicks on the tetherball he bats around alone everyday during break. Napoleon, who talks with an irritated-sounding honk and marches around in a pair of black moon boots, is the genuine off-putting article. He makes Geekus Hollywoodium -- always played by someone such as Ben Stiller, whom we know to be fundamentally cool beneath his nerdy veneer -- look like the fraudulent genus we know it to be.
Napoleon (Jon Heder) lives with his spunky grandma and equally strange older brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), who confirms the sad reality that young nerds grow up to become, not Bill Gates, but just older nerds.
When Grandma is laid up after a motorcycle accident, Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) shows up to "baby-sit" the brothers, even though the pale, lisping, Internet-addicted Kip is 31. Uncle Rico, a former state football champ still reliving the big game, looks like a porn star circa 1975. He makes his living cruising the county in his orange and brown van selling, depending on the day and the clientele, sets of plastic food storage containers or herbal breast-enhancement cream.
Preston, the small Idaho town that serves as the backdrop, is as out of it as the hero. The place looks stuck in 1982. The houses are forlorn and the vast parched fields are shot to make them look like one more exasperating reality of Napoleon's irritating life (which includes the nightly feedings of a cranky black llama named Tina).
Jared Hess, the 24-year-old first-time director, is either shrewd or lucky to have landed the gifted Heder to star. His film is saved from cliche by Napoleon's put-upon mien; he knows he's a buffoon but accepts it with a haughty impatience, like some aged, cranky monarch forced to accept his infirmities. When new kid Pedro (Efren Ramirez) arrives at school and Napoleon is asked to show him around, he tells Pedro impatiently that he supposes they're going to be best friends now. Napoleon knows that it's the chore of the class loser to befriend the friendless new kid.
Pedro decides to run for student body president against the most popular girl in school, Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff), and this provides the underpinnings of the plot, but it's the least interesting part of the film. The set pieces, which feature Napoleon taste-testing milk as part of as a Future Farmers of America project ("I'd say this cow got into an onion patch") or moving chickens from one coop to another in an attempt to earn some cash, are small gems of deadpan lunacy and bring to mind director Jim Jarmusch.
The ending, while amusing and gratifying, is ridiculously pat, given what's come before. But you can't help rooting for Napoleon to triumph, and so he does. He remains true to his freakish, oddball nature; in an American high school, this is a heroic feat that's nigh well Napoleonic.
Grade: B
You can find Œem in every school, in no small number of American homes, at the workplace. They're oddballsintroverts for the most part, who don't fit in except with their own circle of like-minded friends. If you're an oddball in New York, you may have no problem. If you're nerdish in Idahoin the sticks of Idaho at thatyou've got as much support as a potato useful for boiling only. "Napoleon Dynamite," a new film written by director Jared Hess and Jerusha Hess, is an amusing romp in and about a high-school in the tiny town of Presto, Idaho, the sort of place that's lily-white, though in one major situation a Mexican-American turns upwhere the kids get to the school by a bus that travels along rural routes. As in Alexander Payne's study of a high school in his "Election," a vote for student president informs the plot but only to some extent. However the election here is not transcendent: the picture can be taken as a comedy for its own sake, the sort that, were it a still life, it might appear in a New Yorker cartoon.
The ironically named title character (Jon Heder) cannot be mistaken for anything but a geek. He appears to go out of his way to be dumped upon with his now-unfashionable aviator glasses and a small reddish and curly Afro. In class time he often draws medieval characters and for exercise he fools around with a tetherball, socking it so hard that we're sure he imagines he's doing in one particular jock who in at least one case sees him in the halls and slams him against the locker. Outside of his own family, he's friendly with two people: one a Mexican-American named Pedro (Efren Ramirez) who accentuates his differences with the spud-fed whiteys in the school by sporting a mustache; and with a shy girl, Deb (Tina Majorino), who like some other introverts is skilled as an amateur photographer. While Napoleon's grandmother (Sandy Martin) is off-roading in the Idaho flats, Napoleon is watched over by his salesman cousin, Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who also watches over the 32-year-old brother of Napoleon, Kip (Aaron Ruell), the latter spending hours each day in an internet chat room.
Hess's outlandishly character-driven story, then, is of off- center people, people who are mocked not only by the folks with whom they come into contact but at times by the writer-director himself. If Michael Moore were to do this as a mock-doc, he might have Pedro, Napoleon, Rico and Kip coming to the school with AK-47's or Uzi's, but this being a comedy, the ostracized get their revenge in more legal ways. The style which Napoleon uses as his friend Pedro's elections campaign manager brings to mind Jason Schwartzman's school play in Wes Anderson' "Rushmore." Ultimately, though, "Napoleon Dynamite" is an original that will find an audience tired of the action-adventure genre or of mindless slapstick comedy.
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 stars out of 4]
EXCERPT: "Has a sweet momentum."
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 4]
This summer's American lexicon will likely feel the impact of "Napoleon Dynamite," a small, independent comedy nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.
In the same way "Saturday Night Live" sketches introduced key phrases ("Isn't that special?") into everyday discourse, "Napoleon" may bring a geek slant to real-world conversation. If the film gains its deserved audience, expect to hear a volatile brand of dweeb-speak for awhile, puerile lamentations detonated with an eruptive whine: "Dang it." "Gimme the flippin' thing." "Maybe I will, gosh!"
Such square bellicosity is the province of Preston, Idaho, high-school student Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), a cross between the long-suffering Job and a clueless Butt-head (sans Beavis, and lacking Butt-head's defensive sense of irony). Napoleon is an ungainly, toothy, carrot-topped loser squinting through the miasma of his haphazard existence, angry but incapable of meaningful rebellion.
More fundamentally, Napoleon is mired, like a small child, in an unfocused, incomplete awareness of the parameters of his life. He lurches through his days -- barely tolerated, bellowing non-sequitur objections -- in writer-director Jared Hess' dry, cleverly stultified, sort-of-late-1970s rural culture, where purpose is negligible.
When a teacher asks Napoleon to report on a current event, the vaguely comprehending teen describes Japanese scientists firing explosives in Loch Ness. When urged to ask a girl to a school prom, Napoleon draws a hideous portrait of his would-be date and delivers it, promising there's "more where that came from."
Things change when creepy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a domineering hustler, moves in with Napoleon and overtakes the minuscule wills of our hapless hero and his older, feckless brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell). This disconcerting change finally gives Napoleon something solid to buck against. And it comes just as he (finally) makes a couple of friends, the moony Pedro (Efrem Ramirez) and the mousy but proud Deb (Tina Majorino), each of whom give Napoleon a reason to display loyalty and -- in a small, surprisingly profound and memorably funny act -- self-sacrifice.
Heder is magnificent, but the film's flat, eccentric tone is Hess' overarching achievement, an inclusive joke for appreciative viewers and an accessible variation on the willfully banal voyeurism of Paul Morrissey ("Trash").
Napoleon Dynamite
Rating: ** 1/2
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
Rating: **
The movies' continuing fascination with nerds, geeks, dweebs and dufusses represents a substantial strain of doubt in America's win-win culture. The nerd word first appeared in the positive-thinking fifties, in Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo (1950), where it described a comically angry little humanoid creature. Newsweek cited nerd in 1951 as slang meaning a social misfit.
Since Ivan Reitman's Animal House (1978), films about bands of non-rugged individualists triumphing over conformists has been one of Hollywood's favourite comic fairy tales.
Napoleon Dynamite, director and co-writer Jared Hess's debut feature, is a distinctly indie-film take on the theme. The movie, which was acquired by Fox Searchlight for $3-million (U.S.) on the first weekend of the Sundance festival this year, has nerd chic. It takes its deadpan style and arch comic timing from Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums), and its angry edge with the insufferably mediocrity of American suburbia of Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse.
Like a lot of high-school boys, Napoleon (inhabited by the extremely impressive Jon Heder) walks as though he carries a lot of tension in the pelvic area. He has bug-like aviator glasses, an unruly mop of orange curls, and is in a more or less perpetual state of wounded outrage.
Preston, Idaho, the director's home town, appears to be a place where a few prefab houses were dropped at random by airplanes onto the flat landscape. Napoleon lives in one with his grandmother (Sandy Martin) and older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who is in his thirties and more of a nerd than Napoleon. His social life consists almost entirely of Internet chat rooms. The town seems filed with the dumb, deluded and easily confused.
Napoleon's sleazy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) comes to live with them when their grandmother has an accident on her all-terrain vehicle. Rico's a former high-school football player, who sells plastic food containers and breast-enlargement creams door to door.
At school, Napoleon befriends a dour new Mexican student named Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and a shy girl named Deb (Tina Majorino). Together they lead a nerd insurrection, running Pedro for president at the school, and giving Napoleon a chance to shine in a dancing finale.
Love even comes to Kip, who earns a visit from his on-line friend, LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), from Detroit. Like Napoleon, he discovers that black culture may save Idaho.
This ridicule of people on the borderline of poverty, intellectual disability and opportunity isn't charitable, but Hess can also be extremely funny. Napoleon shows his sweet-talking gifts when he sits down with a girl in the cafeteria, looks at her milk carton and tries this ice-breaker: "I see you're drinking 1 per cent. Is that because you think you're fat?" There are also memorable comic images, such as Napoleon taking an election button from a popular student and throwing it down the hallway in disgust before turning and running away.
Hess makes a virtue out of minimalism with an artless shooting style but an impressive attention to painfully dowdy visual detail: Napoleon's wolf motif T-shirts and his fascination with medieval armour and swords, the uncle's Joe Namath hairdo, the orange and brown late-seventies interiors.
He's a talented director though his attitude toward his subject reflects a troubling, familiar, paradox: Everyone cheers for the underdog; no one really wants to be one.
Nerds of a different stripe take the court in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, based on the time-honoured high-school humiliation game where big strong boys make little weak boys cry so phys-ed teachers can weed out their sports teams. Dodgeball, written and directed by former advertising director Rawson Marshall Thurber, aims low and occasionally hits in its parody of the misfit sports genre.
This is the fourth Ben Stiller comedy this year (is he saving to buy his own studio?), which may be too much. He plays preening gymnasium owner White Goodman, who is determined to ruin a humble rival's business. Stiller, wearing a blond puffy wig and a Fu Manchu mustache, offers his most outlandish and strident turn since Zoolander. For the anti-Stiller contingent, there's the compensation of seeing him get hit repeatedly in the mug by flying red balls.
Dodgeball also features Stiller's wife, Christine Taylor (A Very Brady Sequel), as a lawyer, caught between two gyms and two men. She arrives to offer the foreclosure papers to Average Joe's, where she becomes enamoured with Peter (Vince Vaughn).
Average Joe's membership consists of a few unathletic types hanging out to avoid loneliness, who don't pay their dues. Peter's only way to save the gym is to raise $50,000 by winning a Las Vegas dodgeball championship, leading to a showdown with his rivals.
Much of Dodgeball feels competent but lazy. The nerds are barely distinguishable, except for one who thinks he's a pirate and says arghh a lot to no humorous effect. To boost the team's chances, and the movie's obscenity quotient, the team discovers an ancient dodgeball coach, Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn in a wheelchair with long hair), who agrees to train them by throwing wrenches at their groins.
After the sloppy first hour, the movie picks up as a TV-sports parody. The big game is broadcast on ESPN 8 (If it's almost a sport, we've got it here), with Jason Bateman providing some funny moments as a clueless TV colour commentator. There's also a very funny cameo by five-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, offering backhanded support for Peter's decision to give up. As a whole, though, Dodgeball feels far too smug about its underachievement to be a persuasive nerd movie: This is more a film by Hollywood frat boys slumming for some quick summer money.
Rating: * [1 star out of 4]
Proof that some folks would rather laugh at people than with them is provided in "Napoleon Dynamite," a comedy about the utterly clueless of Idaho -- clueless Idahoans? -- that had them rolling in the aisles at this year's Sundance Festival.
Whether "Napoleon Dynamite" has a similar effect on those outside the rarified air of the festival will soon be determined, as it receives one of the biggest releases ever for an independent film. That means people in Idaho will get to see it -- though the film implies they're so clueless they wouldn't make much of it even if they drove their tractors over it.
Directed by recent Brigham Young University graduate Jared Hess and cowritten with his wife Jerusha, "Napoleon Dynamite" may be the most condescending comedy ever to imagine itself being too cool for the room. Even those who find it insufferably smug may find themselves stifling a mean-spirited giggle, however.
Like early John Waters and Todd Solondz -- whose wonderful, insightful "Welcome to the Dollhouse" would appear to be an obvious, if misunderstood, inspiration for the Hesses, "Napoleon Dynamite" presents us with a collection of geeks essentially too stupid to live. But instead of empathizing with them, it sets them on the seat over the water tank and throws one ball after another at a target so big even Michael Moore might be able to resist it.
The Loser of Losers is the title character (Jon Heder), a high school kid with a thick red perm and thicker glasses who is continually being slammed into his locker, and who makes it exceedingly hard for us to feel any animosity for the bullies. He lives in a dump outside Preston, Idaho, with his grandmother and his older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who would be even dumber than Napoleon if the dumbness scale went that low. While Napoleon is pursuing his interest in tetherball ("Sweet!") or attempting to stay out of the way of his nemesis at school ("Idiot!"), Kip spends his time on the Internet with someone he's convinced is his soul mate.
When grandma is hospitalized after a dune-buggy accident, the boys are left in the care of Uncle Rico (Jon Gries, who played a similar if more recognizably human character in "Jackpot" ), whose stupidity is compounded by his smarminess. (Never mind that Kip is almost 30; he's not ready for the responsibility of watching his brother.) Rico is self-employed selling herbal breast enhancer, which he is always willing to demonstrate on his door-to-door customers.
Meanwhile, at school, Napoleon befriends another outcast, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), and convinces him to run for class president against the archetypal popular blond cheerleader. They are assisted in this endeavor by a kinder, gentler female version of Napoleon, Deb (Tina Majorino), who has her own door-to-door business selling key chains.
If you are considering a move to Preston, by the way, you might want to consider putting up one of those "No Solicitation" signs.
You may not be surprised to know that in moments of crisis, Napoleon breaks into an awkwardly embarrassing dance, or that when Kip's soul mate shows up in Preston, she turns out to be a strapping homegirl from Detroit named LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery). Only the fact that everyone in the film is a ridiculous caricature saves it from charges of racial stereotyping.
Had Hess been able to muster even a minimal amount of human camouflage for his characters or a smidgen of originality in his storytelling, "Napoleon Dynamite" might have eked by on absurdity. Considering that Hess has said, with a straight face, that he never knew that Elvis Costello long ago used Napoleon Dynamite as a pseudonym and that he came up with the moniker on his own, we can also dismiss the suggestion that his interest in the characters here goes beyond ridicule. As it is, this is a lot like raising an ant farm just so you can set fire to it.
Grade: C+
Loser, geek, reject, weirdo and certifiable mouth-breathing social outcast, Napoleon Dynamite is someone you have to root for, even if he is caught in a thin film that relies alternately on cliches and cleverness.
With his awful red afro, his amazing ineptness at conversation and complete lack of skill or talent, Napoleon is the worst high-school nightmare and memory of the habitually insecure -- meaning most of us. At the same time, he serves as constant reassurance that as bad as any of us are or were, at least we were never Napoleon Dynamite.
Unfortunately, Napoleon Dynamite the character, as brought to life by Jon Heder, is far more interesting than "Napoleon Dynamite" the movie. In fact, this is the odd film that has a number of characters who somehow seem better than the environment they're in, a cast of unknowns in search of a script worthy of their potential.
But then, that they found themselves in this movie at all is something of a miracle. "Dynamite" is a low-budget, independent film that dares to be PG. No tortured, expletive-driven scenes of rape, no suicides or tragic accidents, no explosive revelations or flashbacks to prior indecencies. Instead of offering some grand statement of the soul, director-writer Jared Hess has made your basic high-school geek comedy.
Good for him. If only it wasn't SO basic. The town is Preston, Idaho; Napoleon is the youngest eccentric in a family of eccentrics (his parents are nowhere to be seen; there's no explanation for his name), and as such is the natural target of all the cooler kids (meaning everyone else) at school. He lives with his grandmother, who leaves early on a mission of irresponsibility, and his older, possibly even geekier brother Kip (Aaron Ruell, terrifically square). The family pet is a llama.
Napoleon, who's more sour than sweet and tends to converse in bursts of resentment, makes a friend when a quiet Mexican kid named Pedro (Efren Ramirez) moves to town. He also makes a fool of himself by asking a popular girl to the prom, while Pedro goes with the more appropriately strange Deb (Tina Majorino, yes, the little girl from "Waterworld"). Napoleon, Deb and Pedro become sort of an unspoken loser love triangle.
Meanwhile, sleazy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) has moved in with the Dynamite brothers, and Kip is continuing his Internet relationship with LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), his never-seen true love from Detroit. All the weirdness builds in predictable ways toward a predictable conclusion that's sweetly clumsy.
Eccentric loser characters, offbeat relationships, high-school clique cruelty, geek love; this is all familiar territory. What makes "Napoleon Dynamite" worth seeing is Heder's performance. His loser is truly a loser, with no apparent spark that will lift him above the popular kids later in life (unlike the classic nerds destined to be millionaire engineers). The way Napoleon suddenly breaks into Grouchesque runs, his essentially antagonistic speech patterns, his complete lack of social grace; Heder makes him an endearingly unlovable human mistake.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is an independent take on a Hollywood tradition, undermined by its cliches but saved by its performances. It's good for some laughs and that's all it wants to be, though it also offers some solace to losers everywhere: At least you're not Napoleon Dynamite.
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 stars out of 4]
Ever since Paul Reubens' farewell performance at a certain Florida theater, we've been on the lookout for the next Pee-wee Herman. We may have found him in Jon Heder, who plays the geeky (and proud of it!) title character in ``Napoleon Dynamite,'' a seriously deadpan addendum to ``Revenge of the Nerds,'' ``Pee-wee's Big Adventure'' and other oddball teen fantasies.
Strange even by John ``Hairspray'' Waters standards, Napoleon is the undisputed hero of his own retro '70s universe. A senior at Preston High in rural Idaho, he doodles winged unicorns and daydreams of nunchuk battles and wolverine hunts. He buys off the rack at Goodwill and fancies himself one sly dude with the babes who, upon spying the moon boots, wonder just what galaxy this guy dropped in from.
At the least provocation, the gangly, curly-haired Napoleon emits long, exaggerated sighs, followed by the requisite eye-rolling. If you're not tuned in to his world, you are, excuse me, beyond help.
Were Napoleon one in a million, we could shrug and move on to ``Road Trip'' outtakes. Director Jared Hess, who wrote the story with wife Jerusha, allows us no such easy out. Formerly of Preston himself, Hess here recalls a prairie community in which his hero -- saints deliver us! -- seems almost normal next to his fellow students and family members.
Napoleon's 32-year-old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) is an adenoidal twit who cruises chat rooms and, in hand-to-hand combat with Napoleon, squeals over a neck mole. Grandma (Sandy Martin) looks like a biker chick. Her favorite pastimes: a pet llama and all-terrain vehicles.
When Grandma meets with a racing accident, Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) leaves his trailer and stops by to babysit. He's even more peculiar than his nephews. A door-to-door salesman who dreams of time travel, Rico relives his non-existent glory days before a video camera. And when he diversifies into breast-enhancer supplements, he creeps out half the girls in town.
Outsiders in their own right, classmates Deb (Tina Majorino) and Pedro (Efren Ramirez) naturally gravitate toward school ``loser'' Napoleon. Deb is so shy, she mistakes him for a take-charge kind of guy; Pedro, the town's token minority and the brunt of a lot of not-so-subtle slurs, is played as the kind of dull, heavy-lidded Mexican who is supposed to have been retired with the Frito Bandito. All of which makes his success at dating and school politics so confounding. But maybe that's the joke.
Structured as a series of school-days vignettes, ``Napoleon Dynamite'' touches on all obligatory rites of passage (first date, class election, etc.), but in a manner that's at once disarming and oddly reassuring. For all the abuse heaped upon him, Napoleon follows his dreams and perseveres, fulfilling Hess' message that the geek shall inherit the Earth.
``Napoleon Dynamite,'' which grew out of an award-winning short by Hess, was purchased at the Sundance Film Festival by Fox Searchlight, which added a couple of songs and a fun new eggs-and-sandwich credit sequence. These touches look almost mainstream next to the wildly eccentric comedy that follows.
My advice: Forget about ``Saved!'' and today's ``DodgeBall.'' Their takes on the outsider feel glossy and disingenuous next to this no-frills celebration of cluelessness. If only Hess and Fox would lose the lethargic, monosyllabic Pedro. This guy is straight out of reruns of ``Speedy Gonzales.'' It's amazing that a movie about the dangers of small-town intolerance would include such an insulting stereotype.
Meet Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), of coiled-spring red hair and coke-bottle-thick glasses. He spends class time drawing mythical creatures (badly), fantasizing about hunting wolverines in Alaska, wielding nunchucks and being cool with chicks. A social and athletic washout, (the poor slob can't even play tetherball), he lives in small-town Idaho (Preston, to be exact) with his dune buggying grandma (Sandy Martin), his older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), and their pet llama Tina.
The William H. Macy-inspired Kip, whose rampant lethargy keeps him still at home at 30, shares his brother's eye problem and seems to spend his life in computer chat rooms, where he has met LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), the woman of his dreams (even though she won't send a photo).
When grandma falls off the dune buggy and winds up in the hospital, Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a small-time hustler with bigtime pretensions, comes to "take care of" Napoleon and Kip, causing no end of friction.
These are strange folks, but Napoleon's problems are strictly standard -- left out of the cool cliques and clueless about interacting with girls, he seems doomed to nerdhood until the principal assigns him the task of showing new student Pedro (Efren Ramirez) the ropes.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is an odd bird. It looks like another in the long line of films about the horrors of high school, but it's equally a portrait of small-town Idaho, from which Director/co-writer Jared Hess hails.
The script seems more a series of vignettes taped together than a cohesive whole. The weak narrative thread wanders off the reservation at times to bring such scenes as those of Napoleon gathering eggs and serving as a milk taster for local farmers. Funny, but they seem tacked on.
The good news is there are many genuine laughs in this film, especially for the nerds or former nerds in the audience. Heder is endearing (if not especially likable) in a nerdy sort of way, and Ramirez shows promise as well.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is no "Election" or "Welcome to the Dollhouse," but this Sundance hit is a pleasant enough outing.
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 4]
'NAPOLEON Dynamite," a charming and often hilarious comedy about the ultimate high school nerd, is refreshing for its simplicity and its originality in a marketplace dominated by soulless blockbusters.
With a style that invites comparisons to such indie vets as Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and Alexander Payne, this Sundance favorite is an unusual mainstream effort by Mormon filmmakers: director Jared Hess and his wife Jerusha, who co-wrote the clever script, met as students at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City.
Their lead is another BYU alumnus: the unknown Jon Heder, who gives a perfectly pitched, deadpan performance as the nerdy, bespectacled Napoleon, who sports curly red hair and a wardrobe straight out of the late '70s, complete with Moon Boots (the unremittingly ugly furniture is also out of that decade, though the movie is ostensibly set in the present day).
Slight, whiny and always exasperated, Napoleon rides a girl's bicycle and lives on a farm in rural Idaho with his mostly unemployed older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who is conducting an Internet romance with a faraway black woman named LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), who may or not actually be a man in drag.
The brothers are looked after by their dotty, dune-buggy riding grandmother (Sandy Martin) and Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a macho bully and failed football player who hawks breast-enlargement products door to door.
Napoleon predictably doesn't get any more respect at high school, but he plows ahead with plans to run his newly acquired (and only) friend, a dim Mexican named Pedro (Efren Ramirez), for class president at their whitebread school -- against a popular blonde (Haylie Duff, Hilary's sister).
The other plot thread in this loose collection of episodes is Napoleon's fumbling romance with Deb ('90s child star Tina Majorino), who sells handicrafts and takes pictures at the mall.
The funniest scenes in what amounts to a smart, no-budget "Dumb and Dumber" have little to do with the storyline: Napoleon's faltering attempts at skateboarding and his sprinting in a tuxedo to pick up Deb for the prom after his ride doesn't work out.
"Napoleon Dynamite," a rare indie effort so innocent it carries a PG rating, is a little movie with a lot of heart and a lot of laughs.
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 4]
Napoleon Dynamite is a very funny sketch of high school nerds in rural Idaho. Although it is a live-action movie, it plays like a cartoon. It doesn't have a great plot or believable characters, but its deadpan performances and cinematic sense of humor earn it a strong recommendation.
Napoleon Dynamite and his 30-year-old brother Kip (Jon Heder and Aaron Ruell) live in their grandmother's house in rural Idaho. While grandma is out riding dune buggies, Napoleon has to feed the llama as part of his after-school chores.
Napoleon is probably one of the biggest losers at school, with his frizzed hair, half-closed eyes, steel-rimmed oversized glasses, and a lanky frame that he doesn't quite know how to inhabit (he runs without moving his arms). Endearingly, he's clueless about it. In his fantasies he's probably the coolest boy in school. He brags to the jocks about his summer shooting wolverines in Alaska, and his current events presentation is about a Japanese plot to blow up the Loch Ness monster, which the Scots counteract by invoking protective spells. Through it all, Heder never betrays a hint of anything but sincerity.
He's surrounded by supporting nerds, each with their own unfortunate hairstyles and foibles. Kip has the pocket-protector look offset by a wispy mustache. Napoleon's friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez) shaves his hair off because it's too hot, then dons a '70s wig to cover it up with the help of their "glamour photographer" friend Deb (Tina Majorino), who sports a sideways ponytail. Napoleon's uncle Rico (Jon Gries), trapped in the 1980s by a failed high school football career, comes to look after the boys after grandma gets injured.
As much as we'd like to just watch these characters, movies demand a plot and a conflict, and Hess complies. Kip meets a girl on-line, La Fawnduh (Shondrella Avery), from Detroit. Pedro throws his hat into the ring for class president. Deb develops a crush on Pedro. And Napoleon scores a date with one of the cool girls (whose mother, led to believe that Napoleon is a "special" boy in need of a friend his age, insists on the date).
Once the characters are pigeonholed into their respective conflicts, the movie demands a climax and a resolution. And at this point, why not? The fun of watching these characters has waned since the first act. For the movie's finale, set at an all-school assembly, Napoleon does a dance in support of Pedro's candidacy. It's quite a finale, both impressive and funny, particularly from an awkward nerd like Napoleon who just assumes he's cool.
A fellow critic, Walter Chaw, ultimately criticized the movie. He said that unlike other underdog movies, Napoleon Dynamite looks down on its characters. He says the filmmakers put us in the position of the letter-jacketed jocks who mock and abuse them. Although I praise Chaw on his sensitivity, I have to disagree.
Chaw says that by staring into the fourth wall while a jock pushes Napoleon against the lockers (a shot you can see in the trailer), we the audience take the perspective of, and are guilty of pushing him into the locker. I say that Hess discovered a truism about comedy filmmaking: flat, stagey, symmetrical scenes that show the whole body are inherently funny. It's not a fourth-wall thing but a comedy staging thing.
Chaw also says the movie's Latinos are caricatures only good for their low-rider car. I say that rather than being blind to them or afraid of their culture, Napoleon accepts their culture at face value and integrates it into his life.
I saw Napoleon not as a loser to be mocked, but as a creative, funny kid -- the kind of kid Matt Stone spoke about when interviewed in Bowling for Columbine, the kind of kid who would grow up to be somebody cool, creative, and successful, who could have the last laugh by living well, by not growing up to be a cog as his tormentors seem likely to do.
At the very least, see for yourself. If you feel dirty, cruel, and complicit in mocking Napoleon, then trade your Movie Habit bookmark for Film Freak Central. But I think it's possible -- easy, in fact -- to laugh at Napoleon Dynamite without hurting anyone's feelings.
Grade: B+
Napoleon Dynamite is one of those vengeful nerd comedies that divides audiences into camps -- you will either laugh crazily at the misadventures of this Napoleon (Jon Heder) or you'll be appalled by them; you'll either feel guilty or insulted.
Napoleon is a high school student, of gangly mien and goofy aspect, with wads of untamable red hair and a heavy, open-mouthed breathing style that suggests intellectual dullness and social ineptitude. He is the sort of outcast who revels in his loneliness. There is a broad mean streak in this kid -- he seems as capable of inflicting damage as sustaining it. He is quick with his fists and cruel with his words.
Set in a time-warped Idaho where the primary colors of the 1970s have yet to fade, the film -- directed by Jared Hess, a recent graduate of Brigham Young University -- pushes the romantic geek comedies of John Hughes past the breaking point into cartoon surreality. Like a live-action Beavis and Butt-Head, Napoleon Dynamite is a movie by smart people about dumb people, and as such it runs the risk of defaulting to simple ridicule to tease out the requisite number of laughs.
As much as I might like to report that I was immune to the acid-drenched pleasures of this snarky little film, which has at its center a character who's somewhat less than genuinely human, I cannot. I like it, and because I like it I'm compelled to come up with a rationalization that allows me to retain a notional image of myself as a humane and sensitive person.
There is something well-observed in the way the movie piles up its tics and gestures and would-be catch phrases, something beyond the usual dynamic of condescension that drives the script. As ugly and antisocial and crude a caricature as this Napoleon is, there is something about him that engages our empathy. Somehow he sucks us in; we find ourselves along for his ride. Napoleon Dynamite does not work the way you think it must. It doesn't exactly invite us to laugh at the hapless and bewildered, but it somehow encourages us to identify with the same.
It may be that when we laugh at Napoleon we are laughing at ourselves, or at our vision of ourselves in our most unlovable moments. Haven't we all felt dull and awkward and undeserving? (Never mind that Napoleon is so insensitive as to seem insensate. Maybe underneath it all he's hurting.)
In any case, the movie works on a slightly deeper level than mere mockery; because we find ourselves touched when the core losers -- Napoleon and his 31-year-old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) -- begin to bond with others of their species. Napoleon's outreach is limited to his fellow nerds, a quietly misfit shy girl (beautifully rendered by Tina Majorino) and a would-be student politician of Hispanic descent (Efren Ramirez) but one suspects these thwarted, abrupt relationships are at least as deep as those that befall the popular kids.
It may be as easy to overpraise Napoleon Dynamite as it is to dismiss it, for while the look is indie fresh, the humor is derivative -- much of the movie feels like Heder improvising as Napoleon, and the character could easily be transferred, without losing much poignancy, into a three or four minute hit-or-miss comic skit format. An archetype rather than a leading man, it may be possible for us to pour ourselves into Nappy D for the short run, but even an 82-minute movie might be too long for some.
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 4]
"Napoleon Dynamite" is an odd little film that's mediocre at best but has nevertheless managed to capture legions of devoted fans thanks to it's memorable characters and some wonderfully quotable dialogue. Count me among the fans, as "Napoleon Dynamite" ranks high on my guilty pleasures list.
Newcomer Jon Heder makes a dynamite debut in the title role, a geeky outcast of a kid just trying to survive high school and his weird family that torments him at home. There's his brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) who is a tiny 31-year-old slacker who speaks with a gay lisp but nevertheless spends his days training to be a cage fighter and chatting with his online girlfriend in Detroit. And there's Uncle Rico (John Gries) a man so obsessed with his 1982 state football championship loss that he buys a time machine off the internet with the serious intention of traveling back in time hoping to convince the coach to put him in the game in the 4th quarter.
Napoleon's school friends aren't much better. The girl he likes (Tina Majorino) is a complete geek herself who sells boondoggle keychains door to door. And then there's Pedro, a soft-spoken Mexican immigrant who decides to run for class president against the most popular girl in school. His qualifications for office? He's the only guy in school who can grow a mustache.
But all of these oddballs and geeks pale in comparison to Napoleon himself. Tall and gangly, with an unfortunate red afro, coke bottle glasses and a perpetual sneer, Napoleon is one of the most memorable nerds in cinematic history. I'm surprised at how much I enjoyed watching Napoleon navigate his daily life. I don't know if I was laughing at him or with him, but I was certainly laughing during the movie.
The bottom line is that "Napoleon Dynamite" isn't a great film, but it's an auspicious debut by filmmaker Jared Hess and his co-writer wife Jerusha. And the real breakout star is Jon Heder, who has delivered a performance so cult-worthy that he may very well spend the rest of his life quoting this movie in order to placate his obsessed fans.
Movie reviews by Sean McBride, "The Movie Guy," are published Wednesdays and Fridays in the Port Arthur News. Sean the Movie guy appears Fridays on KFDM-TV, Channel 6 and Monday and Thursday evenings on KWBB-TV, News at Nine. For more reviews, check out www.seanthemovieguy.com
EXCERPTS: "Absurdist piece about a rural community of clueless cretins who careen through life like poorly played pinballs represents the definition of the comedy of condescension and ridicule. Lots of laughs for those who enjoy sight of bottom dwellers doing stupid things. Could easily be a pic that hits big at Sundance but can't find its way in the real world..."
"There are lots of laughs for those who enjoy the sight of bottom dwellers doing stupid things that make them look even more idiotic."
Rating: *** 1/2 [3.5 stars out of 4]
Napoleon Dynamite was a sensation at this year's Sundance Film Festival. After playing very successfully in art houses for a few months, it is now rolling out nationwide, complete with an additional 5-minute scene added for the wide release. (However, to see the extra scene, you have to sit through the entire end credits, the blue MPAA logo, and about four seconds of total blackness.)
Jon Heder plays the title character, a dorky high school student in Idaho. Napoleon is tall and lanky, with an unruly "hair helmet" and the type of oversized glasses that went out of style at least a decade ago. He's the kind of kid who is routinely shoved into lockers in the hallway at school. He is also prone to liking science-fiction and ugly iron-on T-shirts. Napoleon lies to make himself seem more well-adjusted than he really is; he will claim to have a girlfriend in another state and will insist that he has gone wolverine hunting with his uncle. No one believes him on either count, a fact he never seems to recognize. His conversation skills are often limited to one-word utterances like "idiot" and "duh." One of the funniest scenes illustrates the character's strange habits. During lunch, he places a handful of tater tots in his pants pocket for consumption later on.
Napoleon lives with his grandmother and his adult brother Kip (Aaron Ruell). Unlike Napoleon, who is at least vaguely aware that he's not like everyone else, Kip is blissfully ignorant of his own fashion-challenged scrawniness. He spends his days talking in chat rooms and planning his improbable future as a cage fighter. When their grandmother lands in the hospital after an ATV accident, the boys' Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) moves in to watch over them. He starts up a business with Kip in which they sell 24-piece sets of Tupperware. Kip uses the money to buy a bus ticket for his internet girlfriend.
There isn't a lot of plot in Napoleon Dynamite; instead, this is one of those slice-of-life character studies in which we glimpse into the world these people inhabit. A lot goes on in their lives. We see Napoleon's friendship with the laconic Pedro (Efren Ramirez), a new student from Mexico. Pedro doesn't fit in too well either, but he plans to run for class president anyway. The competition is a pretty, vacuous cheerleader named Summer (Haylie Duff). Then there's Deb (Tina Majorino), yet another misfit. She's so out of touch that she still wears her hair in a pony tail - on the side. She and Napoleon would seem to be interested in each other, but maybe not. Napoleon turns to his friends when he thinks his brother and uncle are ruining his life, which is constantly. They embarrass him, which is probably easier to cope with than embarrassing himself.
There's an interesting factor at play here. A lot of movies feature dorky characters who long to be accepted by the popular kids. In contrast, Napoleon seems to have as much contempt for his peers as they have for him. Never does he really express a desire to fit in. He almost seems to take a certain pleasure in his anti-social qualities. Just as the cool kids are irritated by his dorkiness, so is he irritated by their uniformity. It's not jealousy or resentment; he just really doesn't like the majority of kids in his school. That's an extremely original approach to take. Many of the film's laughs come from the way Napoleon so stubbornly refuses to adhere to the conventions of adolescence. Even when he gets a pity date for the school dance, he barely registers the fact that the girl skips out on him. Heartbreak would just be to foreign to him.
Napoleon Dynamite is a great comic creation, and Jon Heder deserves Oscar consideration for playing him. The actor totally gets inside this guy; never once do you feel like you're watching a performance. This is especially impressive during some of the more painful moments in which Napoleon fails to register events that should be humiliating for him. At the same time, you feel an undeniable affection for the character. Sure, he's dorky, and yes, there are times when his behavior is borderline obnoxious. But there's something strangely admirable about his fierce individuality. He likes himself, even if his peers don't.
For me, the joy of Napoleon Dynamite comes from seeing the misfits get a more honest treatment than they typically do. In a strange way, it's thrilling to see this kind of person get celebrated in a film. I have to admit: the character struck me as an amalgam of about two or three kids I went to high school with. I remember the qualities those kids shared with this movie's hero: the terminal dorkiness, the natural agitation toward "normality," and the surprising resiliency that seems totally unearned considering the circumstances. There was one boy at my school who looked not unlike Napoleon. He used to walk around challenging everybody else to a fight. My great-grandmother could have kicked this kid's ass, but he just kept provoking people. Why? Who knows, but he did it with all sincerity, apparently getting some kind of inner reinforcement. Are there really Napoleon Dynamites out there? Yes, there are.
If there's a message to be found in the film, that message would be that we all have skills of some kind. All we need is the right moment to reveal them. Our lives won't necessarily change much, but we can shine nevertheless, and that alone is important. In the film's climax, Napoleon delivers an ecstatically bizarre geek-dance that allows him a small moment of personal victory. At the end, he still doesn't fit in, and he's still a dork, but there's a small glimmer of hero inside of him anyway. It was always there; it just needed the right opportunity to present itself. This is ultimately a braver, truer, and more honest message than most movies about teenagers can deliver. Here's to the misfits.
Rating: **** [4 stars out of 5]
Treading firmly in the footsteps of films like RUSHMORE and GHOST WORLD, but ramping up the quirkiness a notch or three, NAPOLEON DYNAMITE is a loveable oddball-goofball underdog comedy that both mocks and pays homage to the filmmakers' hometown of Preston, Idaho. The fact that Preston sits just above the border with Utah puts it firmly on the demarcation line between surreal and bizarre.
As odd as the entire population of Preston seems to be, however, few could be classified as odder than teenager Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder). When he gets up in the middle of class to discuss his weekly current event, and launches into a monologue about Japanese scientists attempting to blow up Nessie, and the residents of the Loch Ness area recruiting wizards to cast a protective spell on the lake . . . well, you know that Napoleon spends most of his time comfortably in his own little world, and we're just along for the ride. But while this frizzy-haired, slack-jawed, mouth-breathing geek appears to be borderline-retarded at first glance, looks can be decieving. In plenty of ways, Napoleon is a lot smarter than he lets on, and certainly smarter than most of those around him - including his even more geeky older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who spends time not looking for a job and cruising for babes on the internet, and his washed-up loser Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who sells tupperware out of his van and pines for the glory days of high school football.
There isn't so much a central plot in Napoleon Dynamite, but rather a loose collection of scenes that range from mildly amusing to fall-out-of-chair hilarious. But its organic and free-flowing nature is what makes it such a joy, and gives it a genuine-feeling slice-of-life view of Preston. In addition to dealing with his obnoxious uber-nerd brother and overbearing sleazy salesman uncle, Napoleon puts up with obnoxious jock bullies, befriends equally oddball new student Pedro (Efren Ramirez), and slowly comes to realize that he may actually like the very cute but equally quirky Deb (Tina Majorino, last seen as the little girl in Waterworld). When Pedro decides to run for class president, even offering protection to bullied kids via his tough-looking lowrider cousins, Napoleon becomes his biggest supporter and ends up clashing with the popular kids even more than before.
While Napoleon Dynamite benefits from a strong ensemble cast, and some sharp comedic writing from filmmakers Jared and Jerusha Hess, Jon Heder makes both the titular character and the movie work. Never have I seen a character with such a persistently lackadaisical gait, slackjawed look of bemusement, and entirely mirthless facial expression garner so many laughs. He's so good in the role, I fear he will probably be typecast because of it - which would be a shame, since he has a distinct gift for timing, delivery, and physical comedy that most contemporary teen-comedy actors lack. Still, if he ends up being remembered for only one role, this one is certainly no cause for shame. And while the film has the occasionaly arid stretch that seems a tad too self-indulgent in its musings on life in a whacked-out town like Preston ID, the scenes with Napoleon always bring things back into focus.
Ultimately, it's easy to like and relate to Napoleon, because we all knew a kid like that growing up - Hell, maybe we WERE a kid like that growing up, to one degree or another. I freely admit that I was a lot more like Napoleon than the pretty and popular and utterly vapid crowd that he bucks up against. This is a movie for the kid who ever thought about keeping a pair of nunchucks in his school locker, or preferred drawing pictures of sword-fighting barbarians to playing football. And even if you were a nerd in High School - at least you didn't have to be a nerd in Preston.
Rating: Man sitting alert in chair, holding hat [2 out of 4]
The geek comedy "Napoleon Dynamite" has to be enjoyed in spurts. There's no cohesive story, just a series of opportunities for the title character (Jon Heder) to strut his gawky stuff.
Watch Napoleon handle an unruly chicken. See him perform a sign-language translation of Bette Midler's "The Rose." Witness him sucker-slap his equally dorky brother.
Married filmmakers Jared and Jerusha Hess seem to have let their love for Heder's performance cloud their storytelling judgment. You can see how it happened. Heder's Napoleon might wear the lopsided 'fro of screen nerds before him, but he's a singular presence, demanding respect instead of seeking acceptance. He's a mouth-breather with a quick temper who would fight the school bully if his antihistamine weren't holding him back. The comic setups are rather geek-movie conventional for a picture that keeps trying to announce its differentness. "Napoleon'' is unique only if you gauge uniqueness by an inability to tell the era in which a film is set.
Napoleon's Idaho high school classmates seem to be living in 2004, but they slow-dance to Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time.'' The house where the boy lives with his grandma is replete with fake wood paneling, a top-load VCR and ticky-tacky decor that nobody within 300 miles of a Wal-Mart would still have.
The filmmakers want to evoke the "Sixteen Candles'' era of geekdom without committing to a period movie or acknowledging what's happened in the intervening years. Napoleon's three-piece, 1970s thrift-store suit was unfashionable in 1984, but today it looks like something a San Francisco hipster might wear.
The film's best moments happen between Heder and Efren Ramirez, as a Mexican immigrant student who's innately cooler than Napoleon but mellow enough to appreciate him. One deft exchange hints at what might have occurred had the Hesses worked harder to buck convention. Spying a pretty girl in the cafeteria, Napoleon asks his pal, "Do you dare me to go talk to her?" The Ramirez character responds with a very mild "sure,'' as if reluctant to follow the teen movie cliche of the deluded fellow geek.
Key questions are left unanswered. We don't know what happened to Napoleon's missing parents or how he got that crazy name. The grandmother vanishes shortly after the picture begins, replaced by a van-drivin' uncle obsessed with his early-'80s glory days. Actor Jon Gries' terrible shag wig serves as a constant visual reminder of the shortcuts undermining this picture.
Grade: B+
Audience: 14 and up
MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements and language.
Profanity: Mild schoolyard insults
Nudity/Sex Character sells breast-enhancing herbs
Alcohol/Drugs: None
Violence/Scariness: Bullies and other adolescent humiliations, comic accidents, animal killed off-screen
Diversity Issues: Diverse characters
When you are hurtling through adolescence, overcome with warring emotions and desperately trying to learn a whole new set of rules for status and interaction, everything you thought you knew seems suspect and even your own body is completely unfamiliar and terrifyingly out of control. It sometimes seems that the best anchor to keep you from levitating off the ground over the intense humiliation and the overwhelming injustice of it all is to adopt an air of ferocious perpetual exasperation and disdain. But what keeps you going are those few moments when a tantalizing glimpse of the possibility of pure pleasure provokes the ultimate accolade: "Sweet!"
So, when our eponymous hero, Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) climbs onto the schoolbus and slumps into a seat in the back and an admiring younger kid asks him, "What are you going to do today, Napoleon?" his reply is, "Whatever I feel like I want to do! Gosh!" Then whatever he feels like he wants to do turns out to be tying a muscle man action figure to a string and throwing it out the window to pull along behind the bus. Sweet!
And when he he opens the door to find a shy classmate peddling Glamour Shot photos and lanyard keychains, he disdainfully tells her, "I got like a finity of those I made in summer camp."
And when his older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) taunts him, "Napoleon, don't be jealous that I've been chatting online with babes all day. Besides, we both know I'm trying to become a cage fighter," he replies, "Since when? We both know you've got like the worst reflexes of all time!" Then he has to try to prove it, and it appears that in the race for that title, they may be in a tie.
And when Napoleon sees his new friend Pedro's (Efren Ramirez) bike, he says, "Dang! Ever take it off any sweet jumps?" When he tries, it doesn't work out very well.
Life seems so unfair. Women only like men who've got skills, and to Napoleon that means numbchuck skills, computer hacking skills, or maybe some really sweet dance moves. Those endless arms and legs don't seem to want to cooperate well. Heder is a brilliant physical performer, showing us everything about Napoleon in the way he stands, sits, walks, and responds to everything just a half-second too late.
Then there's Napoleon's uncle and his schemes to make a lot of money and go back in time to that crucial turning point in a high school football game, Pedro's campaign for class president against alpha girl Summer (played by Haylie Duff, older sister of Hillary), and what happens when Kit's online babe shows up. And the young photographer who tells her subject, "Just imagine you're weightless, in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by tiny little seahorses."
The movie's deliriously specific detail, superb use of the Idaho setting, affection for its characters, unexpected developments, and most of all its genuine sweetness keep us laughing with Napoleon, not at him. He may be clueless, but he has a great heart and we know he will be fine, not just for a satisfyingly happy ending for the movie but beyond. He might even develop enough perspective on his life to be able to make a movie about it.
This movie is the first feature from 24-year-old director Jared Hess, who wrote the film with his wife Jerusha. They met co-producer Jeremy Coon and 26-year-old John Heder at Brigham Young University. To put it in Napoleon's terms, they all got skills. I'm looking forward to whatever they do next.
Parents should know that the movie contains some implied sexual encounters between adults. School bullies use headlocks and punches. There are some accidents used for comic effect and an animal is killed off-screen. A character sells purportedly breast size-enhancing herbs. A strength of the movie is the friendship between Napoleon and Pedro.
Families who see this movie should talk about the writers' answer when asked when it takes place: "Idaho." How does it seem like or not like your own experiences of adolescence? How would you list your skills? Does Napoleon seem like the kind of guy who will be able to write a movie like this just a few years later?
Families who appreciate this movie will also enjoy Gregory's Girl, Lucas, My Bodyguard and, for more mature audiences, Rushmore, Election and American Splendor.
Rating: Rental with Snacks [3 out of 5]
Honestly? I had no emotional connection to this film. I still don't know what I think. I thought all the performances were great. I thought the idea was interesting, the way it was shot interesting, and the music was neat. I think I enjoyed it - heaven knows everyone around me in the theatre did. Maybe I was empathizing with someone so hopelessly clueless about his own freakishness and I couldn't quite pull away and laugh at him. The filmmakers obviously love and hate this character, but I couldn't hate someone whose life was so self-determinedly miserable. It's a great showcase of Schadenfreude so if that's your thing, run, don't walk to the movie.
Jon Heder plays the titular misfit as the most perplexing, monotone freak, with a flair for genius in his acting. You can't hate him (even though you no doubt would have picked on him yourself in high school), you can't even feel sorry for some of the injustices that he weathers because he is such a total pill and he brings most of it on himself just by being so aggressively obnoxious. At the same time, you applaud him sticking to his personality guns and being who he is and damn everyone else who doesn't get it. No matter what, Heder's performance is one you won't soon forget. To describe it is to diminish him. Even when he is enthusiastic about something, he seems inconvenienced. His disgust with the world around him is only matched by the disgust his classmates have for him. The major focus of the film is just watching this cat navigate through episodes of victimhood at his whitebread Idaho high school.
He is supported mainly by his equally (but differently) bizarre brother Kip (Aaron Ruell). Kip is a great foil to Napoleon, and their dependence on their grandmother (barely touched upon) adds layers to their roles. Jon Gries as their uncle Rico proves that the weirdness is in the blood, whatever it is, and he is hilarious in a way that Anchorman should have been. The rest of the cast floats in and out but these three anchor the slice-of-so-called-life.
You can't really call Napoleon Dynamite a slice of life. Cowriters Jared and Jershua Hess (Jared directing) don't concern themselves much with a story arc, they mostly showcase Napoleon. When is it set? The clothes, the technology, swing between 1979 and 2000, they reminisce about back in 1982, but appear not to have lived through that era yet. Chat rooms and handheld tape recorders intermingle to make the film timeless and even more disjointed.
The pleasure comes from the aimlessness of the brothers and when the loose ends do wrap up, we're almost sorry Napoleon has less to complain about. Napoleon is a liar, but not in a malevolent way. He just wants, as the tag line says, to prove he's got nothing to prove. By being himself, and defying expectations of learning anything about how his personality makes his life harder, he negotiates a place in his life for himself, and it's an interesting journey. But see Garden State first.
Rating: **** [4 stars out of 5]
Surely, the movies have said all they have to say about nerds. If we've seen one tape-repaired pair of glasses, one slack-jawed dweeb without a clue, we've seen them all.
You'd think. But if you haven't seen Napoleon Dynamite, you don't know from nerd.
This dizzy nothing of a movie is a caricature in klutz, an Idaho indie with a droll fascination with its hero that veers from contempt to adoration. When you meet Napoleon (Jon Heder), the terminally deadpan, explosively funny stickman sight-gag, you will understand.
Napoleon is the nerd's nerd, the last kid his age to ride the bus to Preston High. Of course, he only does that when his way-cool bike is busted.
He loves to draw -- badly. He talks with his eyes closed most of the time, as if wrapped up in the myth he creates out of his life. For this Napoleon, every day is a Waterloo, promising a pummeling from the jock bullies at school. Perhaps that's because he never, ever self-censors the abuse he hurls at his tormentors, who include pretty much everyone.
"How was school?"
"Worst day of my life. Whaddaya THINK?!"
And then there's Deb (Tina Majorino), the meek social outcast who comes to his door, selling various bead crafts "to make money for college."
"I already made like INFINITY of those in Scout camp!"
Didn't we all? And that's some smooth pickup line, sport.
What makes this guy funny is the gap between how he perceives himself and how others see him. Of course, he has a shot with any girl in school. Sure, his artwork has museum possibilities. Like his nunchucks fighting or computer hacking, it's just among many "mad skillz." And he would be the perfect guy to help newcomer Pedro (Efren Ramirez) hook up with the prettiest classmate (Haylie Duff, you-know-who's sister), or run for class president.
Then, you meet his Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a 40-ish, van-driving loser who never got over being the third-string high school quarterback. You hang out with his older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), a mousy little Net-nerd who hooks up, online, with a Nubian goddess from Detroit. You sit in on the bogus martial arts class that Rex (Diedrich Bader) imposes on these clueless rubes. It all starts to make sense.
Writer-director Jared Hess, expanding on a short film he did with Heder and some of the other cast members, frames every shot with a sight gag in mind. Heder is all curly red hair, beanpole physique and mouth perpetually agape. He's an American Mr. Bean, pitiable and yet mean too -- the only guy who doesn't get it.
Hess seems to hate this guy and pretty much every other dork, dweeb, geek and nerd in the movie. And then he surprises us with a moment of triumph, a tiny little piece of validation for his annoyingly dense leading man.
Napoleon Dynamite manages the trick of being funny without having a story and being sympathetic without having a whiff of sympathy for anybody. It's hip and edgy without language more suitable to HBO or teenagers who need to have sex with baked goods.
And it is, start to finish, the funniest film of the summer.
Rating: **** [4 stars out of 5]
With Hollywood working overtime this summer to create alternate realities - from Harry Potter to Spider-Man 2 - the most otherworldly movie of all may be Napoleon Dynamite.
The title character doesn't wield a wand or wear tights (thank goodness), but this king of all nerds resides in a splendidly off-plumb movie world, populated with strangely likable characters that make the kids in Freaks and Geeks seem positively normal.
Compared with Napoleon Dynamite, other movies about high-school eccentrics - Election and Rushmore, for example - come off as glossy. Napoleon Dynamite succeeds in part because it's unpolished, and we can almost see the haphazard stitching that holds it together.
The movie is an exercise in absurdity that occasionally strays over the top, but pound for pound, it has more belly laughs than 10 studio-produced, star-vehicle comedies. This film has a chance to be the independent hit of the summer, judging by the enthusiastic reaction of the high school kids at a recent screening.
Director Jared Hess presents his subjects with a sensibility akin to South Park, but we still like them in the end.
Newcomer Jon Heder gives a hilarious performance as Napoleon, a put-upon Idaho teenager who lives with his older brother and grandmother and practices tetherball when he's not being bullied.
With his curly red hair, thick glasses and slow, deliberate speech, Napoleon is ignored by the popular kids. His unconventional looks are complemented by an off-putting personality, one of perpetual exasperation, that causes him to alternately whine, huff and puff and shout.
Both Napoleon and his brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell) - who spends most of his time in Internet chat rooms - engage in a fair bit of self-delusion. Asked how he spent his summer, Napoleon says he was "hunting wolverines," while the 98-pound Kip sees himself as a martial-arts master.
After Napoleon's grandma (Sandy Martin) is injured in an ATV accident, the smarmy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) shows up to keep an eye on the boys, although Kip appears to be pushing 30. Rico is desperate to relive his days as a high-school football player, pathetically filming himself throwing passes and buying a "time machine" on the Internet.
With Grandma laid up, Napoleon must feed the family llama, a side-splitting scene that ends with the youth just chucking the food over the fence.
Although he's a social outcast, Napoleon sees an opportunity to make a friend when Pedro (Efren Ramirez) transfers to school. Pedro doesn't know anybody, but he boldly asks the school's prettiest girl, Summer (Haylie Duff), to the prom.
She rejects him, but Pedro eventually takes the shy Deb (Tina Majorino), who's really interested in Napoleon. Uncle Rico and Kip, meanwhile, start selling plastic kitchenware door to door, much to Napoleon's embarrassment.
After the prom, Pedro launches a seemingly ill-fated campaign for student body president, though the popular Summer is clearly the favorite. But with Napoleon as his campaign manager and some creative tactics (at one point Pedro makes a Summer piñata and has other students bash it), he might just have a chance.
At least in the wonderful world of Napoleon Dynamite.
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 4]
First time director Jared Hess delivers this sweet and charmingly off-kilter high school comedy set in rural Preston, Idaho, his real-life hometown. The winning cast and quirky script combine for a good time at the movies and Napoleon Dynamite is the most original movie teen since Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Napoleon is a nerd with a capitol N. He has frizzy red hair, wears glasses, goofy t-shirts, hammer-pants and moon-boots. He likes to draw pictures of his favorite animal, ligers (a cross between a lion and a tiger), and enjoys solitary games of tether ball. He lives with his dune-buggy-riding grandma and 32 year old, just as nerdy, slacker brother. When grandma is hospitalized after a dune wipe-out Uncle Rico comes to stay with the brothers while she recovers. He is stuck in his glory days, trying to recapture 1982 when he almost led his football team to the state championship.
Napolean finds a best friend in recent Mexican immigrant Pedro. In his own way he is just as much an outsider as Napoleon. Shy girl Deb rounds out the geeky threesome. To save money for college she sells homemade boondoggle key chains and works at a glamour shots photography studio. The main gist of the plot concerns Pedro's run for class president with Napoleon running his campaign. He is up against popular girl Summer (played by Hillary Duff's older sister Haylie) - her slogan is 'vote for me and it will be summer all year long'.
The town of Preston creates the perfect setting. Although set in the present the town seems to be at least twenty-five years behind the rest of the world. Anyone who went to school during the nineteen-seventies or eighties should get waves of nostalgia at the look of Preston High. The open fields and distant panoramic mountains add to the sense of isolation. This is a world apart. And though at times Hess seems to be making fun of these small town people, it is never mean-spirited. For the most part he is laughing with them and not at them.
Everyone remembers that unpopular nerdy kid in school who seemed to live in his own world. The one you probably never spoke to or wondered much about. Napoleon Dynamite takes you inside the world of one such student and celebrates his geekiness. Warning: this is an unabashed feel-good flick but the cast is so vividly wrought and the humor so infectious that I wouldn't be surprised if this little movie becomes a breakout summer hit. I hope so anyway.
Grade: C+
Napoleon Dynamite premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, where it was snapped up by Fox Searchlight. The distributor is now attempting to stage a guerilla buzz campaign of sorts, holding countless pre-release screenings in dozens of markets, encouraging repeat viewings, holding contests, giving out t-shirts and prizes, trying not to stimulate word of mouth so much as beat it out of people. The orchestrators of this elaborate marketing ambush are clearly looking to build a sleeper hit from the ground up, starting small and crawling outward, as more and more people find out about this little obscurity that everyone just loves. Perhaps no one is thinking on a My Big Fat Greek Wedding scale -- that's impossible -- but maybe The Full Monty?
I understand the strategy but cannot abide its presumed beneficiary. Oh, it may well work -- the preview audience at my screening was nothing if not enthusiastic -- but it will be an unjust victory. Napoleon Dynamite is ostentatious and pointless, firing quirkiness out of a machine gun and saying nothing in the process. We are supposed to laugh because look how weird these people are and how oddly they act. We do laugh sometimes, surprisingly -- I must admit that many of the jokes hit the mark and that the movie doesn't feel longer than it should. But while the film pretends to have heart, its chest cavity is dark, hollow and echoey.
The obvious influence here is Wes Anderson, who has a similar penchant for filling his movies with eccentric geeks and trying to make us like and/or feel for them. Napoleon Dynamite should be particularly irritating to Anderson fans (and they are legion), as it cheapens and literalizes his approach to characters, turning an occasionally affecting filmmaking style into a series of cheap jokes. For those of us (mostly pariahs in the movie buff world) who don't see Wes Anderson as the Second Coming of God Knows Who, it's even worse, with the man's most nagging tendencies amplified to the nth degree.
The title character (yes, "Napoleon Dynamite" is the name of a person, though why that is his name is anybody's guess), played by Jon Heder, is a weird resident of the weird town of Preston, Idaho. He is so strange that one is at a loss for words to describe him -- imagine the most awkward, anti-social person in your junior high school combined with the slowest and least likable (the kind who, for example, might make up a fictitious girlfriend). He doesn't speak, he asserts -- every sentence has an emphasis on the last syllable.
His family -- indeed, it seems everyone in Preston -- gives him a run for his money in sheer inscrutability. He is raised by his grandmother, whose primary concern is a llama named Tina. His brother Kip is a somewhat frightening manchild who maintains an evidently passionate online relationship with his cyber-girlfriend Lafawnduh. When grandma is injured in an off-roading accident, in comes Uncle Rico (John Gries), who videotapes himself throwing a football and dreams of high school sports days gone by. Eventually he starts up a venture selling tupperware out of his van.
I concede that there is an impressive amount of amusing bits in Napoleon Dynamite. "Rex Kwon Do" is funny. When Napoleon intones to his friend, "You left your stuff in my locker; you'd better take it because I can't fit my nunchucks in there anymore," that's funny. It's funny when Napoleon picks up a "D-Qwon's Dance Grooves" tape and starts learning the moves (though the payoff to this isn't nearly so amusing). Hell, even the idea of Kip preparing for the Ultimate Fighting Championships -- particularly the sight gag that inevitably goes along with this -- had me chuckling.
But for what? To what end? Usually, if a movie is funny enough, I won't ask these questions (and will even get angry at those who do so), but Napoleon Dynamite is trying so desperately to become a cult hit that I couldn't give it a pass. The weirdness is for naught: the characters aren't endearing, they aren't likable, they aren't anything. This is an empty shell of a film, the likely result of Wes Anderson being replaced by a robot impostor.
Rating: * [1 star out of 5]
I know Napoleon Dynamite is the Sweetheart Indie Hit of 2004 and that audiences have fallen for it in a big way. But frankly, it's an unfunny, drifting work that borders on the inhumane and ranks as the worst film I've seen all year. As a matter of fact, Dynamite is just as nasty and condescending as a Todd Solondz film if Solondz took out all the demeaning and obscene dialogue, edited out all of the sexual material that openly mocked the film's characters, and aimed it for the Nickelodeon crowd. The fact that such a film would only be five minutes long is beyond the point. This is a film that exaggerates stereotypes (nerdy white kids, blacks, Hispanics), decorates the background with the worst in Retro nostalgia (psychidelic TrapperKeepers, acid-washed jeans), and then expects the combination to keep audience members rolling in the aisles. And from all reports, that what audience members are doing. But the laughs come from the worst part of our responses. Dynamite and its co-writer/director Jared Hess ask us not to laugh with the characters and their situations but laugh at them. Take Napoleon himself. As played by Jon Heder, he is an open-mouthed, closed-eyed anti-social who is belittled for his Goodwill clothing and for the loud wheeze he lets loose after every proclamation. I can't tell if he's exacerbated or has lung cancer. This distinction wouldn't matter to the filmmakers who don't so much create Napoleon as a legitimate character but as a template for embarrassingly "funny" bouts of public humiliation. During a class presentation, he presents a story about Japanese scientists trying to blow up the Loch Ness monster. This story has no connection to anything else in the film so it exists to make Napoleon look stupid and to subject him to ridicule. He teaches himself how to dance and ends up performing during the climatic school assembly. (As we know, school assemblies are always climatic in these type of films.) The music is lame, his dance style is spastic, and he claims to go out of his way not to get attention from his classmates. So why does he do it? Because it makes him look stupid and will subject him to ridicule. And so on and so on. Napoleon Dynamite kind of rolls in this pattern because there's no real plot to speak of. Mainly, Napoleon tries to help his new friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez) get elected to Class President. Pedro must beat Summer (Haylie "Yes My Sister is Hilary" Duff) who threatens that a vote for her opponent is a vote for "illiteracy and chimichangas in the lunch room." Wow, good one Napoleon Dynamite! The racism sprinkled through the film seems like a non-issue since its setting of Preston, Idaho is supposed to represent this bland, honkey wasteland that -save for cell phones - has not escaped the late 1970's. I'm sure there's nothing in Idaho this bad, but the rules of independent cinema dictate every non-urban setting must be depressing yet quirky.
The rest of the film revolves around the equally pathetic family members of Napoleon. Kip (Aaron Ruell) is Napoleon's older, dorkier brother who runs up Grandma's dial-up time by talking in chat-rooms for hours. He meets a black woman from Detroit named Lafawnduh (or that's how he spells it anyway) who comes out to visit and ends up transforming this nerd into an Eminem-type hipster in the course of a weekend. So Kip not only plays two white stereotypes, but he delivers the valuable lesson that its okay to change your personality in order to hook up with a hot chick. There's also Rico (Jon Gries), the boy's uncle who seems to be stuck in 1982 when he played high-school football. His laments on the past and his inability to move on present the film with its best chance to develop a redeemable character. Rico succumbs to the same fate, existing primarily to get beat up by Dietrich Bader. Bader plays Rex, who teaches a martial art he calls "Rex-Quan Do". He wears parachute pants designed like the American flag and takes on Rico for trying to sell Mrs. Rex some household ornaments. Yes, Napoleon Dynamite is the type of film that thinks it can hire an actor like Bader, put him in silly pants, and this will on its own strike comedic gold. Defenders of Napoleon Dynamite will attest that claims of laziness are merely part of the film's lackadaisical charm. Fine. But this still does not answer the charge of a mean spirit. Hess has claimed that the film is not mean-spirited because Napoleon is not mean-spirited. He's a free-wheeling innocent. This is very true. But the film holds him out for so much contempt that the fact that Napoleon never gets mean only adds to his continued embarrassments. Hess, in essence, plays the Solondz card by saying that he doesn't judge the character personally so neither can the film. Unfortunately, Napoleon Dynamite speaks for itself and develops not a story or not a character. The film simply develops a big target for the audience to aim their own insecurities. The film doesn't want its characters in on the joke because the characters are the jokes. That way, both the filmaker and the audience are absolved of any guilt and can laugh without recourse. Despite all of my insecurities, this audience member isn't willing to go along with the independent film version of a wedgie. Sad. Pathetic. Unbelievable.
The Pitch:
1/2 Happiness [title of a film]
Plus
1/2 Lizzie Maguire
Equals 1 Napoleon Dynamite
Grade: B+
The world of "Napoleon Dynamite" is a wondrous place to visit, but you certainly wouldn't want to get stuck there.
It's not even a world so much as it is a city. Okay, a small town. Preston, Idaho, to be exact. And Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is the community's lankiest loser, a frizzy-haired pariah who hides behind his face-hugging glasses as he marches proudly to the beat of his own unusual drum. He's defiant and standoffish. His best friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez) speaks broken English. And he dances like Travolta on speed.
Director Jared Hess, at the ripe old age of 24, places a unique stamp on "Napoleon" that carries the film a great distance. He's not afraid to try a variety of stunts, and so we're treated to a llama named Tina, an online romance, a round of duck bowling and a shaved head for Pedro. Even Hess' opening credits make creative use of everyday foods.
Hess' wife, 23-year-old screenwriter Jerusha, can't keep up. She struggles to connect her husband's endless oddball ramblings into a coherent script, but only concocts two minimal storylines to follow through. In one, Napoleon asks a girl to the school dance, and in the other, Pedro considers a run for class presidency.
The trouble is, we're never laughing with Napoleon but always at him and his cronies. When Pedro wonders if the class hottie (played by current cover girl Haylie Duff) will go with him to the dance, the question is played for laughs because "Napoleon" believes no good looking girl would ever date a homely immigrant. That's mean spirited.
The Hess collaboration stays consistently amusing because it focuses on people normally left out of the camera's frame. It has quirky humor in spades, but needs a story to tie it together. Since the jokes are aimed at someone else's less-fortunate heart, you may chuckle out loud but you'll feel guilty about it immediately afterward.
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 stars out of 4]
Near the beginning of Napoleon Dynamite, the outlandishly geeky title character stands alone in front of his locker at his high school. Another student walks by and, without missing a step, violently shoves him against it. The frizzy-haired Napoleon, played wonderfully by newcomer Jon Heder, lands with a metallic clang, but barely seems to notice.
Whether or not you find that tiny scene funny will go a long way toward determining whether or not you'll find Napoleon funny. The story, which was written by the husband-wife team of Jerusha and Jared Hess and directed by Jared, spends most of its length chucking Napoleon up against lockers, metaphorically or otherwise, and wondering whether this is funny.
I thought it was for a while, until I realized that the same joke was going to be repeated for the length of the movie. A few minutes in, we know all the punchlines.
Even by the standards of Preston, Idaho, Napoleon lives out in the Middle of Nowhere, in a decrepit split-level home with his impossibly geekazoid older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who spends most of his time in Internet chat rooms. The boys live with their grandmother until she is injured in a dune buggy accident and their weirdo Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) moves in to oversee the strange brood. The family keeps a pet llama out back and, whenever their supply of steak runs low, they shoot one of their cows to restock the freezer. They eat steak at every meal.
There are lots of little details like that in Napoleon Dynamite, which has the breezy feel of a Wes Anderson movie. But Anderson's genius lies in dreaming up full-bodied characters to fit into his strange stories -- he takes such care in building his characters that we're willing to follow them into any story, no matter how odd.
Hess comes close, but Napoleon Dynamite never ends up leading anywhere. This is his feature-length debut, and he's filled the cast and crew with novices, mostly fellow students and friends from Brigham Young University, where Hess made a short film called Peluca, which was the basis for Dynamite.
MTV Films is helping distribute the movie, and promotion on the network has made the largely plotless flick a cult hit among high school and college kids even before its release. And though Hess certainly registers as a talent to watch, Napoleon Dynamite never quite amounts to anything all that special.
It's saved, mostly, by Heder, a first-time actor whom Hess plucked from BYU's animation program. Fronted by thick, nerdy glasses and a surly disposition, Heder throws himself into the outcast Napoleon, and I liked the way he punctuates sentences with "Gosh!" or "ID-iot!"
Though the story mostly fails him, Heder keeps us interested as Napoleon struggles through his school days and pines after a girl named Deb (Tina Majorino). And his epic dance scene at the end almost makes all the abuse we watch Napoleon take worth it. But not quite.
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 4]
Will we ever tire of the freaks and geeks syndrome that invade the consciousness of high school existence? If we don't become exhausted by this particular genre then that's fine because the observant filmmaker behind the coming-of-age Midwestern comedy Napoleon Dynamite optimistically reminds us how refreshingly cruel it can be to relive those hectic school days (or fittingly school "daze") as the prototypical outsider.
In first-time writer-director Jared Hess's perceptively wry and self-deprecating matriculating vehicle, the moviemaking Idahoan masterfully takes a caustic stab at the local roots in his community by shining a spotlight on the extremely quirky and favorably flawed characters that provide the filtered fervor for his intimately blunt cinematic universe. Napoleon Dynamite doesn't stimulate or invite anything too distinctively that we haven't already seen before in other effective dysfunctional dramedies that were pithy and potent in its bid to paint an entertainingly drab reality of growing pains. But Hess does creatively produce a droll gem that exudes a nerdy naughtiness worthy of exploring in all its deadpan deliciousness. Invigorating in its offbeat vibes dedicated to celebrating the triumphant spirit of underdogs that look to thrive beyond their self-imposed obscurity, Napoleon Dynamite is a blast looking to explode in the flexible minds devoted outcasts and the envied in-crowd everywhere.
Hess may have concocted a summer sleeper that has the hybrid heft of a Todd Solondz flick such as Welcome to the Dollhouse mixed in with Alexander Payne's wickedly amusing Election. And believe it because that's not a couple of bad blueprints to inevitably welcome these complimentary comparisons. Napoleon Dynamite is the surreal setting where oddballs and misfits roam at will in a place that doesn't seem to have a grasp on any contemporary sense of reality. The outdated styles in clothing and hairdos is a given norm and one wouldn't be surprised if the thought of tampering with the late Lawrence Welk's bubble machine would be viewed upon as contemptuous.
The tall, red-haired gangly four-eyed hero is the title character who aimlessly walks the halls at Preston High as a dorky high school senior. Napoleon (played by Jon Heder) is the epitome of a tormented lad looking for vices to escape his dreary days of doom. When he's in positive mode, Napoleon engages in self-satisfying hobbies that include swinging his nunchucks at random or drawing wiggled creature-like shapes in his spare time. And one can imagine the exercise that the notoriously thin Napoleon receives when constantly ducking and dodging the school bullies that look to have fun at his limp-minded expense.
The domestic life of Napoleon isn't exactly anything to write home about either. He resides at home with his early thirtysomething older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) who doesn't hold any kind of job whatsoever but puts forth unnecessary energy in bickering with Napoleon at will. Plus Kip has a special interest of his own--he likes mingling on the computer as he raps with the chicks over the Internet. The simpleton siblings live with their grandmother (Sandy Martin) and when she is physically out of commission due to an accident, riff raffish Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) comes to live under the same roof. Ad nauseam, Rico unloads plenty of his glorified anecdotal recollections from 1982 and adds to the unstable household with his burdened presence.
Eventually, things start to look up at Preston High for Napoleon when he befriends a transfer student from Mexico named Pedro (Efren Ramirez). Pedro is a short, dark and hairy contrast to Napoleon's towering pale frame. Clearly, the duo is Preston High's newest sight gag--they're the Mutt and Jeff of the school grounds. They loyally stick together and take on the thrust of the flinging angst that the immediate world enthusiastically flicks at them without hesitation.
Determined to co-exist and wallow in each other's friendly company, the boys carry on and try to conduct business as usual like any other student vying for acceptance. Napoleon volunteers to help his newfound buddy Pedro run for class president. Of course we get the obligatory challenge when a hipster rival (Haylie Duff) enters the political race and causes the headache-inducing obstacles for our troubled tandem. As if Napoleon and Pedro don't have enough on their plate with trying to cope with securing the high school presidency, they look to tackle the task of rounding up dates for the upcoming heralded dance.
The uniqueness about Napoleon Dynamite is its uneventful way it sits there and lets the audience soak in its unassuming charm. There's really no penetrable plot to speak of in terms of this little film's storytelling tactics. Hess finds the quaint pleasure in humbly bringing along his characters and the sleepy surroundings they're trapped in without feeling the need to be bombastic about it in the process. Napoleon (and Hess) effortlessly promotes their hayseed utopia with an underlying wonderment that's sharply funny even though it doesn't jump out at you in the conventional sense. And do you know what the riotous thing about Hess's film that's inherently hysterical? Well, it's the odd revelation that his protagonists, namely his lanky leading man Napoleon, don't seem to be aware of their blaring shortcomings. Also, it's as if these heartland bystanders are removed from what's happening in a modern day world where turmoil rules with an iron fist. No siree, it seems that Hess's Idaho-based hazy haven has a quiet sense of tension all its own.
Heder is very exceptional as the walking drainpipe that heads the geeky goings-on with an inexplicable dosage of self-contained pride that's contagious. His exasperating mannerisms and inner conflict deems him the pity-pleaser that moviegoers occasionally champion with good cause. Heder's Napoleon is an enigma of a sympathetic soul looking to jump into the game of Life only to misplace the rulebook along the way. Heder bravely embodies his awkward alter ego as this traveling tragedy waiting to happen but this clueless beanpole is too oblivious to let this occurrence defeat him.
The supporting cast is marvelously realized and plays along brilliantly in the toned down mayhem. Ramirez is very affecting as the sidekick-in-misery Pedro who has the added weight of being a newcomer to the mellowed madness at Preston High. Ruell's shiftless cad Kip is an absolute hoot and Gries's turn as the scheming and garrulous nuisance Rico fits terrifically in Hess's topsy-turvy proceedings. Overall, the tone of the film gels perfectly with snappy dialogue and carefree humor that is as robust as a hog's muddy belly.
There's nothing really explosive about Dynamite since it's wisely restrained and goes along with its homespun flow. But as for Napoleon, he's the ideal wet firecracker for anyone to embrace with celebrated aplomb.
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 stars out of 4]
One of the more bizarre and original characters in recent memory, Napoleon provides some great laughs despite an uneven story that often loses steam
If you've ever watched the fantastic but short lived show Freaks and Geeks, you probably remember the character of Bill, the most outspoken member of the geek segment of the show. Now, take Bill and multiply his geekiness and awkwardness by about a hundred and you might be at the level of the character of Napoleon Dynamite (John Heder). The difference is that Napoleon is such an outcast, such a bizarre character, that he either has no interest in being a part of the in-crowd or already knows he is much too far gone to ever have a chance of assimilation.
Napoleon Dynamite is the first feature for director Jared Hess. The loosely concocted story follows the not-so-lovable loser through his day to day existence in high school and with his screwball family. Napoleon has a an older brother named Kip (Aaron Ruell) who spends the majority of his time talking to women in Internet chat rooms. I should also mention that this is a period piece of sorts, set vaguely in the 80's. I'm not sure if there really were chat rooms at that time, but I guess if there were, Kip would have been the kind of computer nerd that would have known about them. The two live at home with their grandma (Sandy Martin) until she is injured racing dune buggies over sand dunes. Yes, that's what I said. She sends in Uncle Rico (John Gries) to look after the two, despite the fact that Kip is in his early 30's. Rico is arguably the most pathetic character, a sort of Al Bundy relative who is still living out the glory of his high school football days while attempting various money-making schemes with Kip.
As Napoleon struggles through his high school existence, he befriends the school's lone Latino student, Pedro (Efren Ramirez). The two try to help each other get dates for a dance and share their interests in bicyles. They also both become friends with another outcast named Deb (Tina Majorino). They eventually find that they are both interested in Deb but, luckily, since neither character ever really displays emotions, this doesn't become too big a problem.
Napoleon Dynamite has some very big laughs, usually at the expense of our title character and things like his love of chap stick, tater tots and for drawings of his favorite animal, the Liger. That's a cross between a tiger and a lion, for the unenlightened. The laughs often feel disjointed as the story moves in every which direction, never really finding a clear focus. Napoleon, his family and friends are bizarre and watching them is often funny, but they are more funny in the same way that the crazy character skits of In Living Color, SCTV and Saturday Night Live are funny. Napoleon is missing any sort of core story or emotional depth. Napoleon himself is almost completely without emotion.
The story that is there serves only to get us to the next strange thing that someone is going to do. By the middle of the movie, this has grown pretty old. There are some more big laughs in the end that revive things, but as a whole, the film adds up to very little. Director Jared Hess has made a movie that has a lot of laughs, it just isn't memorable in any way. Napoleon is such a jackass that he seems deserving of his lot in life. It's very hard to root for a character that is completely indifferent himself. In the end, even if you've decided to portray a character lacking in emotion, it would seem that the emotion would come out of those around him, however the supporting cast is equally unemotional. In Pedro's case, he's barely human at all.
Napoleon Dynamite is fun as an oddity and features a few memorable lines that may prove more memorable than the movie itself. It's just too bad that Hess didn't find a way to incorporate a more structured story in which we could meet Napoleon. Napoleon's a weirdo, but why should I care? What makes this character any more worth watching than a train wreck? I laughed enough to at least reluctantly recommend this film when it hits the rental stores, but it could have been so much more. If Hess can move beyond the surface of his characters in his next film and place them in an interesting story, then he may wind up with a more complete, more interesting movie.
"I caught you a delicious bass," proclaims Napoleon Dynamite, by way of flirting with a flushed classmate. And when fresh fish fails to woo them, Napoleon (Jon Heder) is quick to offer crude drawings of mythical creatures or even an impromptu demonstration of his tetherball skills. A gawky social outcast, prone to exasperated shrugs and cries of "What the flip do you think?" in response to even the most benign questions, Napoleon seems almost willfully intent on making his own high school experience as unpleasant as possible.
A hit at Sundance, Napoleon Dynamite is coasting into theaters on a typhoon of hype. In an unprecedented move, its distributor has added a five-minute extra scene--typically the kind of thing you'd find as a DVD extra--as a treat for smaller-market audiences. Originally a short film entitled Peluca, the spectacle of Heder's gangly frame and orange Œfro (he towers over his classmates like a chess-club Bill Walton) make it easy to see why husband-and-wife writing team Josh and Jerusha Hess couldn't wait to spend some more time with their protagonist. Unfortunately, the thin premise is stretched to the breaking point at feature length, and even Heder's tour de spaz performance can't completely redeem a film that feels calculated for maximum eccentricity.
Stylistically, Napoleon Dynamite seems stuck in some kitschy 80's mode. John Swihart's score is a Casio homage to the cheesy synth soundtracks of that decade, and everything from crimped hair to top-loading VCRs get trotted out for out bemusement. Napoleon and his love interest Deb (Tina Majorino) are both outfitted like thrift-store aliens from the planet 80s. When Napoleon appears in moonboots, elastic-waistband pants and a teal, wolf-emblazoned t-shirt, it's clear there hasn't been a movie character of such social-bullseye proportions since Heather Matarazzo's Weiner-Dog in Welcome to the Dollhouse. Like the character in the Todd Solondz film, Napoleon chooses to return the world's hostility in kind. But Hess lacks the razor-sharp social wit that make Solondz' films so profoundly discomfiting; in its place he seems to have swallowed Wes Anderson's precious deadpan awkwardness whole. Hess' characters have the tics and absurd non-sequitur communication habits of the Tenenbaum family albeit with a farmland coarseness that's more suited to flyover country. With a hero who looks like a combination of Bill Haverchuck from Freaks and Geeks crossed with Beavis, and whose chores include feeding the family llama, Hess seeks nothing less than to build the perfect misfit.
Napoleon is a fantastic creation, but every buffoon must have his straight-man, and so it is that his only friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez) is actually the film's dead(-pan) center. As the new kid in school, Pedro suffers Napoleon's bizarre offer of friendship gladly and the two set about lining up dates for a school dance and launching a campaign for Pedro's election as student body president. Out of his league but undeterred (and hilariously almost-disqualified for innocently smashing a piñata designed to look like his opponent), Pedro steals the movie in the moment he loosens his bolo tie after bombing in his presidential election speech. Not to be outdone, Napoleon saves the day for him in truly jaw-dropping fashion.
With a bunch of go-nowhere plot strands and characters just one dimension removed from cartoons, Napoleon Dynamite is easier to enjoy than to champion. And while it runs out of steam near the end, it never runs out of charm, thanks to Jon Heder's narcoleptic zeal as the title character. It's a very funny movie, although it's not always clear whether or not the jokes are at Napoleon's expense.
The title character in Napoleon Dynamite is a lanky teenage mouth-breather who wears giant 1980s eyeglasses, speaks in a bored monotone, carries fried potatoes in his pants pocket, and bemoans to his only friend that "girls want boyfriends that have great skills." He's almost as aggressively nerdy as the movie of which he's the subject.
Napoleon Dynamite finds newcomer filmmaker Jared Hess out to prove he knows as much about quirky eccentric geekitude as Todd Solondz and Wes Anderson. There are some funny bits, particularly near the beginning, and Hess's attraction to barren landscapes provides a fitting visual compliment to Napoleon's personality enigma. There's even something resembling poignance in Napoleon slow dancing to Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time. But the movie's mean condescension toward its oddball characters leaves the best of actor Jon Heder's line-deliveries with a bitter aftertaste -- made worse whenever Hess arbitrarily decides an odd scene is worth playing sympathetically. Napoleon Dynamite is no advance over the moronic appropriation of white poverty into rich kid fashion several years ago. Hess serves cruelty as hipster cred (Napoleon Dynamite is a variation of a two hour mullet joke.) The spite is evident: the movie is meant to appeal to less-extreme dorks than Napoleon so they can feel better about themselves.
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 stars out of 4]
I've never seen anything quite like "Napoleon Dynamite."
Quirk for relentless quirk, gesture for half-hearted gesture, it's what might happen if Todd Solondz were afraid of offending anyone. Expanding on the characters he created for his short film "Peluca," Idaho native son Jared Hess turns his satirical attention to his hometown of Preston for a patently peculiar study of life in inertia - taking us to a place we've never been, but not quite knowing what to do with us once we get there.
Co-writing the script with his wife Jerusha, the 24-year-old Hess paints (or simply visits) a landscape of suburban dystopia that's amusingly, curiously extraordinary in its banality.
Napoleon (Jon Heder) is the nerd's nerd - or more accurately, the dork's dork ("nerd" implies an intelligence he obviously doesn't have; "spaz" would denote an energy level): Tall, gangly, shock-haired, myopic and obsessed with kung fu but too lazy to actually practice it, he lives in one of those neighborless tract houses with an ATV-riding grandma (Sandy Martin) who feeds casserole to her pet llama; Kip (Aaron Ruell), a hopelessly dateless older brother who has yet to leave home at 32; and the most astonishing collection of '80s kitsch ever captured on film. Hess obviously is a child of the '80s: Kip's yen for Internet chat rooms is the only observable evidence the film is set in modern times, with the faux paneling, shag carpeting, reliance on cassette tapes as music media, and faded one-sheets for "Dragonslayer" and other sword-and-sorcery cheesefests converting the production into a veritable time capsule of 1982.
That suits Napoleon just fine. Though his environment screams to the heavens in its quiet desperation, all he can manage in protest is a tone of mild annoyance followed by the inevitable "Gosh." (Adding an exclamation point would be unnecessary exertion.) Of course, he's bullied by everyone; he befriends the new kid named Pedro (Efren Ramirez) because he's the only one who'll talk to him, even if it's mostly in Spanish; his idea of a pick-up line for the marginally cute girl (that's as good as it gets in Preston) is, "Are you drinking 1 percent milk because you think you're fat? Because you're not."
Acclimating ourselves to this nightmare on Xanax, the eccentric lifelessness is the occasion for big laughs - some of the year's best. I was instantly plunged into sense memory of years of playground horror watching Napoleon's initial terror, then (customarily mild) triumph at negotiating that most nefarious athletic foe: the tetherball. And you can't help but empathize with the guy's self-awareness of his place in high school (this one, anyway - John Hughes by way of Wes Anderson) - he needn't bother asking a girl out; no girl will consider him because he doesn't have any "skills." Gosh.
When Grandma's hospitalized in a four-wheeler accident, and Uncle Rico pulls up in his customized Merry Miler sporting a bad rug and a porn-star 'stache, that's when Napoleon's problems really begin.
Or do they? As played by an unrecognizable Jon Gries (a once-busy character actor all-but MIA since the late '80s), Rico's the most likable character - obviously intended as an archetype of the oily huckster still clinging to the faded promise of his high school glory days, but taking the high road north of cliché. Napoleon looks on him as the guy who just shows up to ruin everybody's life and eat all their steak, but in the energy he devotes to selling knock-off Tupperware and cleavage-enhancing chemicals, he tries to inspire a sense of purpose in his lethargic nephews - self-absorbed enthusiasm is still enthusiasm. In his cheeseball self-assurance, Rico is the story's sole source of vitality.
Hess has made half of a rather brilliant film here, but its acutely observed triumph is also its undoing: It's hard to lock on to oppressive tedium as your target without becoming oppressively tedious. This movie's not low-key, it's no-key.
Once the currency of eccentric novelty is spent, Hess is in trouble: Because all but one of the characters haven't generated the energy level to exactly endear themselves, their dash (more of a mosey, actually) through the gauntlet of inevitable plot contrivances is even more uninspiring - and Hess' commitment to the absurdities he creates is as half-hearted as the resigned kick Napoleon offers each time a bully shoves him against his locker. The characters "arc," I suppose, in that they experience outcomes beyond their norm, but there's no growth here in Preston, Idaho - the drudgery pays off, and in a twisted alignment, inertia has its rewards: Kip finds happiness as a direct result of indulging his chat-room obsession (and ends up as even more pathetic), Pedro lazes his way into triumph, Napoleon himself captivates the school by being an even bigger dork.
Hess' obvious intent is that we not be inspired, moved or motivated to any action beyond a benign shrug (and often a mild chuckle) by what we see - and he accomplishes it brilliantly, in the context of portraying his hometown as the most unappealing, soul-sucking municipality in the Northern Hemisphere. But it's not satisfying cinema.
I've frequently been accused of expecting too much of cinema. But isn't wit, imagination and wonder the bare minimum of what we should expect of an 86-minute investment of our time? Sorry, Jared - I won't recommend others make the same investment if you deliver all those things, but can't move me to care.
Grab a case of Red Bull, get some vitality in those veins, and show us what you can make of the obvious potential you show here. "Napoleon Dynamite" is a briefly invigorating dip in the kiddie pool of quirkiness - but if we stay in too long, all we have to show for it is pruned skin.
Somehow, I think that would be OK with Napoleon. Gosh.
Rating: *** 1/2 [3.5 stars out of 4]
"Napoleon Dynamite," which premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival to much fanfare, is a quirky, one-of-a-kind comedic gem. With echoes in tone to Wes Anderson's "Rushmore," in style to Todd Solondz's "Welcome to the Dollhouse," and in feel to such adult-minded animated television shows as "Daria" and "The Simpsons," writer-director Jared Hess and cowriter Jerusha Hess have paid tribute to such influential filmmakers and genres without feeling the need to copy them. In telling the story of a group of lovable misfits at the bottom rung of the social ladder who somehow find a way to overcome their woes and keep marching forward, "Napoleon Dynamite" is one of the more consistently charming and original motion pictures of the last few months. And even when you aren't laughing out loud at the characters' antics and Hess' droll humor, you won't be able to stop from smiling.
In the rural, desperately uneventful midwest town of Preston, Idaho, 17-year-old Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) stands out in a crowd. Equipped with a full head of bushy red hair, almost always clad in snow boots, and with an eternal blank stare, Napoleon trudges through the doldrums of his dysfunctional home life and miserable high school experience as if he has long since accepted his lowly existence and has learned to remain indifferent to anything that comes his way. When Grandma (Sandy Martin) is injured in a sand bike accident, smarmy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) is sent to stay with Napoleon and his unemployed, chat room-obsessed 32-year-old brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), until she gets out of the hospital. As Kip teams with Uncle Rico on a corny get-rich-quick scheme and Uncle Rico begins to spread negative rumors around about Napoleon to better himself, Napoleon finds an unexpected ally in new-kid-in-school Pedro (Efren Ramirez). When Pedro decides to run for class president against the popular, snobbish Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff), he and Napoleon begin a seemingly hopeless campaign. Meanwhile, Napoleon befriends the shy Deb (Tina Majorino), a cute wallflower who might just be his perfect match.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is light on a driving narrative, but hugely likable, nonetheless, as it follows its affectionate, offbeat characters through a few months in their shoes. Certain plot threads that threaten to come off as cliches, such as the budding relationship between Napoleon and Deb or the high school campaign for president, bypass where one would naturally expect them to lead and feel brand-new because of it. Most appreciably of all, director Jared Hess (a 24-year-old making his promising feature debut) refuses to talk down to his audience by spelling out every story development. He trusts that viewers are more quick-witted than most films treat them (he would be right), and so he spares us the more commonplace scenes that go along with comedies about teenagers. For example, when Napoleon and Deb end up dancing together at the school dance, their conversation is awkward, but warm, leading to a silent reciprocal respect for each other that transcends any dialogue Hess could have cooked up. And the scene, for once, doesn't end in a kiss. Later, when Deb gets mad at Napoleon over a misunderstanding, Hess drops the usual, tired apology and make-up sequence for something that is far more quiet and honest.
More than anything, "Napoleon Dynamite" is a study in transcendent simplicity. There are a lot of broad laughs, much of which comes from Napoleon's outrageous behavior in certain circumstances, and some that are more subtle, whether it be a zinger of a one-liner or a joke that is carefully set up early on and paid off later. The portrayal of Grandma's bike accident; the funky dance Napoleon learns (from a tape called "D-Kwon's Dance Moves") that he puts to use during Pedro's election; and the gift Kip's black Internet girlfriend, LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), gives him are just a few of the comic highlights in a movie that has countless others. No matter. All of the comedy is successfully carried off without any winks to the audience, and the characters have no idea that they are even in a comedy. That the movie is so very funny and never unveils that it knows it is the biggest key to great comedy. The second anyone shows that they know they are funny is the second the spell is lifted and it stops making one laugh. Fortunately, this never happens here.
As the outlandish title character, Jon Heder (making his major film debut) superbly carries the film without ever seeming to try. Napoleon walks through most of the film with a facial expression that resembles a fog. Maybe he has been treated badly by his peers for so long that he is worn out. Maybe he is unsure of whether or not to trust new friends Pedro and Deb at the onset because he is afraid of getting hurt. Or maybe it is the exact opposite, and he no longer is affected by rejection, which is why he willingly hangs out with them. As kindred spirit Deb, Tina Majorino is easily the standout. Once a wonderful child actor in such films as 1994's "When a Man Loves a Woman," 1994's 'Corrina, Corrina," and 1995's 'Waterworld," Majorino returns after a five year absence (her last project was 1999's television miniseries of 'Alice in Wonderland") all grown up and proving that maturity has only strengthened her abilities as an actress. Majorino is, at once, adorable and deeply touching, nearly the female equivalent of Heder's Napoleon. She makes her every moment on screen come alive.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is that rare motion picture that reminds you of a lot of other films while, at the same time, being unlike any other movie you have ever seen. Director Jared Hess makes it his own, both through the unpredictably trajectory of the subplots and the innovation with which he creates his ensemble. He also invigorates things with peculiar, winning aesthetics; many of the fashions are right out of the '70s, most of the nostalgic music selections (such as "The Promise" by When in Rome and "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper) are from the '80s, and the technology (the Internet, for example) is strictly of a present-day mentality. It is as if this nowhere town in Idaho has been stuck in a number of time warps, creating some weird sort of meshing of random decades. Most important, director Hess never seems to be laughing at his characters. Even when it starts to seem like it, Hess is quick to confirm at every turn that he really adores them, there is no question. By the time the lovely, lyrical final scene of "Napoleon Dynamite" arrives, you have no choice but to nod in acknowledgment. Finally, and once and for all, it is crystal clear why these characters deserve to be loved.
Rating: * [1 stars out of 4]
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE is cast with a bunch of unknowns -- actors who are unknown for good reasons. Like a reject for a TV movie, the film is an MTV production, although why they thought it deserved a theatrical release is beyond me. I suspect that they hoped audiences would embrace it as this generation's REVENGE OF THE NERDS. The lifeless production has little story development in evidence. Basically it is just a slice of loser life at a rural Idaho high school. In this school -- you will be shocked to discover -- the dorks aren't popular and have trouble getting elected president of the student body. (Stop me if you've heard this before.) These guys with no social graces, who act like stoners without the need for drugs, also have difficulty in getting the popular girls to go out with them.
A better title for the movie might be DORK AND DORKIER, as Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) and his buddy Pedro (Efren Ramirez), a couple of DOA students, try to cope with the rigors of their high school's social structure. The script is so lame that it is unable to come up with a single credible villain to somehow mistreat our misfits and thereby gain our sympathy. Actually, we'd probably be rooting for the bad guys, if there were any.
Something like a reverse of LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE, the movie makes food so unappealing, especially meat, that it could be used as a recruitment film for Vegetarians International.
In his usual deadpan style, Napoleon sums up NAPOLEON DYNAMITE best in a comment he makes about his uncle's prized home video, one of his uncle tossing football after footfall into the distance. "This is pretty much the worst video ever made," Napoleon complains in disgust. I know exactly how he feels.
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE runs 1:26. It is rated PG for "thematic elements and language" and would be acceptable for kids around 11 and up.
Rating: ** [2 stars out of 4]
So deadpan a film is Napoleon Dynamite, the story and the name of a gangly high school misfit in Preston, Idaho, that I can't say whether it was intended as a character study or a comedy. When the audience roared at Napoleon's almost spastic way of slicing the air with his limp-spaghetti arms, I cringed. Were they laughing because they felt superior to this supremely alienated and awkward youth? Or because they identified with him as a social untouchable so uncool that not even the nerds will talk to him?
Napoleon (Jon Heder) resembles his family's pet llama, but with a shock of red curls. Behind Coke-bottle lenses his eyes are half-shut, as though he can't bear to face the world, and his mouth is half-open, like a gasping guppy. He subsists on tater tots (this is Idaho, after all) and Kool-Aid. He lives with his grandma, his brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), and Tina the llama. His voice is a toneless drone. Heder does a frighteningly good job of creating a character you'd cross the Sierras to avoid.
He is routinely bullied by the jocks at school and cruelly snubbed by the cheerleaders (one is played by Haylie Duff, big sis of teen idol Hilary). You could say that Napoleon has a personality disorder, but that would presume that he has a personality.
As conceived by director Jared Hess, who cowrote the film with his wife, Jerusha, Napoleon Dynamite is not a movie but a series of excruciating social indignities triumphed over in the penultimate scene.
The triumph might carry more dramatic weight were the acting not so deliberately disengaged, as though all the performers were injected with Botox so they couldn't register emotion.
While the cinematography is strikingly lit in the manner of Diane Arbus portraits, where figures seem unmoored from their environments, Arbus had obvious sympathy for her freaks and geeks. It's unclear how Hess feels for Napoleon, perhaps the only guy in Idaho who can lose at a game of solo tetherball.
Rating: ** [2 stars out of 5]
Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) has a gigantic corona of unkempt hair framing his semi-closed eyes, which peer out from behind thick glasses. Ask Napoleon how his day at school was, and his nasal, husky voice bristles with indignation: "It was the worst day of my life, what do you think?" How can you not appreciate his plight? Napoleon lives with his grandmother (Sandy Martin) and his unemployed brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), leading a non-heroic, unexplosive life.
But Napoleon is plunged into a time of conflict by the forces of nature and Grandma's all-wheel-drive accident. Suddenly forced to live with his Uncle Rico (character actor Jon Gries), Napoleon is eager to impress the young women of small-town Idaho and determined to help new kid Pedro (Efren Ramirez) win the student council presidency against the hideously popular Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff). He's also coping with the tentative affections of Deb (Tina Majorino), a shy, sweet young woman with a hilariously asymmetrical ponytail sticking out from the side of her head.
Director Joshua Hess co-wrote Napoleon Dynamite with his wife, Jerusha, and the script is long on quirk and short on plot; the film rolls about in a cloud of wheezy whimsy. Unlike Rushmore's Max Fischer, Napoleon isn't really driven in any way; he's content to live in solitude and mutter in his low voice about the thousands of injuries the world inflicts upon him. Bear in mind that for all of the script's flatness, Heder's performance in the title role is an act of pure abandon and fully committed acting. Heder has a willingness to look amazingly bad, the capacity to do his own stunts and a cockeyed physical timing that infuses every line delivery with an aggrieved, adolescent-weary fatalism -- which, as the film progresses, turns into go-to-hell determination.
But a character does not a movie make, just as quirks can't take the place of an absent story line. The characters in Napoleon Dynamite have their obsessions -- Uncle Rico with his lost, long-ago football glory, Kip with his Internet love affairs and Grandma with her pet llama and quad dirt-racing. All of this is wacky, but also a bit weary. As much as I smiled at Heder's dork-tacular work, Napoleon has the brittle, thin showiness of a sketch character, as opposed to the kind of dimensionality a film's lead role requires to make it truly engaging.
It's hard to hate Napoleon Dynamite; everyone on-screen seems to care, and care a lot, and director and co-writer Hess obviously has enthusiasm gushing from every pore. The only problem is that we've seen this movie before, and the slightly askew physical characteristics, mannerisms and oddities of the lead characters are thin stuff. Napoleon Dynamite winds up being a low-grade, wet firework of a self-conscious, self-impressed indie comedy.
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 stars out of 4]
The titular hero of Napoleon Dynamite is a tall, gangly, exceedingly odd boy who's always being slammed into lockers or getting hit in the face by flying objects or suffering some other sort of humiliating indignation (even his pet llama treats him with disdain). A senior at Preston High School, Napoleon goes around drawing sketches of ligers and unicorns, or babbling about the Loch Ness monster and nunchuks. His favorite sport is tether ball (a perfect game for loners), his wiry red hair always looks as if he just got out of bed, and his signature item of clothing is a pair of oversized moon-boots -- a natural accessory for someone so relentlessly strange, he might as well be a visitor from another planet.
Nerds are a familiar fixture in movies about high school, but in this wry, deadpan comedy, Napoleon is just one in a procession of weirdos. Napoleon Dynamite marks the debut of director Jared Hess, who also co-wrote the screenplay with his wife Jerusha, basing it on people he knew while growing up in tiny, flat Preston, Idaho, where the film is set. Hess' attitude toward the town and its people is reminiscent of Alexander Payne's portrayal of Omaha in About Schmidt: Often, it's hard to tell if Hess genuinely likes his characters or is simply out to mock them.
The answer is a little of both. Napoleon Dynamite has no problem mining laughs out of Napoleon's 32-year-old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), an unemployed homebody who brags about the number of hours he spends talking to girls in online chat rooms; or Napoleon's creepy, toupee-loving uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who buys a time machine on eBay so he can travel back to 1982 and relive his high-school football days; or even Napoleon's sole friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez), the school's only Hispanic, a slow-witted mouth-breather running for student council president.
But the movie never looks down on its eccentric characters: Hess simply regards them, with amusement but without judgment, as they revolve around Napoleon, alternately stoking and pacifying his inner geek-rage. Like David Gordon Green's George Washington, Napoleon Dynamite is more interested in behaviors and its small-town milieu than an actual story. What little plot there is -- the election, a homecoming dance, the door-to-door selling of Tupperware products -- unfolds slowly and episodically, like life in Preston itself. Occasionally, time really does seem to stand still.
As slight as the picture is, though, its hero is an indelible creation. Played by newcomer Jon Heder (a Brigham Young University student and former classmate of the director), Napoleon walks around with his shoulders thrust forward and his head pointing down, like a defensive tackle poised to ward off whatever new disaster life is preparing to throw at him. Napoleon is often cranky and irascible, like a misfit unhappily resigned to the cosmic joke being played on him.
But Heder also lets us see the hopeful, fiercely independent soul lurking inside. When Napoleon compliments a girl by telling her she should drink whole milk instead of skim, or stands in front of the entire high school and performs an uninhibited, herky-jerky dance to Jamiroquai, you get the feeling that while this formidably ugly duckling may never get his own storybook transformation, he'll still turn out all right.
Rating: Thumbs Up
EXCERPT: "I'm cracking up already thinking about that uncle again, who is obsessed with 1982."
EXCERPT: "While these kinds of stories often drown in their own eccentricity, the cast keeps the film afloat."
Grade: B
"Napoleon Dynamite" is one of those rare, small independent films that finds a mainstream audience. Crudely and cheaply made, this film is nonetheless doing well at the box office all over the country. The reason? Simple, it's funny. It has a surrealistic, but effective story loaded with interesting characters and good sight gags.
The title character, Napoleon Dynamite, is played by Jon Heder. He also appeared in a short film, "Peluca," which was directed by Jared Hess, who wrote and directed "Napoleon Dynamite." Hess is from Preston, Idaho, where this story is set. He clearly understands how small rural towns work. Few comedies are set in rural Idaho, or rural anywhere, for that matter. This unusual setting gives the film an exotic quality. The themes of the movie are universal, however. It is a coming-of-age movie about two outsiders, Napoleon, and his friend, Pedro (played by Efren Ramirez) who try to get dates for the dance and win the school election. The plot is more like a series of blackout sketches that fit loosely together. The editing seems almost haphazard. What makes it work is character development. For trivia buffs, Hilary Duff's sister, Haylie Duff, plays the part of Summer, the school's diva, and Pedro's competition for school president.
In addition to Napoleon and Pedro, Napoleon's nerdy, stay-at-home brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), his ex-jock wanabe Uncle Rico (Jon Gries of "Northfork"), his would-be girlfriend, Deb (Tina Majorino) are all quirky, but well-defined characters. That's four more characters than a lot of recent Hollywood films managed to develop. Uncle Rico wants to use a time machine to go back to his high school years and win the big game. He's the kind of guy that even if he could go back in time, he still couldn't get things right. All of these characters, however, show a lot of optimism about the future. They all have faith that things will get better for them. Uncle Rico thinks his get-rich-quick schemes are going to work. Pedro thinks he will be elected class president, and Napoleon just believes in himself. This optimism is refreshing compared to the pessimism in most films, including independent films, that are being made today. In addition to being optimistic, the characters in the film are also uncompromising. The film is also uncompromising in the way these characters are depicted. These characters never conform, and neither does the film.
Good use of location photography is made in the film. One scene showing some boys on a lunch break at a chicken farm shows the stark, treeless Idaho landscape in the background. Similar backgrounds are shown in several other scenes in the film. One scene shows Uncle Kip camped out in the middle of nowhere. Some of these scenes tend to heighten Napoleon's sense of isolation from the rest of the world. It is also another way of showing these characters are not intimidated by the world's massive indifference to them.
Rating: *** [3 out of 4 stars]
Napoleon Dynamite, a quirky, funny film directed by Jared Hess in which the title character, an awkward, gangly, Idaho teenager, seems to be genetically incapable of social conformity, is the rare comedy that has an overabundance of material desperately looking to wrap itself around a plot (usually it's the other way around, with a one-joke idea stretched and distorted beyond recognition by a tired storyline). But Hess, who co-wrote this film with his wife Jershua, has strung together an almost endless supply of original jokes and gags into what could easily pass for an A-list standup routine.
As it is, Napoleon Dynamite is full of laughs, and if they had been attached to some kind of story, we'd be quick to crown Dynamite as the latest and newest classic comedy (for its part, the film has apparently, within a month of its theatrical release, attracted a fan club willing to populate midnight showings to lend the film cult status). Surely, those who do see this smallish, independent film will be quoting dialogue long afterward.
Napoleon (a perfectly cast and very capable Jon Heder) is the star of the show, a teenage resident of Preston, Idaho, who struggles through life daily. He is not, by any measure, a normal teen: he has a curly mop of blond hair; oversized glasses; a husky, mildly annoyed deadpan; and a gaze that extends into a vague middle distance, usually somewhere on the floor about four feet in front of him. He likes mystical animals (his favorite is something called a Liger, which, he explains, is like a lion and a tiger, mixed), he fancies himself proficient with "numchucks," enjoys playing tetherball (though mostly by himself), and his only friend (apparently) is Pedro Sanchez (Efren Ramirez), a transfer student from Mexico. He also has a secret crush on a shy girl named Deb (Tina Majorino).
The plot, if it can be called that, follows roughly a year's worth of Napoleon's adventures, beginning with the arrival of Napoleon's uncle, Rico (Jon Gries), after his grandma winds up in the hospital following an accident with a dune buggy -- which, naturally, is good for a laugh. Rico is permanently stuck in 1982, and when he's not endlessly reminiscing about his failed attempt to win the high school football state championship that year, he's recruiting Napoleon's brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) as part of his door-to-door Tupperware sales team.
Kip is possibly an even bigger loser than Napoleon -- at age 31, he spends hours on the Internet talking long-distance to his girlfriend, LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), who lives in Detroit, and is, predictably but hilariously, as large and black as Kip is small and white.
Not in recent memory has such an amazing and broadly enjoyable cast of screwball characters been assembled for a single film; while each of them defies reality, there is that sliver of plausibility that exists with the movie's small-town, Idaho setting.
But Hess hardly gives the viewer time to ponder these questions; the film is structured in 30- or 60-second anecdotes that usually end with some kind of punch line. In one scene, Uncle Rico, who, it should be said, is something of a bully, throws a piece of steak at Napoleon and nails him square in the face. "Idiot!" retorts an irritated Napoleon -- his usual comeback, but one that in Uncle Rico's case is unfailingly accurate: Rico, inspired by his steak-tossing abilities, wonders about the possibility of time travel, and whether he could go back to 1982 for another shot at the state football title. With Kip's help, he acquires a "time machine" over the Internet, though this turns out to be nothing more than a self-electrocution device.
The movie builds up to a climactic race for student council president, in which Napoleon's friend Pedro decides to run against Summer (Haylie Duff, pop star Hilary's older sister), the most popular, if not exactly the brightest, girl in school (her campaign slogan: "Vote for me, and it will be summer all year long!"). The movie takes a slightly roundabout path to Pedro's inevitable victory, but more entertaining are some scenes along the way: in one, Pedro rigs up a piñata that looks like Summer, and in another, Pedro's older and much larger brothers offer protection to all the geeks and nerds in their school in exchange for votes.
Indeed, there is hardly a single scene in Napoleon Dynamite that isn't funny. The cast and crew deserve equal credit -- the deadpan writing is spot-on, while the cast is perfectly matched to the characters. Though it helps to watch this movie in the context of the independent festival fare that it is, it is palatable from almost any perspective -- presumably, the homegrown feel might even appeal to Idahoans themselves.
It is true, however, that you have to be something of a sadist to enjoy watching Napoleon Dynamite. Napoleon stands out like a sore thumb, and pays the price for it (continually). But this misfit, and his stubborn refusal to play by the rules, is a near-brilliant comic creation -- and if you can get over that niggling guilt about laughing at his antics, then you'll find Dynamite is exactly that.
Rating: *** [3 out of 4 stars]
He plays himself at tetherball, has a pocket full of tater tots to snack on, a "Pegasus Crossing" sign on his bedroom door, and he comes on to young women with a decidedly unusual line: Spotting a cutie drinking milk in the school cafeteria, Napoleon Dynamite asks, "I see you're drinking 1 percent -- is that because you think you're fat?"
A Romeo he may not be, but Napoleon is a strangely endearing personality, particularly since he's played by Jon Heder, a young actor who is not afraid to give himself over to sheer geekiness. Although "Napoleon Dynamite," co-written and directed by Jared Hess, isn't much more than an excuse to explore the wacky world of Napoleon and his associates, it's probably going to turn Heder into some kind of star; anyone who's willing to go through an entire film outfitted with a flattened-out Afro, a voice that's somewhere between a whine and a bray and a pair of enormously unattractive glasses deserves at least a cult following.
It's easy to envision "Napoleon" eventually becoming a staple of college DVD parties, in the same way that "Office Space," "High Fidelity" and "Bottle Rocket" have. Hess' brand of comedy is generally understated -- sometimes you might wonder if certain scenes were actually intended to be funny -- yet accessible. Picture what might have resulted if "The Royal Tenenbaums" had been a small-town family, or if "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" had been pumped up with a little more comic juice, and you've got some idea of what to expect.
A high school student who's not about to be anybody's first choice for the "most likely to succeed" award, Napoleon lives a life that's shockingly unexciting; for Napoleon, participating in the Happy Hands Club and performing a sign-language interpretation of Bette Midler's "The Rose" qualifies as a high time. His delusional brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), aspires to be a cage fighter, even though Napoleon reminds him that "you have the worst reflexes of all time." His uncle, a failed former football player named Rico (Jon Gries), sells cheap knockoffs of Tupperware and highly questionable herbal concoctions that he claims will increase bust size.
Seeking some purpose in the world, Napoleon signs on as campaign manager for the school presidency campaign of his friend Pedro Sanchez (Efren Ramirez). But perhaps Napoleon could do a better job helping Pedro with his public speaking: "If you vote for me, all your wildest dreams will come true," Pedro tells voters, in the same way you might say, "Sorry, honey, but your hamster died this afternoon."
There's not much plot development -- "Napoleon" does not have any of the acidic satire of the similarly themed "Election," nor does it give itself over to "She's All That"-style teen romance, although it occasionally seems to be drifting in that direction -- but Heder provides a reasonably steady flow of laughs and several happy surprises as well, including a delightful visit from Kip's "internet girlfriend" and the sight of Napoleon doing a memorably misguided shuffle to the tune of Jamiroquai's pulsating "Canned Heat."
Entering the company of Napoleon Dynamite (John Heder), you know you've met this year's top choice for Hipster Halloween Costume. A teenager living a life of nonexistent expectations in rural Idaho, he's an unforgettable mess. His gangly body ends in a head that's topped with an unsightly red Afro and set off by fashion-backward eyeglasses that Lenscrafters would refuse to sell. When he's exasperated, his asthmatic voice becomes a sigh that sounds like steam escaping. In denial of his microscopic status at his high school, Napoleon maintains his self-esteem by reciting a résumé of fictitious personal "skills" he thinks will attract the ladies. Like bowhunting. And the proper use of nunchucks.
Did I say "mess?" I meant "hero."
The triumphantly uncool Napoleon has the audience in his back pocket throughout this weirdly compelling picture (by director/co-writer Jared Hess). And it's a good thing he does, because the film that bears his name isn't about to get by on plot. Napoleon's hilariously mundane misadventures take the form of hit-and-run set pieces, glued together about as tightly as the deleted scenes on a DVD. The film is thus already being dismissed in some circles as having no story, but that's an oversimplification. Each seemingly disconnected episode is really another step on Napoleon's path to acceptance (as opposed to the illusion of it). How he gets there has important consequences for everyone in his world, including his terminally sedate Mexican buddy, Pedro (Efren Ramirez); his Internet-addicted older brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell); and their Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who's stuck in a state of nostalgic yearning for his own personal heyday: 1982.
It's as if John Hughes fashioned one of his teen comedies solely around the supporting characters, then handed the project to a filmmaker who could be immeasurably more sympathetic to their dreams and desires. (Only Diedrich Bader's role as a boorish martial-arts instructor feels like a caricature.) Poignant even when in the throes of slapstick clumsy physical altercations abound the movie puts a refreshing spin of awkwardness on situations that should be utterly played out. There's a big school dance, an all-important election for student-body president and, of course, a few heart-palpitating homeroom crushes and bitter rejections.
What sets it all apart is the movie's lunatic calm, its cleareyed view of a residential wasteland that looks like grotesquerie ... until you realize that nothing in the film lacks a real-world precedent. Look closely at one interior shot, in which a family's living room is decorated in photographic portraits of their uncomfortably posed kids. You knew somebody who had those pictures. And you probably knew someone like Napoleon, who's so out of the loop that he thinks he can mouth off to the very bullies who regularly body-slam him into the school lockers.
Director Hess obviously wants you to reflect that you may have been that kid yourself. But you were lucky if you saw your alienation through the way Napoleon does. In his most honest moments, he has to acknowledge that he's a zero in every social equation, yet he never doubts that he's entitled to be happy. That message has resonance far beyond the film's subject or its genre; with such a pearl waiting to be plucked, how much of a story does one really need?
Rating: $8.00 out of $10.00
IN SHORT: The funniest, sex and drug-free high school comedy we've ever seen. That's compliment. A big one. [Rated PG for thematic elements and language. 86 minutes]
We stopped paying attention to the various film festivals years ago. Our reasons, stated here and there over the last ten years were simple: we had enough of pretentious writing and/or directing and/or overacting and the overwhelming ego of directorial superiority that seemed to go along with making the cut as a Festival Selection. Besides, the really good movies that emerged from any Festival -- and we don't include the films that managed to land a studio distribution deal before show time -- were few and far between.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it's Few and Far Between Time.
With the exception of gone in a flash cameo by Drew Carrey co-star Diedrich Bader there's not a name attached to Napoleon Dynamite in any capacity that would make the little voice in your head start scratching itself thinking "there's something about this film that makes me want to see it..." That is the reason critics like the cranky old gnome who slaves over these words exist. We are the pigs rooting out the truffles; the hounds tracking down wanted quarry; the writers saddled with a need to write with too many metaphors because we haven't come up with any new way to rave or dis a film in years.
So, let's get to the point. Technically, Napoleon Dynamite has all the look of a collegiate production. It's adequate, at best. In keeping with that, there is no one in the cast familiar enough to the general public that you'd lay down your money for a look see. What Napoleon Dynamite should have going for it, and we're going to help start the ball rolling here and now, is that wonderful thing that marketers dream of called "word of mouth." Napoleon Dynamite is a film set in an average high school that ignores all the done to death conventions of the "high school genre" movie. The kids we meet in this story aren't obsessed with getting their first roll in the hay. They just want a date to the school dance -- all the more difficult when the clique of kidlets at the center of the story are the social outcasts of the Class of 2004.
Begin with our "hero," Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder). Though the film falls way short on getting certain background details into its subtext, it's safe to assume from context that Napoleon is a junior at Preston (Idaho) High School. His parents aren't on the scene for reasons that are unclear. Grandmother Dynamite (Sandy Martin) has been watching over Napoleon and his 32 year old unemployed, Internet chat room surfing brother Kip (Aaron Ruell). Napoleon hasn't managed to corral a lot of friends during his run in the local school system, but he's more than eager (in a gentle 'I don't have anything else to do' kind of way) to befriend the new kid from Mexico Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and neighbor Deb (Tina Majorino), who's trying to raise money for college by selling key chains door to door.
When Grandma temporarily vacates the scene due to a dune buggy accident -- don't ask -- Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) leaves his van and moves in to the Dynamite house, where his presence isn't exactly needed. As far as Rico is concerned, the phones are free and there's plenty of steak in the freezer so life is good while he figures out the next get rich quick scheme. Those schemes will eventually pull Kip into his circle -- Kip's Internet girlfriend LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery) is on her way from Detroit and the stud must be able to represent, dontcha know...
Most of Napoleon's life would be pretty grim by most other standards. He gets beat on by the jocks, takes martial arts instruction from dojo master Rex (Diedrich Bader) and has a set of "num-chucks" stashed in his locker. Most of the time, though, he's doodling pictures of fantastical creatures -- a lion/tiger crossbreed he calls "liger" -- and damsel in distress scenes. In short, Napoleon is a typical geek teen. Napoleon is more concerned about two other things. First, how to get a date for the dance, since his obvious "target" will be snatched out from beneath him. Second, how to manage Pedro's run for School President against the most popular girl in the school, Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff).
That's all you need to know, story-wise. The strength of Napoleon Dynamite is in its cast and script. We can say it until we're blue in the face, and we probably are, Napoleon Dynamite is one of the funniest films of the year. It certainly is the funniest with a no-name cast and that being written, props go out to all the onscreen folks, who do a very good job.
On average, a first run movie ticket will run you Ten Bucks. Were Cranky able to set his own price to Napoleon Dynamite, he would have paid . . .
$8.00
Find it. Pay for it. Laugh out loud.
Grade: B-
Former Brigham Young University student Jared Hess is the 24-year-old co-writer, along with his wife Jerusha, of Napoleon Dynamite, who makes his directing debut in this offbeat comedy about an eccentric nerdy high schooler, the titled character, trying to survive being an outsider in his bland small-town of Preston, Idaho (Hess's hometown). Napoleon is a strange kind of hero, who is not a particularly likable sort of kid but who sort of grows on your soft side with his weird humor and the way he outrageously walks around school with a faraway look, wearing moon boots and wildlife T-shirts. He acts like a simpleton locked into his own private dream world, with his animal sketches being his only apparent talent--his favorite animal which he calls a "liger," is a cross between a lion and a tiger. The loner spends his spare time trying to perfect his tetherball game, feeding his pet llama and performing hand signal sing-alongs with the Happy Hands Club.
The laid-back, bespectacled, deadpan expressioned, gawky and frizzy haired Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), lives with his secretly wild motorbike riding grandma (Sandy Martin) and his 32-year-old dominating nerdy brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) in the desolate desert town of Preston. Kip is having a chat room Internet romance with Detroit ghetto gal LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery). When granny goes down in a motorbike riding accident in the sand dunes and is hospitalized, sleazy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) is recruited to watch her grandchildren. Rico's a frustrated ex-jock who is trying to relive his almost glorious high school football days back in 1982 (the film seems retro in its 1980s fashion look, though it's apparently set in the present). The obnoxious Rico lives out of his Dodge van and makes a living selling plastic Tupperware-like food storage containers, and when that doesn't pan out his next get-rich-quick scheme is selling herbal breast enhancements. Rico is so obsessed with the past that he videotapes himself throwing a football for accuracy and buys a time machine hawked on the Internet, hoping to return to his high school gridiron days to parlay his revived football prowess into an NFL career.
When the shy new Mexican immigrant student Pedro (Efren Ramirez) enters Preston High School, Napoleon becomes his best friend. The two outsiders scheme to get dates for the upcoming school dance. Pedro when rejected by the most popular and attractive girl in the school, Summer (Haylie Duff), successfully hits on the geeky girl Napoleon was about to ask but never got around to--Deb (Tina Majorino). She's a timid photographer, who tries earning money selling flashy homemade key chains by going door-to-door. When Summer runs for school president, Pedro emerges as the unlikely candidate opposing her. Napoleon puts his heart and soul into getting the nervy but slightly retarded Pedro elected, performing as a breakdancer to win himvotes. At this point the incoherent story starts wearing really thin and all the jokes directed at the freakish Napoleon character start feeling overworked (in any case, the jokes were never different from the geek-genre conventional ones). The uncomfortable humor comes from laughing at Napoleon and the other misfits, with the grossest yuks coming when the school bullies repeatedly slam Napoleon into the lockers. But the filmmaker seemed to have second thoughts about such cruel humor and tried to temper it with some affection for his loser hero. This effort to make Napoleon into a more tender character seemed disingenuous, and the contrived results come without being earned.
There's also a false ending to contend with, as after the final credits roll by there's an unnecessary five minute skit about Kip's marriage to the mannish looking LaFawnduh. The supposedly happy ending takes away from the shoestring budgeted indie's initial edginess. In this one-joke idea for a film, I never got the impression the filmmaker cared what happened to any of his characters. But by eventually playing it PC safe, we are led to believe that things will work out just fine in the Western rural wasteland for dead-beat Napoleon and all the other misfits (when all prior evidence seemed contrary). I think this idea of having everyone's wildest dreams come true, which is the feel-good message left, is as unlikely a scenario as Pedro being elected Preston's school president. This film is more about scoring points over Jon Heder's unique performance than in telling a meaningful story. If you dug the performance, then you probably also liked the film. I did like Heder's performance, but only up to a point. I was never able to feel comfortable with the film's lack of social consciousness or the way it crassly presented the misfits. It didn't have the same integrity for the misfits or concern for social issues Todd Solondz had in Welcome to the Dollhouse, a film it most closely resembles.
Grade: C-
EXCERPT: Here's a key to nerd-chic scriptures: Everyone comes from somewhere, unfabulous as that place may be. And many establish their updated identities at new addresses by laughing at the places they pray to God they've left safely behind. Sometimes dorkdom is a function of geography (''Fargo''), sometimes of mind-set (TV's ''Freaks and Geeks''). But whatever its genesis, geekitude requires wounded anger (''Welcome to the Dollhouse''), confident style (''The Royal Tenenbaums''), or bleak compassion (''Ghost World'') to advance the attitude from that of fashion statement to affecting art. At this point in the cinema of psychological slacking, we ought to demand more...
Rating: *** [3 out of 5 stars]
One of the overarching jokes in "Napoleon Dynamite," the odd, amusing debut of the 24-year-old filmmaker Jared Hess, is that such a grandiose, explosive title should be attached to such a small-scale, deadpan film. Napoleon Dynamite is also the name of the movie's awkward, frizzy-haired hero, a high school student in Preston, Idaho, whose world-conquering potential is invisible to everyone but him.
Napoleon, played by Jon Heder with unnerving conviction, is a gangly mouth-breather whose affectless eccentricity could easily be mistaken for simple-mindedness. "He's a tender little guy," says his Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a sad, sleazy fellow who drives around in an orange-and-brown Dodge van selling plastic food-storage containers. This is about the kindest thing anyone says about Napoleon, who is taunted, harassed and laughed at in school. It is also the truest, though it may take you a while to appreciate Napoleon, and to grasp that the movie's attitude toward him is ultimately more tender than cruel.
Mr. Hess grew up in Preston, which he films as a collection of lonely houses dropped in the middle of an empty landscape of mountains and rangeland, and his filmmaking style is well suited to the rhythms of small-town Western life. His mockery of the local quirks and delusions is grounded in both affection and impatience, and his dry, barbed visual and verbal jokes reflect the humor of a place where time doesn't move too quickly and people don't talk much.
The story takes shape slowly. Napoleon lives with his brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), their boisterous grandmother and a bored llama. When Grandma cracks her coccyx in a motorbike accident, Uncle Rico comes to baby-sit, even though Kip, the elder brother, is 32. Meanwhile, Napoleon befriends a shy Mexican boy named Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and an amateur photographer named Deb (Tina Majorino) who sells garish handmade key chains door to door.
Rico, who at one point purchases a time-travel machine over the Internet, is obsessed with the year 1982, when he lost his chance at high school football glory. ("We could have won State.") Judging from their clothes and hair, Rico and the other residents of Preston are still living in his favorite year. If not for the occasional reference to the Internet (where the frail and flighty Kip searches for love and, remarkably, finds it), you might mistake "Napoleon Dynamite" for an exercise in fond, cringing nostalgia, doing for '82 what Richard Linklater's "Dazed and Confused" did for '76.
Of course, Mr. Hess and his 23-year-old wife, Jerusha, with whom he wrote the screenplay, are much too young to remember 1982, and the nostalgia in "Napoleon Dynamite," which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, is the kind that people in their 20's, in whatever decade, inevitably begin to feel for high school.
Mr. Hess, who studied film -- and met most of his cast and crew -- at Brigham Young University, has a lot of talent and also a lot to learn. The performances, even those by trained actors like Mr. Ramirez and Ms. Majorino, have the hesitant, blinking opacity that some directors look for in nonprofessional casts. Their awkwardness is charming, and part of the point of the movie, but it also makes for some dull stretches and thwarts your ability to regard the characters with sympathy rather than mere curiosity.
At the end, Mr. Hess turns his meandering assembly of quiet observations and slapstick inventions -- which, at their best, suggest a combination of Tod Solondz and Bill Forsyth -- into an unconvincingly uplifting fairy tale. Napoleon's triumph is sure to please audiences who need to forgive themselves for laughing at his earlier misfortune, but it comes a little too easily, and it compromises the film's most interesting quality, which is its stubborn, confident, altogether weird individuality.
Rating: [Positive]
EXCERPT(?): "With wit as dry as the chapped lips of a constant mouth-breather, Napoleon Dynamite finds moments of painful reserve even in slapstick."
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 out of 4 stars]
Cracked? Bent? These and similar adjectives will do in describing this comedy about a high-school misfit (Jon Heder), thinking big and living small beneath spacious Idaho skies. Director-co-writer Jared Hess has a flair for deadpan slapstick, but you may feel a little guilty for laughing so hard. With Jon Gries, Aaron Ruell, Tina Majorino, Efren Ramirez and Haylie Duff. 1:26 (some mildly off-color humor, comic violence). At select theaters.
A colleague who saw "Napoleon Dynamite" six months ago at the Sundance Film Festival describes it as a typical off-the- wall festival entry that induces tears-down-your-face laughter in Utah's thin-air reaches. It's only closer to sea level, he says, that you wonder, in retrospect, if it was as funny as you remembered.
I happen to think that few things are ever as funny as you remember -- unless it's Ted Knight on "Mary Tyler Moore" or a Chuck Jones "Three Bears" animated short. I don't think "Napoleon Dynamite" is quite as funny as those entities. But I don't think sea level has much to do with it. Maybe if I weren't as far removed from high school as I am now, I'd be much more into the movie's warped depiction of teenage wasteland. I can remember feeling the anger and restlessness that "Napoleon Dynamite" conveys. I just don't remember being this gratuitously hard on everyone around me.
Rookie feature director Jared Hess is hardest of all on his eponymous hero, who shares one of Elvis Costello's many stage names and, as with the younger Costello on stage, moves through the dreary terrain of rural Idaho with ungainly, unfocused rage. Napoleon (Jon Heder) is tall, bespectacled, sports a mop of tangled, orange hair and speaks fluent whine. He's the kind of human doormat who's just asking to get slammed against a high school locker for no good reason other than occupying space.
At home, he has an older brother named Kip (Aaron Russell), a smaller, wormier species of geek, who spends most of his time chatting online with his "soul mate." When their grandmother is incapacitated after taking her dune buggy for an ill-advised flight, the brothers are looked after by Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a polyester-clad jock manqué who's hustling plastic bowls and breast enhancement to the community at large.
Things aren't altogether arid for Napoleon, who has found communion of sorts with shy neighbor Deb (Tina Majorino) and new kid at school Pedro (Efren Ramirez), who's running an uphill campaign for class president against Summer (Haylie Duff), Cheerleader-Queen of the Cool Kids.
Some of these elements have become standard for hip youth comedies of recent vintage. (One difference: You won't hear anyone use an expletive harsher than "Dang!") Still, Hess knows what he's doing when it comes to timing out his sight gags and spacing out his protagonist's glandular outbursts. And a thin layer of sweetness seeps through the astringent mockery toward the end. Hess has a heart almost as big as his spleen.
Grade: B-
Cinema's never-ending fascination with the geek continues apace in NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, a character study of an Idahoan teen whose every move is out of step with his surroundings. That doesn't mean he doesn't find a groove -- with his retro glasses, out of control frizztop, overused slang, and fascination with other worlds (including fantastical animals and urban street dancing), he's one of the most fascinating outcasts since Harold and Maude sauntered their way across the big screen.
Trouble is, Harold and Maude were going someplace; their story had a direction. Napoleon, for all of his detail (played with mirthful conviction by Jon Heder), seems to get lost in mundanity, passing through a life filled with quirks but not interest. What emerges is a character that is endlessly fascinating, trapped in a film that isn't at all. From the very first moments of the opening credits of NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, you know there's going to be kitschy style aplenty. And director Jared Hess doesn't disappoint -- although clearly set in modern times (cellphones are everywhere), the vibe is circa 1982, with a costume and production design (and a soundtrack) meant to evoke the Reagan Years.
Napoleon is the younger of the Napoleon brothers, raised by their grandmother (Sandy Martin); after she has an accident, Napoleon and his chat room-addicted brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) are temporarily left under the dubious care of Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), an overcompensating former jock who still relives his long-past glory days. School isn't going too well for Napoleon, either -- a girl he kind of likes, Deb (Tina Majorino), is going to the prom with his only friend, Pedro (Efren Ramirez). You can see that plot isn't really NAPOLEON DYNAMITE's strong point. Really, Hess and his co-screenwriter (and wife) Jerusha Hess are interested in the details of rural/suburban existence, the quirky idiosyncrasies that place us apart from one another.
But really, it's unclear as to whether we are laughing with Napoleon...or simply at him. The best teen comedies allow us a sort of personal transference, a vicarious understanding of the characters' trials and tribulations because, hey, we were all there once, right? We can see ourselves in their experiences. In NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, few will empathize with Napoleon's foibles. Yes, almost everyone felt nerdy in high school, everyone felt out of sync. But this isn't about you...it's about the guy who sat next to you in biology, stuffing food in his pants and drawing unicorns. The guy who made you feel better -- because at least you weren't that nerdy. This is the Nerd Alpha/Omega, the guy who played Dungeons and Dragons...by himself. This is the apotheosis of geekdom. We can all relate to a degree, but at some point, Napoleon passes all of us by, and our ability to share in his experience dissipates.
Despite its plot problems, however, you can't do much better for a character study; NAPOLEON DYNAMITE features a half-dozen of the most original characters you'll ever see. Heder gives Napoleon a slowly fomenting vitality -- not a joie de vivre, exactly, but locomotion driven by the excitement in day-to-day life. Napoleon makes snap decisions and lives by them; Heder, magnificently, plays these with a decisiveness that gives Napoleon a refreshing vibrancy. Ruell gives Kip both a bravado and wimpiness that makes for witty contrasts, and Ramirez charges the entire room by having Pedro suck the energy out of every scene. (He gives new meaning to the phrase deadpan delivery.) Perhaps best is Majorino, the child star of Waterworld and Corrina Corrina, who finds a textured vulnerability as the put-upon Deb.
And if you should see NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, make sure you're fully alert for its climactic moment. As a part of his election for school president, Pedro is surprised to learn that all of the candidates were expected to prepare a musical skit for the school assembly. Having nothing prepared, Pedro succumbs to depressed defeat. It's up to our hero Napoleon to save the day, and he does so in a bogglingly spectacular fashion, to the music of Jamiroquai's infectious dance song "Canned Heat." It must be seen to be believed, and I don't say that very often. You may feel a sense of incompleteness when the credits roll, but NAPOLEON DYNAMITE's characters are almost a wonder to behold.
Rating: * 1/2 [1.5 stars out of 4]
There are so many reasons to like "Napoleon Dynamite." First of all, it's funny, smart and it's got one of the best character names in the lead title character I've seen in film for a good number of years. And let's not forget the skills. Maybe that's one you've got to watch the film to truly appreciate. But the most disappointing thing about "Napoleon Dynamite" is that it chooses to make its lead character the butt of its jokes, inviting the audience to laugh at him rather than with him. The choice ends up weakening Napoleon's time in the spotlight, and we're not sure if, at the end, we're clapping out of joy or condescension.
Written and directed by Jared Hess partly based on his own experiences of growing up in the tiny rural town of Preston, Idaho, the film follows high school senior, Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder). Napoleon lives with his grandmother and his unemployed 31-year-old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who spends his days on chatrooms looking for love. When his grandmother hurts herself in a quad runner accident, "Uncle" Rico (Jon Gries) moves in to look over the two boys until grandma recovers. With his red afro and fondness for moon boots, Napoleon already has trouble fitting in but things are getting better thanks to his new best friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez). But when Uncle Rico starts selling herbal breast enhancements to his schoolmates' moms, he threatens to send Napoleon back to lonerville. Pedro and Napoleon decide to put it all on the line when they run for Student Body President against the school's most popular girl, Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff).
One of the things that sets the film apart from other teen films is its rural settings. We've seen tons of teen films set in cities or suburbs, but few where a high school job would be collecting eggs at a chicken farm or tasting milk for defects at a dairy farm. One hardly blames Kip for not getting a job. There's also something sadly ironic about experiencing one of the most turbulent periods of one's life in a town where nothing ever happens.
But teen oddballs is hardly a new genre, and in fact, has been brilliantly covered in films like "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and the brilliant TV series "Freaks and Geeks." Films about outsiders living on the fringe of society have enjoyed wide appeal popularity in the last few years, especially with films like "American Splendor," "Welcome to the Dollhouse," "Crumb" and "Ghost World."
In many ways, "Napoleon Dynamite" capitalizes on this trend, but one important place where it diverges is that "American Splendor" and "Ghost World" celebrated its eccentrics, laughing with them rather than at them. But in "Napoleon Dynamite," the audience is invited to laugh at Napoleon's geekiness, the way he goes around labeling things as "sweet!" or people who question him as "idiots." In a way, we are meant to side with the cool kids that write him off, but are unable to ignore his loud presence as he walks in his own world down the school halls.
Without giving too much away, the film does give Napoleon his moment of glory at the end, but I was never quite sure if at the end of it, if his fellow students now going to change their attitude towards him.
Grade: A-
Let us die young or let us live forever / We don't have the power but we never say never," mourns the '80s techno group Alphaville over the bushy heads of high school slow-dancers in Napoleon Dynamite. "Sitting in a sandpit, life is a short trip / The music's for the sad men," continues the piped-in song, "Forever Young," before the refrain: "Forever young, I want to be forever young / Do you really want to live forever, forever and ever?"
Does co-writer and director Jared Hess really want to be forever young? His film, one of the most blissfully abstract comedies in recent memory, seems unstuck in time, to borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. His title hero, Napoleon Dynamite, has the name of a character that sounds equal parts blaxploitation and comic-book hero. And where are people in more dire need of heroes than in the lockered halls of high school, where danger lurks in the form of the aggressively physical (bullies) and the aggressively social (popular kids). As John Hughes reminded us time and time again in the '80s, life can be hell if you're not with the in crowd.
Of course, look at just about every Hughes film, and you smell a cop-out: the geek selling out to fit in, or to get the girl or guy, or all of the above. Hughes always seemed to tap his inner Anthony Michael Hall before realizing, deeper down, he wanted to be Andrew McCarthy.
Neither Jared Hess, nor his doppelganger, Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), have such identity crises. They both know all too well what Alphaville knew, that sitting in a sandpit, life is a short trip indeed. But there are classmates to protect, love triangles to negotiate, idiot relatives to endure, skills to learn, battles to win, and llamas to feed. Yup, Napoleon Dynamite can save the world -- defined here as Preston High School in Preston, Idaho -- without forgetting who he is. He's going to live forever, or die young trying.
Like much of the rest of the film, he looks like he stepped out of a time machine covering anywhere from the late '70s to the early '80s. His blond Brillo pad of a hairdo has successfully fended off any attempts at being parted, his glasses cover half his face, his tucked-in T-shirts are the pride of any silkscreen artist, his pants adhere to a strict expandable-waist theme, and his moon boots look more like slippers. He's rarely far from his Mead Organizer notebook (remember those?), in which he doodles such characters as a "liger," a combination lion and tiger. A fashion statement is a knit tie (remember those?).
As one promo for the movie notes, Napoleon is a man who's out to prove he has nothing to prove. His mannerisms are little bursts of exasperation at a misunderstanding (and slightly inferior) world. His sighs, exhaled with closed eyes, sound like tires deflating, and his arsenal of effusive language includes "gosh!" and "flip" (almost like the f-word). When life is good, it's "sweet" and "yessssssssss." His body movements come in sudden bursts of inspiration. After he lopes to the back of the school bus one morning, a curious schoolmate inquires, "What are you going to do today, Napoleon?" He shoots back, "Whatever I feel like I wanna do -- gosh!" He looks away and produces a toy action figure, ties it to a string and drags it along on the road, behind the bus.
In a sense, Napoleon is a compulsive liar; he creates girlfriends out of borrowed photographs and reputations out of thin air. He knows who he is, but sometimes has to articulate it in a way that normal human beings can understand. So he bullshits.
Seemingly disconnected subplots abound, including a grandmother (Sandy Martin) who disappears as soon as she enters the movie, an even dorkier older brother (Aaron Ruell) mired in an online relationship, a visiting uncle Rico (Jon Grief), who can't seem to move beyond life after 1982 and who is a continuing source of embarrassment for Napoleon. Look closer, and these are people who are often more than we think they are. Even Napoleon's new friend, transfer student Pedro (Efren Ramirez), and their mutual love interest, Deb (Tina Majorino), don't seem to have much in the way of personality -- until they come into Napoleon's orbit.
As you might have guessed about Napoleon Dynamite, there's not much of a plot -- simply, life in high school is an ongoing struggle for survival. Asking girls out and avoiding bullies can be a major energy suck and requires, as Napoleon puts it, "skills." As the Alphaville song reminds us, "It's so hard to get old without a cause / I don't want to perish like a fading horse / Youth's like diamonds in the sun / And diamonds are forever."
That Napoleon Dynamite can live forever, and maybe even get the girl along the way, is a minor miracle -- like the film itself.
PHOTO CAPTION:
Sweet hook-up: Napoleon (Jon Heder) gives his brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) a ride into town in the quirky comedy Napoleon Dynamite.
Rating: *** [3 out of 4 stars]
The movie is "Napoleon Dynamite," named after its hero, a nerd so nerdy he almost outdoes the losers in "Mean Girls" and "American Splendor" for sheer geekiness.
Although several of the picture's creators hail from Brigham Young University in Utah, director Jared Hess filmed it in Preston, Idaho, where he grew up. The story is as steeped in Middle American atmosphere as "Election" and other dark comedies by Alexander Payne, but Mr. Hess gives his own special twist to debunking the utopian myth of heartland America that appears in mainstream movies. He throws in fractured families, scarce employment, and schools so boring that a student-president campaign can seem like the event of a lifetime.
Hess explores such everyday matters with a dryly humorous touch that must be seen to be appreciated. He's a true motion-picture minimalist, never using a cinematic shout when a visual whisper will do. The film's talented actors share this understated wavelength, especially Jon Heder as Napoleon and Efren Ramirez as a lonely Latino whose bid to become president of the student body seems fated to fail, since his opponent is the prettiest girl in town.
Also on hand are Napoleon's visiting uncle, one of those relatives who seem to think embarrassing you is their mission in life, and Napoleon's older brother, whose Internet girlfriend gives the story a hilarious boost when she comes to meet her wooer in person.
I thought just a few weeks ago that I never wanted to see another teen comedy, since I'd already sat through enough of them to last several lifetimes. Then the genre started spinning in directions I never expected, first in the satirical "Saved!" and now in this offbeat entry.
"Napoleon Dynamite" may not make you laugh out loud - it's too sly and subtle for that - but it will have you smiling every minute, and often grinning widely at its weirded-out charm.
Nerdiness will never seem the same.
Rating: 1/2 [0.5 out of 4 stars]
'Napoleon Dynamite" packs the explosive power of a wet firecracker left over from the bicentennial. Calling this story about a quirky high-school student from a dysfunctional family who lives in a goofy small town a one-joke movie is exaggerating by a factor of 10.
The movie started as a film student's short that was screened at the Sundance Film Festival. We can see how a five-minute version might have been entertaining. But taking a skit and padding it to feature-film length is no easy task, even for veteran entertainers (see any number of "Saturday Night Live" spinoffs). For a bunch of fresh-out-of-school first-timers, it's a classic case of biting off more then they can chew -- or we can swallow.
It's common in film school for classmates to serve as the cast and crew for each other's movies. We're willing to cut student filmmakers a little slack because they're working with volunteers, not pros. But writer-director Jared Hess decided to carry his classmate company over into his full-length project. They're not very good. Since a ticket to "Napoleon Dynamite" costs as much as one to a splashy Hollywood release, we're no longer as forgiving of their deficiencies.
The title character is played by Jon Heder, an animator by training. He's a nerdish outsider who enjoys playing tetherball by himself. He and his inert older brother, Kip (Aaron Rule, a still photographer), who has no job at age 32, live in a small town in Idaho. Napoleon spends his days being tormented by the high school jocks; Kip bides his time surfing the Internet, looking for online romances.
Their ne'er-do-well Uncle Rico (Jon Gries, "Northfork," one of the few professional actors in the cast) is experimenting with a time machine in hopes of going back to his almost-glory days on the high-school football field. He works as a door-to-door salesman, a profession he tries to coerce Kip into trying.
With the exception of Gries, everyone underplays their roles, delivering the lines deadpan. We'll have to wait for Hess' next movie before determining whether this is a stylistic choice or just an attempt to conceal the fact that most of his actors can't act. Which is not to imply that we're in any hurry to see his next movie.
Grade: D+
If you need to look down on others to feel better about yourself, "Napoleon Dynamite" is the movie for you. A success at Sundance, the feature debut of writer-director Jared Hess is a supremely condescending look at dimwits and misfits in a tiny Idaho hamlet, most notably the ultra-geeky title character, a lanky high school student, and his family and friends. It might be fun if there were any sign of affection or respect in the makers' approach to the doltish figures on display, but there isn't; an attitude of smug contempt dominates instead. Though there are some easy laughs scattered throughout, as a whole it's the sort of movie that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Napoleon is played by Jon Heder as a gawky, squinting, perpetually dyspeptic kid with a shock of frizzy orange hair, who's virtually a pariah on campus, relentlessly picked on by the guys and ignored or insulted by the girls. He lives with his grandma, a hard-bitten old broad, and his older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), an even nerdier fellow with a nasal voice and no apparent interests beyond exchanging chat room messages with a distant girl. When grandma is injured in a dune buggy crash, the brothers find themselves temporarily in the dubious care of Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a hopeless dreamer obsessed with his high school football days--the high point in his life--who's trying to begin a career as a door-to-door salesman of, among other things, breast enhancement products. What little plot there is centers on Napoleon's effort to help his new friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez), the sole Latino in the school, get elected as class president against a popular member of the "in" crowd, and his goofy romancing of Deb (Tina Majorino), a girl almost as isolated as he is. Kip's long-distance sweetheart also turns up in the form of Lafawnduh (Shondrella Avery), a Detroit diva under whose tutelage the guy is transformed into something like Jerry Lewis' version of an inner-city thug. Nothing makes much sense in "Napoleon Dynamite," of course, because the picture is basically just a succession of ain't-these-hicks-dumb gags that, despite the deadpan tone, just keep escalating in absurdity. The sheer madness of the goings-on occasionally gets so surrealistically outrageous that you'll surely crack a smile, but the laughter will be at the expense of the characters rather than with them; they're all just convenient comic punching bags, without the slightest hint of the endearing about them. The attitude that pervades the picture is cruel and mean-spirited, in its own way as taunting as that of the bullies who make Napoleon's life miserable; viewers are basically invited to watch these dumb-as-a-post characters make fools of themselves for ninety minutes and thereby feel wonderfully superior. (The exception, of course, is Lafawnduh, who as a modern black woman might be as much a caricature as anybody else but must nonetheless be portrayed as knowing, ultra-smooth and absolutely self-confident. Pedro, on the other hand, is depicted as a near-catatonic cipher.) Within this context you have to give credit to the cast for doing what's demanded of them--particularly Heder, who certainly succeeds in appearing the ultimate geek. (One hopes that's the result of acting, not merely playing himself.) Technically the movie is ragged and gritty, in the fashion of bargain-basement independent flicks, but appearance is the least of its problems. "Napoleon Dynamite" is the sort of nasty conceit that might have worked in the original short-film form, but in this elongated feature format, it quickly deflates, becoming in the end about as exciting as a game of the title character's sport of choice--tetherball.
My favorite line in "Napoleon Dynamite" involves the titular character approaching his grandmother's pet llama with a plate of food and whining, "Tina Š eat your ham!"
There is simply no easy way to explain why this line -- and the rest of "Napoleon Dynamite" -- is so darned funny.
It just is.
Napoleon (Jon Heder) is a mouth-breathing geek living in the 1980s hell of Preston, Idaho. Or perhaps it's not the '80s -- but the clothes, cars and appliances all suggest that era, with the film's art direction dialing the movie's nerdiness volume up to 11.
A gawky underachiever with a frizzy comb-over, moon boots and oversized aviator glasses, Napoleon loves Tater Tots and expresses joy with a tight-throated "Sweet!" in his breathy adolescent twang. He's a distillation of every über-dweeb you remember from high school, with Heder giving a performance that will strike you one of two ways -- either you'll find immense humor in his ultra-nebbishy behavior or you'll find him exceedingly irritating and undoubtedly dislike the rest of the film.
The mostly anecdotal plot revolves around several weeks during which Napoleon and his 32-year-old, chatroom-addicted brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), put up with a visit from their creepy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), while their grandmother, the victim of an off-roading accident, is in the hospital.
With a school dance coming up, Napoleon plots with his best pal, a slow-witted new kid named Pedro (Efren Ramirez) to get dates. Napoleon's suggestion that Pedro court a very popular girl by baking her a cake is inspired but doomed, while Napoleon woos his lady with a truly hideous pencil portrait. Meanwhile, Napoleon is unaware of a romantic prospect right under his nose -- a bashful geekgirl (Tina Majorino, "Waterworld") who sees something appealing in our bucktoothed hero.
"Napoleon Dynamite" was a popular entry at this year's Sundance Film Festival, but reviews have been mixed, with some critics accusing first-time director Jared Hess of having contempt for the film's characters, á la Todd Solandz ("Welcome to the Dollhouse," "Happiness"). But the film's sensibilities fall more solidly into the deadpan playground of Wes Anderson, who made the potentially unlikeable characters in his comedy "Rushmore" both funny and sympathetic. Napoleon and Pedro are social losers, certainly, but their unflappable spirit makes us cheer for them even as we laugh at their appalling dorkiness.
As Napoleon helps Pedro run for class president in what ought to be a formulaic teen-comedy plot development, writer-director Hess veers so far from the mainstream that it's impossible to predict what the outcome will be. Given how twisted every other moment in this weird little gem has been, Pedro's campaign is almost guaranteed to fail -- and even Napoleon's ultimate sacrifice, hilarious as it is to watch, seems unlikely to turn the tide.
It's a strangely charming, thoroughly original movie that, refreshingly, eschews any sort of raunchiness or profanity in the telling of the tale. The film's conclusion feels a tad rushed, but it may just be that hanging out with Napoleon is such a treat that it seems a shame it has to end.
If reproductive science made it possible for weird Al Yankovic and Ed Grimly to combine DNA, they might produce something like Napoleon Dynamite.
Napoleon (Jon Heder) is maybe 6 feet tall, but so gangly, and so awkward, so out-there with his gravity boots and his goo-goo-googly eyes, he's like something out of "Attack of the 50-foot Weenie."
He's an outcast at his local high school (in Idaho), but we don't feel sorry for him, because such empathy would derive from Napoleon's fear that there might be something wrong with him. But if Napoleon suffers the lash of the alienated, he doesn't show it.
Perhaps everything would will be fine if he could just return to his home planet. Planet Nerd. Nerdiness seems to run in the Dynamite family. Napoleon has been raised by his grandmother (no explanation is made for his absent parents, or his absurd name), and when she goes into the hospital, he and his equally nerdy brother (Aaron Ruell) are supervised by uncle Rico (Jon Gries) - a weird sort of '80s throwback who drives a conversion van and sells Tupperware and breast enhancement products.
This is a lot of kitsch, but the movie has a strange sort of affability that pulls you along. And there is something quietly heroic about the way Napoleon soldiers on through the mine field of high school nerd-dom.
He has few friends, but is always ready to make new ones. He gets a crush on a shy girl (Tina Majorino) who sells homemade jewelry, and befriends a phlegmatic Latino boy (Efren Ramirez) who transfers into school and immediately runs for class president and pursues its prettiest girl, whose name (I love this) is Summer Wheatly.
Ramirez' character typifies the movie's singular attitude towards race - he's a bit of a Speedy Gonzales caricature, but somehow stripped of meanness. Likewise for the large, shapely black woman who ends up dating Napoleon's tiny, ultra white brother.
The movie doesn't really have a plot, just a series of events, and exercises in comic mood. And Napoleon's not really a character - he's a motif. The movie does not ask that we feel anything like real sympathy for him. Another thing: The movie doesn't seem to be set in any particular time.
That is not to say the movie has no connection to reality. In an odd way, all of its phony elements add up to a very real-seeming high school - where the kids look like real teens, going to a real school.
Maybe that's why Napoleon's outcast misadventures strike viewers as familiar and universal, and why he inspires a rooting interest (the movie is already a cult phenomenon). And why, despite the movie's droll detachment, you can't help laughing when Napoleon takes the stage during the high school talent show to give the movie its out-of-the-blue climax.
Director Jared Hess, a Mormon who wrote the movie with his wife, has been influenced by other new directors - Todd Solondz and Wes Anderson, to name a couple. "Dynamite" borrows from them, reassembles ideas and forges them into something unique and funny, if not totally dynamite.
After a press screening of WHITE CHICKS, I was desperately hoping to see something good. Jetted across town quickly to get to LAFF's first of three surprise screenings, only to be shut out because they figured the eeeevil media might ruin the surprise.
Saw Douglas Dunning in the lobby. He had just seen some English film, which of course he loved because it was English.
So I went to the red room, downed two vodka cocktails, and went to see NAPOLEON DYNAMITE. I missed the first couple of minutes, but my review follows anyhow. (Tonight I'm hoping to see FAHRENHEIT 9/11; will definitely post my thoughts if it happens)
but for now...
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE
Picture a Mike Judge cartoon brought very literally to life. We've got incomprehensible rednecks, deranged chicken farmers, sad-sack middle-aged salesmen, and a protagonist ("hero" would be the wrong word) who looks like a perfect hybrid of Beavis and Butt-head (also, Diedrich Bader, who appeared in OFFICE SPACE, shows up as an equally wacky macho man). You've probably seen the ubiquitous trailer by now; the film pretty much offers much, much more of the same. Yes, Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is the lead character's actual name, but whether or not his parents deliberately picked out an old Elvis Costello pseudonym is never mentioned.
The film initially seems to be set in the Œ80s -- the lame fashions and music choices (the use of The A*Team theme is particularly awesome) point in that direction, until we get one incongruous Backstreet Boys tune towards the end. So that dates the period at least to last decade, but the whole theme of the movie is one of looking back. Napoleon's uncle Rico (John Gries, of JACKPOT and ED AND HIS DEAD MOTHER) is an Al Bundy type who once played high school football and now sells Tupperware; at one point he has Napoleon's brother Kip (newcomer Aaron Ruell, in a strong debut) purchase a ludicrous hand-made "time machine" on eBay to attempt to travel back to 1982. Meanwhile, Napoleon's life is an example of why no-one should want to go back and relive high school -- every day is "The worst day of my life, Whaddayou THINK?"
Writer-director Jared Hess, expanding on his short film "Peluca," has created a high school that rings truer than most -- NO-ONE looks like a movie high schooler; even Hilary Duff's sister Haylie, as the class hottie, is dolled down enough to look like a real person who happens to be slightly pretty.
Many will argue, however, that the film is not realistic in the slightest, but rather a gross mockery of people Different From Us. Those who say that probably did not go to high school in a rural town. Yes, Napoleon says outlandish things in an attempt to be cool (the "liger" he draws, and calls his favorite animal, is not as crazy as it seems -- lions and tigers can cross-breed, though they do not have magic powers). And yes, we laugh at his nerdiness (out of character, actor Heder is considerably better looking -- check THIS out). But there are different kinds of laughter. We all know the general difference between laughing AT someone and laughing WITH them, but there are also different degrees of laughing AT. The most normal one is, for instance, laughing when someone falls down and gets hurt. But there's another kind, the kind when someone does something really odd and unexpected, but fully commits to it with all their energy (think Chris Farley doing the Chippendale dance on SNL). We laugh at them because there's no other reaction that works. It's funny, but not because the other person is suffering. We laugh knowing that most of us don't have the balls to be so much ourselves in front of a crowd (actually, I would claim that I do have those balls, but many don't).
Napoleon may start out as a caricature, but there is a subtle and gradual change that occurs. For me, the point at which it becomes apparent is during the high school dance, when he's ditched by his date (who has been forced by her mother to accompany Napoleon as a sympathy thing), and eventually ends up dancing with the girl he really likes (Tina Majorino, WATERWORLD's little girl all grown up) to the strains of "Time After Time." The music choices push my buttons, I admit. I've been hard on some film-makers who rely too much on such things, but this isn't quite the same as, say, SHREK 2, which uses "Holding Out For a Hero" in order to tap into an emotional resonance earned by another movie (FOOTLOOSE) rather than create any of its own. I think the song is only part of the picture here; Majorino really sells the moment, with her understated acting standing in stark contrast to the over-emoting she did onscreen as a kid.
But when Hess uses "The Promise" by When in Rome over the end credits, man, that damn near brings a tear to my eye, especially in tandem with the film's final image. I didn't know the song title or the band before I saw these credits, but any fan of Œ80s hits will recognize it. It's the song whose chorus goes:
"I'm sorry but I'm just thinking of the right words to say
I know they don't sound the way I planned them to be
But if you wait around a while, I'll let you come with me
I promise you, I promise you...I will"
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE is no REVENGE OF THE NERDS. The nerd doesn't get to score with the bully's best girl, nor does he save the world. He manages a minor triumph, and keeps on keeping on. It's a funny film, and a beautiful one. I felt that Hess' sympathies were strongly with the lead characters -- those who find the film condescending obviously didn't think so. Plotwise, the movie is a bit meandering, but so's life. I love this film, and if you're in any way similar to me in age and upbringing, I think you will too.
WE'VE SEEN NERDS on screen before. But none compare to the uber-weedy Napoleon Dynamite.
In the low-budget indie comedy that bears his name, Napoleon (Jon Heder) is a scrawny scowler from Preston, Idaho, whose eyes are lost behind the semi-opaque haze of his glasses. His red, frizzy hair looks like wire brush bristles that have been stretched and tortured into the shape of an ice cream scoop. (There's a side parting as if Napoleon occasionally makes half-hearted stabs at coiffure.) His mouth sags open as if its closing mechanism has a permanent malfunction. And his cool swagger -- complete with body-hugging jeans and T-shirt as well as soft-leather shin-high boots -- blissfully ignores his obvious nerditude.
He claims to own nunchucks. He pretends to have a girlfriend. He refuses to surrender to anyone, even the bully that regularly strangles him and bashes his head against his locker door. And his monotonal patter is given to sudden exclamations of "Goooosh!" and "Idiot!" directed at whoever's annoying him lately.
"What are you going to do today, Napoleon?" A kid asks one morning as Napoleon makes his way to the back of the school bus.
"Whatever I feel like I want to -- goooosh!" he says, peeved. He throws a little plastic figurine attached to a long thread through the window. Holding on to the string, he watches it bump and bounce on the road behind the bus all the way to school. And another Napoleon day begins.
Directed by Jared Hess (and co-written with his wife, Jerusha Hess), "Napoleon Dynamite," is definitely a one-shtick movie. And there is the nagging thought that laughing at these characters amounts to ridicule. But then there's the counter feeling that this is no different than watching a live-action version of, say, Mike Judge's TV cartoons ("Beavis and Butt-head," "King of the Hill"), or a hinterland spin on Todd Solondz's suburban geek-epic "Welcome to the Dollhouse." And I wonder if it isn't just as condescending and elitist to refrain from laughing at characters in America's cow-pasture land, as if they are beasts in a wildlife preserve that need our sanctimonious protection. I laughed. And I laughed primarily over Heder's hilarious performance. You ain't seen nothing till you've seen Napoleon attack that tether ball.
Napoleon spends most of his time weathering the weirdness of his family. His grandmother likes to drive fast on her dune buggy. Her injury resulting from this pastime forces Napoleon's incredibly bizarre Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) to watch over Napoleon and his reclusive, thirty-something brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who spends his life exploring Internet chat rooms. Rico, who loves to admire his biceps and make home videos of himself throwing a football, is Napoleon's biggest scourge.
Is there a story? Sort of. Napoleon befriends a new student named Pedro (Efren Ramirez), whose withdrawn, heavily accented demeanor makes him a social outcast. But as we learn, he is completely self-respecting and doesn't care what the unenlightened think. (There is no scorn here; quite the opposite.) In fact, Pedro decides to run for school president against the overwhelmingly popular Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff -- Hilary's sister).
Despite what seems to be a miserable existence -- the "normal" world (like all those Judge cartoons and "Dollhouse") is just too horrible to deal with -- Napoleon has a sort of indefatigable life energy. And when he decides to work for Pedro's campaign (his suggested campaign slogan: "Vote for me and all your dreams will come true"), he shows no fear of standing up against the majority. And there's some hope that he'll get it together to become romantic with sweet, shy Deb (Tina Majorino). But in this kind of a movie, who knows? That's the charm of it. You have no idea what's next.
Napoleon's final act, to save Pedro's flagging campaign, is the movie's big punch line. It doesn't amount to much in the dramaturgical scheme of things. But there's something so funny and liberating about the performance, it doesn't matter. You find yourself laughing at Napoleon's antics but you're definitely rooting for him. Ultimately, you realize, he's cooler than everyone.
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 stars out of 4]
Husband and wife filmmaking team Jared and Jerusha Hess think Napoleon Dynamite can join the pantheon of classic nerd heroes simply by talking funny and affecting the mien of the outcast. But nerds are people, too, something the duo never quite comes to grips with in their new indie comedy. "Napoleon Dynamite" offers flashes of wit that could serve the team well in future outings. It's not a stretch to imagine them maturing into a wise humorist team. Consider "Napoleon" a baby step toward that end, one that's more diverting than the average teen comedy but almost utterly lacking in soul. Set in an Anywhere school in Idaho, Napoleon (Jon Heder) looks every inch the high school pariah, from his frizzy 'do to the way he breathes out of his slack mouth whenever the bullies circle his locker. He lives with his grandmother and older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), but while his brother's fey behavior masks an aggressive id, the grandma seems a robust role model who should be able to snap Napoleon out of his funk. Any chance of that dissipates when Grandma breaks her coccyx in a dune buggy accident, leaving the boys on their own. Enter Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), called on to look after the boys even though both are old enough to fend for themselves. Lucky for us, since Mr. Gries' turn here provides the big laughs and elicits the most pity from us. He's a former jock who never quite became an All-American hero. Rather than move on, Uncle Rico coifs his hair like an '80s god and patterns his clothes to match, as if willing time to reverse course. The film's half-hearted attempt at narrative finds Napoleon helping his equally obtuse pal Pedro (Efren Ramirez) run for class president against the school's uber-babe (Haylie Duff, sister of Hilary). Meanwhile, Napoleon all but ignores the advances of Deb (Tina Majorino), another local misfit who is inexplicably drawn to him. The Coen brothers (1987's "Raising Arizona," 1998's "The Big Lebowski") are often unfairly chided for being mean-spirited toward their characters. The charge might be leveled with far more justice against the Hesses, who set up "Dynamite's" sad sacks just so they can gleefully knock them down, giving them virtually no tools from which to build a life for themselves. Some slapstick moments seem constructed out of thin air, with no regard to context. The one glorious exception comes when Napoleon performs an impromptu dance when the class elections require some sort of talent presentation. Watching Mr. Heder strut, gyrate and hurl his wiry frame across the stage is enough to show that the actor's got the goods to add sorely needed new dimensions to his Napoleon. Real-life nerds have enough trouble during their high school years. Films such as "Napoleon Dynamite" shouldn't pick on them, too.
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 4]
To Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), a nerdy Idaho white boy in a red Afro, the word signifies something sublime, like learning soul dancing and how to play nunchaku. Or the time machine his crazy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) is building to revisit his days as a football hero. Or the ponytail his friend Deb (a fab Tina Majorino) wears on the side of her head. Or the bootylicious mama, Lafawnduh (Shondrella Avery), that his brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) finds on the Internet. Or just the fact that his Mexican friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez) is running for class president. What's not sweet is anyone who is contemptuous of Napoleon's universe. First-time director Jared Hess, 24, who wrote the script with his wife, Jersuha, has been accused of ripping off Welcome to the Dollhouse and Rushmore. Nah. Hess and his terrific cast -- Heder is geek perfection -- make their own kind of deadpan hilarity. You'll laugh till it hurts. Sweet.
Rating: *** 1/2 [3.5 stars out of 5]
Meet Napoleon Dynamite, perhaps filmdom's ultimate high school misfit.
He has no fashion sense, wears enormous square glasses and keeps tater tots in his side pocket in case he wants to snack during class. He has a horrific quasi-afro, has no discernible skills other than drawing pictures of ligers (you know -- the offspring of a lion and a tiger), walks with a strange gait and speaks in a perpetually annoyed tone, especially when he utters his favourite epithet ("Id-iot!").
For much of his eponymous film, the slack-jawed Napoleon -- played by 26-year-old unknown Jon Heder -- is the butt of all sorts of mean-spirited jokes. And for the most part, the movie delivers big laughs -- although you may find yourself feeling a bit guilty about enjoying it so much.
There's a really nasty streak that runs through first-time director/screenwriter Jared Hess' debut, which was beloved by Sundance audiences.
You're encouraged to laugh at will at Napoleon and his friends, which include his dweebish older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), his best friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez), his '80s-obsessed uncle Rico (the scene-stealing Jon Gries) and his possible love interest Deb (Tina Majorino).
The movie regards most of its characters with contempt, and savages them mercilessly. Much of the time, even the spastic Napoleon has no redeeming qualities -- until a genuinely rousing climax set during his Idaho high school's Student Body Presidential presentations.
Still, Napoleon Dynamite is very, very funny, even if the jokes are at the characters' expense. And it doesn't even really tell a story. It follows Napoleon's dreary day-to-day existence -- living with his 31-year-old brother, another social misfit who likes to chat on the Internet; feeding his grandma's pet llama; getting bullied at school; going to the big dance; helping Pedro win the Student Body presidency against popular blond Summer (Haylie Duff, Hilary's older sister) -- at its own leisurely pace. Virtually every shot is designed to make the characters look ridiculous or grotesque in some way, and there are times when Napoleon Dynamite reaches almost surreal heights in its mockery.
All of the performances are terrific, especially Heder, and Gries, who plays the shifty ex-jock uncle who wishes he could travel back in time to 1982 when he was a real somebody instead of being the guy who lives out of his van and videotapes himself firing footballs in the air. Each cast member captures his small-town rubes and oddballs to a tee.
See Napoleon Dynamite and laugh at it -- and we guarantee you'll laugh a lot. Just don't expect to feel too proud about it afterward.
I'm trying to remember when I laughed as much in a movie as I did while watching Napoleon Dynamite -- probably not since the last time I saw Waiting for Guffman. Both comedies feature characters I immediately cared about in spite of their faults and silly behavior. In Napoleon Dynamite, the people are more realistic than in Guffman, but they're just as hilarious.
First, there's Napoleon himself -- a tall, geeky high school student who lives with his grandma and older brother. As played by Jon Heder, this put-upon teenager made me smile every time he appeared on screen. Looking at his mop of bushy hair, I couldn't help thinking about "Sideshow Bob" from TV's The Simpsons, but his unique stare and monotone delivery drew me into the poignant world of nerd existence.
Next, meet Pedro (Efren Ramirez), a new student Napoleon befriends after everyone else shuns him. When Pedro decides to run for Student Body President, Napoleon agrees to help with the campaign. Even though Pedro gets in trouble by introducing a piñata in the form of his "mean popular girl" rival candidate (Haylie Duff), Napoleon saves the day during an election assembly. I can't say how, of course, because that would spoil the surprise. Just know it involves Napoleon doing something you least expect and doing it amazingly well.
Then there's Deb (Tina Majorino), a shy, budding entrepreneur who makes colorful key chains and shoots glamour shots when she's not trying to get Napoleon to pay attention to her. Finally, there's Napoleon's wacky family -- Kip, a thirtysomething brother (Aaron Ruell) with nothing better to do than spend time in chat rooms on the Internet; a grandmother (Sandy Martin) who winds up in the hospital as the result of a dune buggy accident; and Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a selfish loser who almost ruins his nephews' lives when he moves in to take care of them.
Oops! I almost forgot LaFawnduh (Shrondella Avery), Kip's Internet girlfriend. Talk about a live wire! When she comes on camera, the sparks really fly. LaFawnduh becomes the catalyst that changes everything for Napoleon and his brother.
Thanks to Jared Hess (director and co-writer with Jerusha Hess, his wife), Napoleon Dynamite reminds us not to judge a book by its cover. And the same goes for this movie. Don't judge it by its simple production values, such as opening credits written on plates of food. Evaluate it by what's inside: the tale of an amusing and lovable main character with the courage to meet the challenges of high school despite his social ineptitude.
(Released by Fox Searchlight Pictures and rated "PG" for thematic elements and language.)
This review is dedicated to Hollie Thornton, Napoleon's number one fan.
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 stars out of 5]
Napoleon Dynamite is a movie trying desperately to be quirky and succeeding. It's weird, odd, and everything the trailers might lead you to expect, but seems to have no loftier goal than being freakish. The movie lacks any real heart or emotion and thus fails to connect on any sort of deeper level.
The titular Mr. Dynamite (Jon Heder) is a High School nerd, only not the type that will ever go on to something greater. He's a nerd without any brains, making him more of a pathetic loser than bona fide super-geek. Everything about him is pathetic, from his curly brown hair to his obsession with ligers, to his tendency to wear his pants at Steve Urkel levels. He has no friends, though he doesn't seem to be lonely. Still, after a particularly difficult day of beatings, he meets a new student named Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and the two quickly become friends, sort of. They don't really have much of a relationship, but they stand next to each other in various social situations. Pedro, being more Mexican than nerd, gives Napoleon bland advice on women and bike jumping, while Napoleon helps soft spoken Pedro deliver a romantic cake to the woman of his dreams.
Napoleon seems fairly unaffected by his surrounding. Things like rejections and bullying leave him unmarred as he crawls into a mental fantasy world of unicorns and nun chucks. He's uninvolved and so we the audience feel pretty uninvolved. There's little all that redeeming about Napoleon, he'd be hard to root for in any situation, assuming he had any goals, which he doesn't. At some point Pedro runs for class president, and Napoleon seems somewhat interested in helping him. But his interest seems only passing, another extension of a nerd-boy fantasy world that we just aren't allowed to be part of.
There are a lot of reasons to find movies funny, but I'm never comfortable when asked to chuckle simply because I feel superior to someone. Napoleon Dynamite gropes about for humor by watching Napoleon and his equally pathetic family do things which label them as inferior. It asks you to respond with the kind of reprehensible joy that a bully might receive from giving his victim a swirly. It appeals to people who live their lives attempting to be "cool" and thus gives them an obviously lesser human being to deride. Wrapping all that in a quirky, independent film package only makes liking the movie itself seem that much cooler.
Dynamite flails around at obvious gags involving the mispronunciation of Spanish words, and cliché scenes of nerd dancing. This approach is neither original nor exciting, but is occasionally mildly amusing. Napoleon isn't trying to achieve anything, isn't going anywhere, and doesn't seem to be interested in anything, so why should we be interested in him? His journey is one of stolid stupidity and steady unacceptability. Director Jared Hess pushes Napoleon's stupidity as far as it can go in pursuit of cheap laughs, but achieves nothing that isn't easily forgettable.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Unfortunately this one is only rental worthy which is a major disappoinment to me. I saw the short that this one is based on (Peluca) and cheered loudly when it won best student short film at the 2003 Deep Ellum Film Festival. Peluca is hilarious in an obtuse way that Napoleon Dynamite only sniffs a few times. When it comes out on DVD I'm sure that Peluca will be included and you can see what I mean. Dynamite is a short film stretched beyond its limits and littered with afterthoughts. His older brother, for instance, is only funny in places and halfway through becomes a walking cliche...that's just how he's written. Napoleon himself (played expertly by Jon Heder and named Seth in Peluca) was actually more well developed (or perhaps more likeable) in Peluca. His way of speaking and the things he was interested in were both focused yet amusingly random. They shoehorn every joke from the short into the feature, but the context is often changed and the impact of the comedy lessened. Now if you haven't seen Peluca (which most of you probably haven't), you obviously won't see all these differences, so perhaps Dynamite will seem really fresh to you. Despite its shortcomings, it does take the road less traveled at times which made me laugh, but never as violently as I did while watching Peluca...it's one of the funniest/quirkiest short films I've ever seen. If you enjoyed Rushmore, think of Max Fisher minus the intellect, social skills, charisma, and reason for being...you now have Napoleon. He's funny in spurts, but mostly he's stupid and at times mean. Pedro is pretty funny but they ruin his hilarious scene from Peluca as well...I just hate this. It was great to see Jon Gries (Lazlow from Real Genius) as Napoleon's Uncle Rico. His character is perhaps the best one that was added for the lengthened script. His living in his own re-written high school past allows for some funny moments. Anyhow, check it out in the theater if you think you'd like to see an "anti-teen comedy" comedy. It's not horrible, but it could've been SO much better. Check it out on DVD for sure if only to catch the pure greatness of Peluca...Seth rules...sweet.
Rating: *** [3 out of 4 stars]
Forget the Greek heroes of ``Troy.'' Meet the geek hero of Preston High. ``Napoleon Dynamite'' may be the summer sleeper that the hip and the restless have been waiting for - even if in the final analysis it lacks any real bite or substance.
A Todd Solondz (``Happiness'') movie without the perversion,``Napoleon Dynamite'' features the most inventively low-tech opening credits of the year and a must-see and soon-to-be widely imitated performance by a grotesquely gangly, unknown animation student named Jon Heder in the title role.
As Napoleon himself would say, ``Sweet.'' Napoleon has a red Afro, oversized eyeglasses and a body only Gumby could appreciate. He likes Tater Tots and speaks in a dull monotone when he isn't heaving in exasperation. When he's not practicing with his nunchucks or sketching unicorns or ``ligers'' - a tiger crossed with a lion - or being tormented by high school bullies, Napoleon is probably outside feeding slop to the family's pet llama. Or he may be bickering with his jobless and hopeless older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), a 32-year-old runt who spends his days ``chatting online with babes.''
Preston High, where Napoleon goes to school, is the comedy film Columbine. Napoleon and his new buddy, the short, semi-conscious Mexican-American Pedro (EfrenRamirez) are the school's real-life Beavis and Butt-head, a couple of outcasts who nevertheless optimistically plot to land dates for the prom.
Napoleon and Kip live with their granny (Sandy Martin). But when she breaks her coccyx on a motocross bike, sleazy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who lives in a Dodge van, moves in with them. After making a move on Kip, Uncle Rico is peddling herbal breast enhancement schemes door-to-door and buying a time machine online so he can relive the glory days of 1982. Napoleon also befriends Deb (former child actor Tina Majorino in a sweet debut as an adolescent), a young woman and photographer trying somewhat pathetically to improve herself.
A noteworthy achievement in freaks-and-geeks cinema and often reminscent of the work of RhodeIsland's famed Farrelly brothers (``Dumb and Dumber,'' ``Kingpin''), ``Napoleon Dynamite'' was written and directed by 24-year-old Jared Hess, an Idahoan dropout of Brigham Young University.
Framed as a simple coming-of-age-movie, it's a ``Portrait of the Geek as a Young Man,'' an American trailer park ``Candide'' in which all the VCRs are top-loaders and a pure heart trumps any deficiencies of physical beauty, IQ, education, money or breeding. It is one of those rare films that makes you laugh when you aren't appalled at what you're watching.
But this winning example of ``geek pride'' is also myopic beyond belief, and the triumphant ``Flashdance'' ending, featuring Hilary's sister Haylie Duff as Napoleon's rival in the school election, doesn't make the grade. Anywhere else in the world, a film like ``Napoleon Dynamite'' would have some political point of view to express. Here in the USA, it has nothing to say on the subject one way or the other.
You'd think that some of the young people of the American heartland depicted in this ``reality-based'' film would have older brothers and sisters in the armed services and something, however stupid or funny, to say about the state of the world.
But no. On this level, ``Napoleon Dynamite'' is a film for a generation that has agreed to keep its mouth shut and consume.
Rating: *** 1/2 [3.5 out of 4 stars]
Grab a Ronald McDonald wig, a brown vest suit that would have been out of style in 1974 and a pair of spectacle rims even Steve Urkel wouldn't touch.
Add a toothy, self-important sneer, and there's your cheap, easy cinephile Halloween costume. You'll walk into a party and someone across the room will yell, "Hey, you're Napoleon Dynamite!" And you're all set.
The costume idea is just one of the gifts delivered by the independent Sundance Film Festival hit "Napoleon Dynamite." With your admission price, you also get 82 minutes of delectably oddball comedy and reams of dialogue worthy of saving in your mental hard drive devoted to movie one-liners.
"Napoleon Dynamite" turns the High School Loser Makes Good formula on its side, then tickles it mercilessly for laughs. Set in rural Idaho, the characters' idea of entertainment is ramping bicycles off particleboard jumps and plunging into various get-rich-quick schemes.
The film was shot on a $400,000 budget - microscopic by Hollywood standards - and looking at the Spartan sets, props and production values, you actually wonder how the filmmakers managed to squander all that dough. The lack of gloss is charming and befitting the backcountry ways the film is mocking. Brigham Young University classmates Jared Hess and Jon Heder make what is essentially a student film, and they get the audience laughing harder than anything Will Ferrell and his studio machine can muster.
Heder plays Napoleon, nerd of nerds and reservoir of comic entertainment. Burdened with social ineptitude and bizarre looks, Napoleon struggles through a high school life plagued with roughhousing bullies and uninterested females. As alienated as Holden Caulfield, only without his smarts, Napoleon carries hefty contempt for everything and everyone around him.
Take the scene, much funnier to watch than to read, in which Napoleon opens the door to see a friendship-bracelet salesgirl, whom he dismisses coolly, as though she were taking up his valuable time. "I made like a 'finity of those at Scout camp," Napoleon says with a sneer.
Napoleon's lines, coupled with a droll, deadpan delivery, make the material sing.
Consider, also, the instance in which Napoleon confronts someone on her milk-drinking habits:
"I see you're drinking 1 percent milk. Is that because you think you're fat? Because you're not. You could probably be drinking whole milk."
It's not that the screenplay, co-written by director Hess and his wife, Jerusha, crackles with a particular comic wit, nor is it Heder's comic charisma alone that carries the day. It's more the fusion of forces by friends on the same askew wavelength who combine their skills into something greater than their sum.
The film has little story to speak of. It's all about character and environment, and it has richly developed layer upon layer of the stuff. Napoleon, intent on finding someone to take to the school dance, is the center of our attention, but the corners of the screen crackle with weirdo folks nearly as savory.
Giggle with Pedro (Efren Ramirez), the new kid who insists on dating the prettiest girls and running for class president. Smirk at Kip (Aaron Ruell), Napoleon's pencil-necked older brother, who obsesses over martial arts and his online affair. Gawk at Summer (Haylie Duff, Hilary's sister), the mean-spirited popular girl whom everyone secretly hates.
While we're laughing at everyone, we're noticing little parts of ourselves inside the ridiculous characters. And we're cheering for them.
Like its hero, the film zooms along in its own out-there orbit, sure to connect with comedy lovers looking to try something bizarre. "Napoleon Dynamite" matches those expectations explosively, with its own goofy brand of TNT.
Grade: B-
Rick James once scored a hit with "Super Freak." Now Napoleon Dynamite hopes to do the same with its super geek, a tall, gangly Idaho teen so uncool that he's almost cool.
Napoleon Dynamite breathes through his mouth, draws unicorns wherever he can and has a flair for compulsive and creative lying (like the summer he spent hunting wolverines with his uncle in Alaska). He sports a shock of orange hair and plays tether ball, with much gusto, by himself. Even if you don't like the film and its freak-show depiction of small-town life, it's hard not to admire the commitment of Jon Heder's performance.
Directed by Idaho native Jared Hess, written by Mr. Hess and his wife Jerusha, Napoleon Dynamite operates under a flag of deadpan weirdness that waves through every moment. Napoleon lives with his 32-year-old, equally geeky brother (Aaron Ruell) who spends his time surfing the Net in search of love. His clueless uncle Rico (Jon Gries) hunts for a time machine so he can return to the high school football championship game he almost won. Napoleon's best friend, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), is a near-somnambulant Mexican kid who woos the hot chick in school (Haylie Duff, Hilary's sister) and mounts an improbable run for class president.
The action, such as it is, unfolds before a collection of tacky wallpaper and public settings that emphasize the classic jocks vs. nerds dynamic. The score, much of it performed on Casio-esque synthesizers and drum machines, strives to enhance the geek-chic feel. Napoleon Dynamite is more about atmosphere than story, which will make some thankful for the scant 82-minute running time.
Filmmakers have every right to poke fun at where they grew up. If they don't, then who does? The performances are one-note, but the notes are colorful enough to get laughs. Still, you never shake the feeling that you're laughing at, not with, this benign, fashion-challenged motley crew. The film never tries to peel away the inner life of high school social outcasts, a la Freaks and Geeks. If Diane Arbus sought the humanity of her oddball photo subjects, Napoleon Dynamite seeks little save a series of walking punch lines, some of which are admittedly funny.
But when all is said and done, there would be no film without Mr. Heder. He does nothing less than create a new type here, the swaggering nerd who sticks out his chest and wields his obliviousness like a weapon. Napoleon is a vivid and unique comic creation at the heart of a film that doesn't wander very far.
Fox Searchlight purchased Napoleon at Sundance, where other indie comedies, including Happy, Texas and Super Troopers, have been snapped up only to die at the box office (that Utah altitude has a way of warping financial judgment). But Fox is putting some marketing muscle behind Napoleon, with fan clubs, ample word-of-mouth screenings and other promotional tools, plus distribution and marketing help from Paramount and the hipsters at MTV Films. Their task won't be easy, but in Mr. Heder, they at least have their poster boy.
Grade: C
One of the big buzz movies out of Sundance earlier this year, Napoleon Dynamite signals the arrival of some undeniably gifted new faces on the independent film scene. Unfortunately, the project in which these newcomers have chosen to showcase their talents is unworthy of the creative energy they've expended on it.
A relentlessly quirky high school movie, Dynamite is a sort of remedial Rushmore set in the Idaho hinterlands. Jon Heder stars as the title character, an awkward teen-ager living with his grandmother and older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell). Napoleon is something of an outcast at school, largely because his day-to-day demeanor suggests someone who was frequently dropped on his head as an infant.
Napoleon does manage to befriend Pedro (Efren Ramirez), a recent arrival from Mexico. The soft-spoken Pedro plans to run for class president to enhance his image with the chicks, and Napoleon is quick to sign on to his campaign. Meanwhile, things are changing at home; with grandma in the hospital, Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) moves into the house. Rico is a Marlboro Man manque permanently trapped in his high school football glory days, circa 1982.
Does director and co-writer Jared Hess love these misfit characters or has he created them simply to heap scorn upon? It's a question that comes up in discussions about filmmakers ranging from the Coen brothers to Todd Solondz, and it's an issue here, as Hess repeatedly sets his characters up for mockery only to embrace them at the last minute.
Heder gives a fearlessly dorky performance as Napoleon, but he and the rest of the cast are straitjacketed by the cartoonish conception of the characters. Stylistically, the movie is a thrift shop of the tackiest and kitschiest stuff America has had to offer for the past 30 years. It's chock-full of bad haircuts, ugly clothes, orange vans, wood-paneled basements and all the worst music you'd hoped to never hear again. It's a landmark achievement in curdled nostalgia, but the whole enterprise leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Hess is a promising filmmaker, but for now, at least, an even more promising cynic.
Rating: * [1 out of 4]
It was a Sundance Film Festival darling earlier this year, but I was left wondering why.
Jon Heder stars as Napoleon Dynamite - a small town kid in Idaho who doesn't fit in at school and barely fits in within his own family. While he suffers the slings and arrows of being the uncool, obnoxious kid at school, his 30-year old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) spends his days looking for love on the Internet and his Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) tries to relive his former high school glory days. Napoleon's world gets a little more complicated when his Grandmother has an accident, and Uncle Rico has to take care of him.
Will Napoleon find a way to cope? Can he find love with a new girl and friendship with a new pal?
I have to admit, I'm stretching it a bit with that plot summary. Sadly, Napoleon Dynamite doesn't have much of a plot. Worst of all, it seems to be a mean spirited look at people who aren't like you and me. Napoleon and his pals aren't the heroes of a Bruce Springsteen song who get up every morning and go to work each day. They're knuckleheads. Writer/director Jared Hess doesn't make any effort to show nobility in the life these characters lead or make us sympathize with them. He appears only to want to make fun of these people, and that's mean. I feel like Hess wants to tell the audience, "you're better than these people, so laugh at them." I can't go for that. They aren't obviously comedic like characters in Dumb and Dumber or some movie like that. These characters are sad, lonely, and down on their luck. I can't laugh at that.
Heder does a great job making Napoleon Dynamite into the most obnoxious movie characters of the year, but is he a hero? I find it hard to believe he has learned anything or made his life better, but maybe that's the point, and that's what I find so mean. The supporting cast is strong, especially Ruell, but, without much of a plot, their performances don't serve much of a purpose.
There are dorks. There are dweebs, geeks, spazzoids and nerds. But they all bow down before Napoleon Dynamite (John Heder) and kiss his "Sailor Moon" ring.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is an odd little movie about an eccentric teen who's seemingly oblivous to his trademark nerd attributes. He's got coke-bottle glasses, a red 'fro, he walks around in plastic moon boots, and when he opens his mouth, a flat monotone rings out words like "sweet" and "unicorn." All the while, Napoleon fancies himself some sort of enchanted ninja. He claims to keep nunchucks in his locker (when there's room) and practices his karate chops on a playground ball.
But the movie isn't just about Napoleon. "Napoleon Dynamite" is about the lives of several lonely loons living in a small desert town in Idaho. Rarely does a movie set out to construct characters with such bizarre idiosynchrocies that watching it might even send Christopher Walken on a Prozac binge.
First, there's Napoleon's 31-year-old brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), who's a knockoff of the Chris Elliot character from "Get a Life." The puny wannabe Casanova has a bad mustache, hiked up dress socks, and an Internet girlfriend. Then there's Uncle Rico (John Gries), who comes to live with the "kids" after their grandma injures herself in some extreme dunebuggy accident. Rico is stuck in 1982 and constantly reliving the state championship football game his team lost. He even tries to buy a time machine online -- a haphazardly constructed contraption that requests its users to strap a cattle prod to their genitals. Darwin Awards where are you? Finally there's Pedro (Efren Ramirez). He's the new kid at school having just moved from Mexico -- and by default Napoleon's best and only friend. He's quiet, but he's automatically cool since he's the only kid in high school with a mustache. There's always one.
"Napoleon Dynamite" doesn't have plot in a beginning-middle-end sense, but it does follow the characters as they try to make sense of their world and solve their identity crises. For Napoleon, this means honing new skills, because according to him, "chicks dig skills." He already knows how to draw magical beasts on the back of his homework during class. His favorite is the liger, a cross between a tiger and lion -- now if he can only master dancing. For Kip, finding himself means meeting his Internet girlfriend face to face and popping a jungle fever pill. Rico sets out selling Tupperware and breast enhancement pills door-to-door to finally somewhat legitimize himself. Pedro wants a chick, and to be class president. It's all about the Œstache, baby.
The best part of Napoleon is that you can laugh without feeling sorry for Napoleon. He's not a tragic character. He doesn't want your pity. And since there's no chance of anyone like Napoleon ever existing, there's really no guilt to sweat for wanting to join in on the swirlies and wedgies. If you take "Napoleon" seriously, you'll dismiss it as indie crap and walk out during the first five minutes. If you walk in with an open mind and an acute appreciation for forging truly unique characters and interactions, you'll come back five times. It has the potential to grow from a small film with a niche audience into a big pop culture phenomenon, kinda like "Clerks." Or it could be "Gigli" with acne and braces.
Rating: **** 1/2 [4.5 out of 5 stars]
Following firmly in the footsteps of modern cinema geekdom right behind Max Fischer ("Rushmore"), Dawn Wiener ("Welcome to the Dollhouse") and the eye-rolling Enid ("Ghost World") is Napoleon Dynamite. Be forewarned though: Napoleon's an ornery little nerd who'd just as soon bite your head off with a sarcastic smirk than deign to talk to you.
There's a slyly shocking realism to the details of Napoleon Dynamite, as if it could have been made only by someone who once wore moon boots and a huge unkempt red afro to school. One suspects that first-time writer/director Jared Hess was, once upon a time, an oddball of this caliber, one who eventually rose above his social ineptitude and venomous disdain for other people to become the creator of... a vicious little nerdly troll who's socially inept and has a venomous disdain for other people.
Well, most people anyway.
Napoleon hates his big brother Kip, who is an officious little pervert who trolls the internet chat rooms in search of a woman.
Napoleon also hates his obtuse Uncle Rico, the brothers' unwelcome caretaker after Grandma injures her hip in a nasty dune buggy accident.
Napoleon really hates Tina, because he always has to feed her. Tina is his grandmother's pet llama.
One person Napoleon doesn't seem to hate is Pedro. Newly arrived in the backwater burg of Preston, Idaho, Pedro is of Mexican descent and speaks rather poor English. Pedro and Napoleon become friends over shared tater tots.
So if Napoleon Dynamite is a fairly unlikeable geek who hates everyone except for the new Mexican kid at school, what makes us think he's worthy of a whole movie?
Well, if all you know of Movie Geekdom is that "Jon Cryer as Ducky was, like, hilarious!" then perhaps Napoleon Dynamite is not for you. If, however, you're on the lookout for a smart, subversive, endlessly sarcastic and oddly poignant little curiosity - be sure to get in line once Napoleon Dynamite hits town, because it's a guaranteed Cult Favorite waiting to happen.
A movie becomes a Cult Favorite partially by being a little...untraditional, but mainly these movies strike a chord because there's some subtle craftsmanship and quiet artistry that elevate the films beyond typical multiplex fare. There's a depth of character and droll humor in Napoleon Dynamite that recalls a dash of the Coens and a pinch of Wes Anderson. Despite offering a few different flavors of indie-cinema inspirations, Hess confidently creates something that's still fresh and unique.
Jon Heder, in the title role, dives face-first into the character of Napoleon. So memorably odd is his performance that one suspects he may have trouble finding roles in the future. He simply IS Napoleon Dynamite, so much so that it's almost like watching a documentary. Jon Gries (The Rundown) offers a fantastically funny turn as the stuck-in-the-80s Uncle Rico, while Aaron Ruell is suitably creepy (in an oddly humorous way) as Napoleon's ubergeek brother. Efren Ramirez (Rave), as the mild-mannered Pedro, is quite strong throughout; he and Heder share several excellent moments.
Toss in a great supporting turn by Tina Majorino (Waterworld), a soundtrack populated by some of the most obnoxious 80s tunes ever recorded, and a bleakly hilarious approach to the oft-told tale of Geeks Gone Wild... like I said, you're looking at a cult classic just waiting to happen.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is a shining exmple of what Independent Movies are all about. There's no WAY something this odd and acerbic and just plain different would ever get produced via the Hollywood Machine. So Hess banged the thing together on his own, made it sing, and then sold it to the distributor willing to release the thing on 1,000 screens. Now all you have to do is go buy a ticket.
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 out of 4 stars]
The latest Sundance success likely to fall flat in the real world, Jared Hess' deadpan debut could have been so much better if only he'd had the courage to actually appreciate his loser characters.
Hess, who has obviously spent too much time locked indoors with the collected works of Todd Solondz, makes a sacrificial offering out of his titular misfit (Jon Heder), a slack-jawed geek who slouches miserably through the halls of his Idaho high school.
Heder ably captures the quirks that make Napoleon a hopeless outcast. Hess handles the visuals with impressive confidence for a first-timer.
But with the exception of one truly glorious dance solo, the movie treats its hero - and his equally uncool family - with undisguised disdain.
And if his creators can't even find a reason to like this kid, why on earth would we?
Rating: *** [3 out of 4 stars]
"Napoleon Dynamite" is something of a poor nerd's "Rushmore," a celebration of freaks and geeks told with formalist precision from a filmmaker who can clearly relate to the plight of adolescent outsiders.
Jared Hess' debut movie, an audience favorite at Sundance (but don't hold that against it), casts an unsparing eye on its title character, a sleepy-eyed, frizzy-haired Idaho teenager as likely to eventually find a home in a fringe militia group as he is to achieving any kind of happiness in mainstream America.
But then, there's nothing mainstream about tiny, rural Preston, Idaho, where Napoleon (Jon Heder) goes to school when he's not feeding casseroles to his pet llama or judging cows with the Future Farmers of America. Director Hess, who co-wrote the film with his wife, Jerusha, grew up in Preston himself, and clearly knows his way around town, capturing the landscapes and the psychology of the place with a mixture of fear and laughing.
"Dynamite" is essentially a series of comic vignettes charting the slow growth of young Napoleon as he learns to let go of his justifiably hostile and anguished view of life. Face it: Solo tetherball and performing sign language sing-alongs with the Happy Hands Club are not exactly food for the soul if you're 16 years old.
Napoleon's home life isn't much better. He lives with his grandmother (Nancy Martin), who breaks her coccyx early in the action so Hess can introduce family doofus Uncle Rico (Jon Gries). Rico wants to go back to 1982, believing that if his high school football coach had put him in in the fourth quarter, "things would be different."
Rico's convictions on the subject run deep: He even buys a mail-order time machine contraption with Napoleon's lisping, 32-year-old, still-living-at-home brother Kip (Aaron Ruell). It's curious why he goes to all the trouble since Preston itself seems stuck in an '80s time warp. (Listen to the music at the school dance.)
Clearly, Napoleon needs to look elsewhere to find contentment. He eventually meets Mexican immigrant Pedro (Efren Ramirez), who stages a great underdog campaign for class president, and Deb (Tina Majorino), a classmate earning extra money shooting glamour photos (a growth industry in Preston) and making boondoggle key chains. (Napoleon's opening line to her - "Is that 1 percent milk you're drinking?" - should, by all rights, become a perennial ice-breaker in school cafeterias after this movie.)
There's a measure of redemption and a glimmer of cautious optimism by the film's end, but again, Hess knows enough about life in these parts not to sugar-coat anything. That commitment to honesty, along with enough genuine laughs, gives "Napoleon Dynamite" an appealing humanity that will leave you smiling.
Rating: ** [2 out of 4 stars]
"Napoleon Dynamite" may have been the surprise comedy hit of the last Sundance Film festival--and its 24-year-old co-writer-director Jared Hess may be a helmer with a future--but that doesn't mean it will make you laugh out loud. It didn't tickle me much, anyway, though it did hand me a few smiles and it may work for others.
Hess, his co-writer wife Jerusha Hess and some buddies from Brigham Young University have imagined a screw-loose parody of the small Idaho city where Hess grew up. They populated it with the usual collection of snobs, nerds and eccentrics you find in most high school comedies (whether big-studio or indie), found a camera-friendly newcomer, Jon Heder, to play the lead role of local weirdo Napoleon Dynamite and came up with the sort of amiably bent, wistful indie that plays well at festivals and jogs a few memories of how silly or painful high school was.
It's fairly entertaining--but not the second coming of indie comedy some notices might lead you to expect. The best things about "Napoleon," in fact, are the gangly moonchild presence of Heder, and the overall mood of retro '80s style, languor and absurdity that Hess gets.
Heder's Napoleon is a misfit of unusual obnoxiousness: a tetherball addict whose favorite expressions (repeated endlessly) are "Sweet" and "Idiot!" Napoleon lives with his computer-geeky younger brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) and, temporarily, with their macho-creepo Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), while attending Preston (Idaho) High--which happens to be Hess' alma mater.
At Preston, he bonds with fellow misfits Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and Deb (Tina Majorino), while assaulting the values of popular personality kid Summer and her vacuous but well-dressed jock-cheerleader retinue, all of whom he and Pedro challenge in a school election. Meanwhile, Uncle Rico zips around town trying be a supersalesman, as Napoleon's grandma recovers from a cycle accident.
The movie has an offbeat film-indie mood, but the climax of all this is exactly the sort of flabbergasting worm-turning resolution you'd get in "Revenge of the Nerds" or any other "Geeks rule" Hollywood comedy of the '80s--a few of which are much better than "Napoleon."
I was rooting for "Napoleon Dynamite" because, like Hess, I come from a small town--Williams Bay, Wis.--that is even tinier than Preston (funnier, too). But this is the sort of Sundance audience hit that doesn't necessarily travel. For me, the humor was too derivative, the resolution too upbeat.
To give Hess credit, he and his company have made an entertaining movie on a small budget, with a good mix of new talent and veterans, like Gries ("Jackpot," "Northfork") and Majorino ("When a Man Loves a Woman"). Even if it's no "Bottle Rocket" or "Twin Falls, Idaho," the movie has style, smarts and vision--that overall off-trail whimsy that's always called "quirkiness." It leaves you confident about the movies Hess will eventually make, if not totally pleased with this one.
Grade: B-
The nerds certainly had their revenge at Sundance this year, when this geeky comedy became, like, totally popular. Set in a tiny Idaho town, this flick tells the nonadventures of the titular teenager (Jon Heder), a slack-jawed dweeb with Coke-bottle glasses and tight red 'fro. He's surrounded by quirky rubes--his salesman uncle, his Internet-obsessed bro and his only friend, Efren Ramirez, who runs for class president against school darling Haylie Duff. Director-cowriter Jared Hess borrows heavily from the Coen brothers and Wes Anderson to whip up some offbeat characters--too bad he doesn't emulate their storytelling skills, as well. A physically adept comedian, Heder and the rest of the spot-on cast provide a smattering of chuckles, but they get hung by the one-note script that feels like an amusing sketch stretched too long. Dynamite only pops when you want it to explode.
Veteran character actor Jon Gries adds another indelible role to his résumé with his portrayal of a door-to-door breast enhancements salesman in Napoleon Dynamite.
Actor Jon Gries vividly remembers his reaction when he started reading the screenplay of what would become the off-kilter comedy Napoleon Dynamite. "Sixteen pages into the script, I was laughing out loud," he says. "I didn't need to read another page."
"I called my manager and I said, 'Yeah, I'll do this. I'll do this for nothing. I don't care. I love it.'" Gries wasn't the only one to embrace the titular teen geek, as the film became the sleeper hit of this year's Sundance Film Festival, winning the festival lottery when distributor Fox Searchlight (since joined by Paramount and MTV Films) snapped it up. The movie went on to win the Film Discovery Jury Award at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival and is now arriving in theaters as a welcome alternative to the usual summer blockbuster fare.
The ghost of Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse hovers over Napoleon Dynamite, the story of an awkward Preston, Idaho teenager (Jon Heder) who finds himself the object of derision at both his high school and the home he shares with his ATV-riding Grandma (Sandy Martin), 30-year-old chatroom-obsessed brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) and pet llama Tina. But 24-year-old first-time director Jared Hess, who wrote the script with his wife Jerusha, is blessed with a far sunnier worldview than Solondz.
The film is an enormously affectionate paean to small-town misfits and the perpetually put-upon Napoleon, whose drawn-out sighs punctuate the movie and who gradually emerges as a genuine hero. Says Gries, who plays Rico, the uncle who delights in torturing his nephew, of Napoleon's transformation, "What I love about this piece is that it's about how a person can be perceived physically and how they can almost adopt the perceptions that have been put on them from outside sources. And transcending that comes from your own self-initiation."
"The endearing quality about Napoleon is that he kind of lies, he boasts and brags and tries to compensate, and yet all that is thrown aside."
Gries had his own challenges to wrestle with in Rico, the door-to-door salesman of breast enhancement products, who lives in a van where he endlessly videotapes himself throwing a football in a vain attempt to recapture his lost youth. "I think he's a reflection of potential never realized," remarks Gries, adding that when it came to nailing down Rico, "the wig was a big thing."
Advised by Hess that he should envision Rico as someone who thinks of himself as David Hasselhoff or Burt Reynolds, Gries immediately saw a way into the character, telling Hess, "We've got to get him a bad hairpiece. Here's a guy who so desperately wants to go back to a certain time in his life and the only way that he can [do that] is to have this perfectly coiffed, big brown hair that he clearly doesn't have anymore underneath it."
"I feel like I was so lucky to stumble onto to this film," adds Gries, who very nearly missed the opportunity. After a five-year run as the bashful computer expert Broots on the TV series The Pretender and a starring role as hard-luck karaoke country singer Sunny Holiday in Mark and Michael Polish's Jackpot, Gries decided to quit acting in order to concentrate on directing and writing.
But after he took one last role in the noirish indie comedy The Big Empty to raise a little cash, casting director Jory Weitz, who worked on both films, screened The Big Empty dailies for Hess, pointing out Gries to the newbie director.
"I feel like one of these old-time baseball players who's just waiting to say, 'Look, I'm going to hang 'em up,'" says Gries, grateful for the surprise role that Napoleon Dynamite provided. "It feels somewhat like a fairy tale, because here was this low-budget movie that justŠ They didn't have the money to make this movie. Pure gut that I wanted to do this film, pure gut. I just felt something."
For the 46-year-old Gries, Napoleon Dynamite represents the latest turn in an idiosyncratic career. The son of the late Tom Gries, a busy director of both movies and TV shows who is probably best known for his work on Breakheart Pass, the original Helter Skelter miniseries and the Muhammad Ali biopic The Greatest, his introduction to acting began by accident.
Out playing on the Paramount lot one day, while his father worked inside on pre-production for his latest film, the Charlton Heston-starring western Will Penny, the 10-year-old came to the attention of the movie's producers, who promptly cast him over his father's vociferous objections. Gries recalls the indelible memory of acting opposite Heston on location in Bishop, California.
"There was a scene where I had to hug him and I'll never forget it, I was bawling," he remembers. "I didn't want to show it, because it wasn't part of the scene and I was embarrassed. I didn't want anybody to know I was crying."
"It was a strange thing, these feelings built for this guy," Gries continues. "There was this fatherly figure here who was really acting fatherly, even though my dad was there and I got so emotionally involved. It scared me a little bit, at that age, it scared me."
That early experience frightened Gries so much that he turned down all other offers, including roles opposite John Wayne in The Cowboys and Steve McQueen in The Reivers, telling himself, "I'm never going to do that stuff again. I'm no actor."
However, by his late teens, the acting bug had bit again and his father gave him a small part in Helter Skelter so that he could get his SAG card, warning his son, "If you ever call me again for work, I'm going to kick your ass, because you can't rely on me."
That might sound harsh, but Gries remains grateful. "It was the best advice, it was such sage advice," he admits. "I packed up my bag with $200 in my pocket and I went to New York and studied with Stella Adler."
Gries worked steadily from the late 1970s on, becoming a reliable character actor in films such as More American Graffiti, Real Genius, The Grifters and Get Shorty, while his five years on The Pretender provided a welcome and steady paycheck. And then one night, Gries, who is also a musician, was winding down after a club date by walking his dogs.
"I wasn't feeling any pain," he explains of an evening that brought him into contact with the filmmaking brothers Mark and Michael Polish. "Mike [Polish] was carrying a film can and I said, 'What have you got in the can there?'" explains Gries. "And he said, 'It's my short film. I just won Honorable Mention at the DGA.' I said, 'I want to see that film.'"
The brothers, who turned out to live five doors down from Gries and to be Real Genius fans, were only too happy to give their new friend a tape of their film and a copy of an early draft of Northfork. "You could see that they clearly had talent," Gries remembers.
The actor introduced them to producer Rena Ronson, who put the twins' career on the fast track when she agreed to produce Twin Falls Idaho, while Gries went on to act in all three of the Polishes' films, serving, as well, as either associate or co-producer. He even contributed a song to the Twin Falls soundtrack.
Gries describes his bond to the brothers as, "Avuncular or like an older brother to them. I have a very protective relationship; I want to see them do well."
He also notes the similarities between his alliance with Michael and Mark Polish and his new experience on the Napoleon Dynamite set. "I feel like all of the sudden, in the low-budget, kind of independent world, here I've gone and I've been traded to another team and we're here."
Ultimately, Gries says he relishes the chance to work in a world where the financial rewards are not necessarily great. "The fun of this kind of experience, which I think, unfortunately, a lot of people in the film industry miss, is really the adventure of making a movie that is being nurtured almost like a child and having to go through a channel where there are not millions of hands kind of massaging it to the screen," he asserts.
"This one is like a film that came out of the woods, you know, there it is and everybody's like, 'Wow! This is incredible,'" he adds. "It's a great feeling to be part of that. It makes me happy to know that a film like Napoleon Dynamite is part of my personal archive."
"If I get to do more films like Napoleon Dynamite, then [my career] has worked out," Gries concludes, offering his personal definition of success. "It's not about the money. It's not about the prestige or being recognized. It's about doing work that you really think has integrity."
When the film "Think Tank" makes its world premiere at 7 p.m. Friday as part of FilmFest KC, Cowtown audiences will catch a movie that, as of Tuesday, even its own director hadn't watched in its final form.
"We've been really up to the wire, actually, getting it for this festival," says filmmaker Brian Petersen about his first feature. "We're watching the film print (Wednesday) with the final positive sound and music. There really is no time to make changes after that before the festival. Hopefully, everything works out."
Petersen will be in town to present the film; joining him will be producers and members of the cast, including Kansas City native Jeff Runyan.
"I was friends with producer Chris Wyatt," Runyan said. "And my mom, Cathy Runyan-Svacina, was heavily involved with (FilmFest KC) so we put our connections to bring the film out for its debut. I knew Chris. We actually met each other in Italy when we were both missionaries for our church."
"Think Tank" is a comedy about a group of underachievers who have banded together to find a solution to save the pool hall where they hang out.
"They're sort of living in the past," Petersen says. "They haven't really accomplished anything. It's something of a coming-of-age but a little late in life sort of comedy."
Dedicated fans of the summer's sleeper hit "Napoleon Dynamite" might recognize Petersen -- he played Lance, the husband who couldn't bend the Tupperware. Both films share the same producer (Chris Wyatt), some of the cast (Tina Majorino, Aaron Ruell) and both were made for around $400,000.
Petersen also received some help from "Napoleon Dynamite" director Jerod Hess, who, like Petersen, is a Brigham Young University film school alumni.
"I was working and raising money for ŒThink Tank' while they were trying to get money for ŒNapoleon,' " he said. "They got their money, and we went up there and helped on his film. We've all kept kind of close. A lot of film schools do that. The alumni always help each other out with each other's crews. The BYU film school is a good film school; it's just not very big, very well known."
Petersen says "Think Tank" is more conventionally structured than Hess'.
"We tried not to make the same film as ŒNapoleon Dynamite,' " he said. "They're both comedies. Both of the films are somewhat childlike. They're not at all the kind of the gross-out teen comedies that come out. We just decided to make some films that were somewhat aimed at the demographic that those same films are going toward but that didn't have that same content."
Petersen said there also are some special effects in the movie, which is odd for such a low-budget film.
"We sort of violated all the rules of writing an independent script," he said. "We have a large cast with multiple locations, stunts and special effects and animals. All the things you shouldn't do, we did. We had to figure out low-budget ways to pull those off."
Joining Petersen for tonight's screening and for a subsequent screening at 1 p.m. Saturday will be producers Wyatt, David Kaye, Sean Covel and Celeste Garcia, and actors David Thompson, Greg Neil and Keith Paugh.
Rating: *** [3 out of 4 stars]
Note: The following pertains to an advanced screening of the movie which took place on 5/19/2004.
I can hardly believe that, twenty minutes into this movie, I was thinking to myself "This will never, ever work." The opening of Napoleon Dynamite shows no sign of a pulse; the audience was laughing at the aimless punches it threw at them, while I was rolling my eyes. However, after seeing the movie in full, it's easy to conclude that the abysmal opening act is merely a method of setting up a delightfully enjoyable movie. It's been two months since I laughed as hard as I did in Napoleon Dynamite, with March's The Ladykillers preceding it. This is a pure comedy with heart, which is a rare find in the movie industry these days. It is set to be released this June, by Fox Searchlight Pictures, and I sure hope it finds its audience.
Teenage Napoleon Dynamite (John Heder) lives with his thirty-year-old brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), and Grandmother (Sandy Martin) in the small town of Preston, Idaho. He's not a popular boy, tucking in his shirt, with his curly, red hair bobbing all over the place when he walks. His main interest is drawing pictures of ironic-looking creatures, including the "ligers," tiger-lion crossbreeds, which have ball-and chains for tails. He also claims to fight werewolves and such monsters in Alaska over the summer, when his peers will ask him about his prized activities, just for laughs. As the movie unfolds, Napoleon's eccentric, scheming Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) moves in with him and his brother when their Granny is injured in a freak ATV accident, leading a long chain of events. Napoleon befriends the New Mexican Kid at school (Efren Ramirez), eventually helping him run for class president; his brother's internet girlfriend LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery) stops by for a visit all the way from Detroit; and he asks a cute girl to the school dance. Napoleon Dynamite isn't so much a coming of age film as it is a study of peoples' quirks. The characters in this movie thrive amazingly; with each new scene comes another joyous mannerism or event.
John Heder shines as Napoleon in every way possible. After watching a good comedy, I will often impersonate the main character, to relive the brilliant moments in the picture. That's not the case with young Napoleon Dynamite, though. Even if I were to study it for hours at a time, I do not think I could ever imitate Heder's work; it represents the most unique and enthralling performance of recent years. When simply thinking of Napoleon's voice I am tempted to chuckle--a complement I surely have never paid in a review before. Like most all great actors should, Heder made me want to see this flick again, and sometime in the future, I definitely will.
Director Jared Hess is the most essential part of the superlative execution of Napoleon Dynamite, however. He has an excellent taste in comedy, and has cut this film to perfection, nearly mastering the aspects of pacing, tempo, and rhythm. I should also complement film editor Jeremy Coon in this area; after all, it was he who forced Hess to make the necessary, tough cuts in the film. Once a punch-line is delivered in Napoleon Dynamite, the scene then quickly comes to a close; the movie is, quite frankly, not allowed to lollygag. Most importantly, this technique keeps things amusing and funny. If one is not a particular fan of a segment, it never lasts long enough to be called an endurance test. My reaction serves as the perfect example of this. For me, the mediocre opening sketches flew by quickly, even though I didn't find much liking in them.
I know that the movie is going to receive a limited release come time, but it has not been made clear yet by Fox Searchlight as to how widely they will be expanding it. If they take their chances on it, and play their cards right, then I would predict that Napoleon Dynamite will perform quite well. This is the kind of story that no viewer can resist--simple and entertaining--with no bitter Hollywood aftertaste. From a quality standpoint, Hess' motion picture has just as much potential as My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Bend it like Beckham did; whether such will be lived up to will soon be seen. If it does end up in a theatre even remotely close to you, though, seize the opportunity, and see it. Napoleon Dynamite is wacky and full of social wisdom, a one-of-a-kind experience for anyone, regardless of their preference in film.
Rating: *** [3 out of 4 stars]
Wouldn't you know? The funniest teen-related movie in years is being released as an art/specialty film -- one or two theaters per city.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is hilarious. How comfortable your laughter is, though, may depend largely on whether the film seems condescending to its central character or sympathetic.
Films like the Coen Brothers' "Fargo" and Todd Solondz's "Welcome to the Dollhouse" straddled that line.
Few will find the ironically named character Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) likable. The film inspects this world-class nerd as though he were a bug under a microscope.
His lips never meet, giving him a perpetually open-mouthed gape. He looks constipated and half asleep -- the weariness of 16 unforgiving years as an outsider.
He's ungainly. His frizzy orange hair somehow encourages others to clip him at random. He's always being smacked and pushed into lockers.
He and older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) live with their grandmother in a modest house in Preston, Idaho, where the picture was made.
When Granny is hospitalized after a dune buggy accident -- no doubt road rage from coping with hopeless grandsons -- the Dynamites' horror of an Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) invites himself to move in as babysitter.
This guy never got past the big football game in '82, when the coach took him out. Or never put him in. Either way, he goes right on replaying the game for anyone who will listen. He's a door-to-door salesman of herbal breast enhancements.
Everything Dynamite touches turns against him except the marginally functioning Pedro (Efren Ramirez), who runs against popular Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff) for student council president, and backward Deb (Tina Majorino), who wears her hair in a ponytail on one side.
Losers on parade? Oh, yeah. But "Napoleon Dynamite" is a deadpan fairy tale -- nerdiness made droll, with appetizing plusses, such as the year's most imaginative opening titles, and details quietly observed, such as the atrocious school lunches.
Jared Hess directed from a screenplay he co-wrote with his wife, Jerusha Hess. They and producer Jeremy Coon all met as students at Brigham Young University at the turn of the century. The famous film schools should graduate a team half as savvy.
Rating: *** [3 out of 5 stars]
The opening credits of Napoleon Dynamite displays the names of the cast and crew on food items with backdrops of horrible shag carpeting and overpowering wallpaper. I'm not quite sure why but seeing the garish oranges, blues, and greens triggered memories of my childhood. My childhood may not have been as painfully awkward as the title character's but I could certainly relate to his "I really don't give a crap" attitude.
Napoleon Dynamite centers around the adventures of Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), a nerdy kid who lives with his grandmother and brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) in Preston, Idaho. When Grandma is injured in an ATV accident, Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) arrives to take care of the two brothers.
All of Napoleon Dynamite's characters are strangely out-of-sync with reality. Napoleon spends his time drawing fantasy creatures, fantasizing about being a ninja, and generally being unkempt. Kip spends his time online in chat-rooms talking to "hot babes." Uncle Rico lives in his van trying to recapture the glory of 1982, the year he almost took the high school football team to the state championship. Other than these brief descriptions, there's little to know about anyone in the film other than they're all quite bizarre. And I guess that's the joy of Napoleon Dynamite. The characters are so brazenly odd that they're immediately endearing. Napoleon is a loser but he seems to work so hard at it that one can't help but like him for his efforts.
Later in the film, Napoleon makes friends with Pedro (Efren Ramirez), the school's lone Latino student. Pedro decides to run for class president and Napoleon helps him in his effort to beat the preppy Summer (Haylie Duff) for the job. Their joint promotional methods are what one could expect from two nerdy outsiders and not the type of unbelievable stunts a typical Hollywood film might have them perform.
There's precious little story and the plot mainly exists to string a bunch of set piece skits together but, somehow, it all works. The humor is most certainly not for everyone but, if you've ever felt like a geek or an outsider, Napoleon Dynamite will make you laugh a bit louder and harder than if you haven't.
Rating: 5 out of 10
Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is a high school geek and describing him as a geek might not even be doing justice to the word geek. He has a big, puffy head of hair; he's tall and gangly; he wears glasses yet is still constantly squinting; he breathes with his mouth open and his bottom lip seems to stick out further than his top lip; he wears winter boots in the summer and constantly wears track pants; he draws pictures of a liger (a cross between a lion and a tiger). I could go on but I hope you get the picture.
His older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) is not much better. He is 32 years old, lives at home, wears shorts with socks hiked up to his knees and seems to think a wild night out on the town entails two hours of sitting at home and talking to chicks online. (Insert Brendan joke here.)
Napoleon Dynamite, the movie, follows a few months in the life of Napoleon Dynamite, the super-geek, and some of the key players in his life - his equally geeky brother, his "best friend" Pedro (Efren Ramirez), his Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), his grandma (Sandy Martin) and a small handful of his classmates.
There's not a whole helluva lot going on in the life of Napoleon, besides the fact that his first name is Napoleon and his last name is Dynamite. He watches videos of his uncle playing football, he takes a martial arts class, he takes dance lessons and he helps Pedro run for school President. Funny? Sometimes it is humourous, sometimes it drags a bit and sometimes it is just plain foolish.
His brother, on the other hand, is great. He is a dedicated on-line dater. He also takes a martial arts class. And in a brilliant turn of events, he goes gangsta on our asses. I laughed at this one.
Overall, I would say Napoleon Dynamite is a mixed bag of nuts. There were times I laughed out loud and other time it was painfully slow and torturous to watch. I was hoping this movie would be a lot funnier than it actually was. It seemed sort of like a modern days version of "Revenge of the Nerds", but not nearly as dynamic or as funny. I am sure there are people out there who are going to fall in love with Napoleon Dynamite. I did not fall in love seeing this movie. I don't regret giving it a chance to win my heart but it quite simply was not funny enough to deserve my love.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Settling comfortably into the high-school angst genre, 24 year-old filmmaker Jared Hess' low-budget comedy, which was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival, focuses on losers. Technically, it's a sequel. Actor Jon Heder played the same deadpan, socially-inept character, then named Seth, in a 2001 Brigham Young University student short called "Peluca." But since its audiences were sparse, few will realize that Seth has morphed into Napoleon Dynamite.
Nerdy, bespectacled Napoleon lives in rural Preston, Idaho, with his energetic grandmother (Sandy Martin), her pet llama, and Kip (Aaron Ruell), his slacker older brother who searches for love in Internet chatrooms. When he's not drawing "ligers" (lion/tiger), Napoleon's friends are two other outcasts: Deb (Tina Majorino), an aspiring photographer and Pedro (Enfen Ramiriz), a shy Mexican transfer student who impulsively decides to run for class president against the popular prom queen (Haylie Duff, Hilary's sister). Complications arise when Grandma cracks her coccyx in a dirt bike accident and macho Uncle Rico (John Gries) comes to stay with them. He's a door-to-door salesman/con man who's wistfully obsessed with a time-travel machine he bought over the Internet in hopes of re-visiting a fateful football game back in 1982.
Reminiscent of Richard Linklater's "Dazed and Confused" and Wes Anderson's "Rushmore," this quirky, episodic homage to dim-witted, awkward, ostracized geeks is certainly a promising feature film debut. Jared Hess, his screenwriter wife Jerusha and cinematographer Munn Powell are just beginning their cinematic journey. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Napoleon Dynamite" is a curiously charming 6. It's an outlandish, goofy diversion.
Rating: *** 1/2 [3.5 out of 5 stars]
Napoleon Dynamite (Heder) is a teenage dork. Not a hey-let's-put-glasses-on-Rachael-Leigh-Cook kind of teenage dork, but a unicorn-lovin', lip-balmin' Future Farmer of America with Dragonslayer posters on the wall of his Preston, Idaho, bedroom. His tiny, lisping 32-year-old brother (Ruell) is a chat-room slave; his uncle Rico (Gries) sells "NuPont fiberwoven bowls" to farm wives and tries to time-travel back to his gridiron heyday in 1982. Like its mumbling, monotonous protagonist, this festival charmer takes its time making a point. It luxuriates in small-town kitsch (e.g., the "Happy Hands Club" pantomiming in American Sign Language to Bette Midler's "The Rose") at such length that one wonders if it isn't exploiting its characters, who are poor and rural and creepy and odd, from an arch indie platform, as do certain other more jaundiced filmmakers dealing in youth and family themes. (Todd Solondz, I'm looking in your direction.) Fortunately, writer-director Hess finally steps up in the second act and propels the story into its rightful place, celebrating the youthful underdog. And I do mean underdog, people we're talking stirrup pants and side ponytails and purple eyeshadow. It's not pretty. Yet the movie successfully engages issues of class and race without bobbling its offbeat, offhand mood: Napoleon's best friend (Ramirez) by which I mean that they exchange a few halting words is a migrant student from Juarez who pines for but is humiliated by the rich and perfect Big Girl on Campus (Haylie Duff, cybernetic look-alike sister of Hilary). This is the kind of movie you get when the kids from the AV Club grow out of their headgear, put down their 12-sided dice, and start making independent films. It's not always narratively on point (its origins as a 2003 short are evident from its meanderings), but it gets along to the Big Dance, to Napoleon's Big Moment, and the trés-1980s soundtrack-driven resolution all the same, and the detours are ultimately well worth the trip for the texture they provide. Heder sells the character completely, from his kinky red Poindexter hairdo to his puffy ankle boots (jeans tucked in, naturally). His every response to every situation is an exasperated slow-motion whine that's almost painful to witness, but it does ring true. Adolescents are ugly and awkward and at times real shit heads; they don't leap up helpfully to feed the family llama or clearly state their romantic and personal intentions. Real teenagers will run from this movie as if it were hot lava. For older and more reflective viewers, it's a quirky, fresh slice-of-life more inviting than a tater-tot pyramid.
Rating: *** [3 out of 5 stars]
Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is the quintessential nerd. A geeky, gangly boy, he looks at the world from half-closed sleepy eyes behind thick glasses, has a shock of every-which-way frizzy red hair on his head and a slack-jawed mouth that seems to be in a perpetual state of "Huh?"
Although he lives on the rolling farmland of Idaho, Napoleon seems to really live in his own private Idaho, a sort of parallel universe that exists alongside ours.
It's a place where grandma gets injured while riding her off-road motorbike across a sand dune, a crazed uncle orders a time machine online to go back to his high school football glory days, and even geekier brother Kip has grown pale from endless hours spent in an online chat room looking for his soul mate. Oh, and there's a pet llama, too.
Napoleon Dynamite, a film-festival favorite in
which all this takes place, is a movie for people who wouldn't miss a day without a look at the Non Sequitur or Close to Home comic strips. You know who you are.
All others will probably find Napoleon Dynamite more befuddling than dynamite.
Yes it's contrived and silly -- Napoleon and his friends speak in monosyllables and approach nearly every oddball situation with blank stares -- but it sort of grows on you the longer it goes on.
Not much really happens in Napoleon Dynamite, yet what does happen means the world to its characters.
There aren't many jokes. It's more the sudden, surprising sight of unusual things that spark laughs -- six classmates at the front of a class signing to Bette Midler's "The Rose;" Kip on in-line skates holding a rope that's attached to the back of a bike that Napoleon is pedaling furiously.
Napoleon pretends he can do martial arts and has a girlfriend, but does not.
When he gets up the nerve to approach a shy, but sweet girl, his pickup line involves asking whether she's drinking 1-percent milk because she thinks she's fat.
More likely he's alone in the schoolyard playing tetherball or being pounced on by the school bully. A giant-sized teen who towers over his much younger schoolbus mates, he's a Northwest Ichabod Crane.
With Grandma in the hospital, Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who apparently lives in his van, is called to fill in at home.
Uncle Rico spends lots of time practicing his old football tosses, which he videotapes in a vain hope of interesting some pro scout. But he really sells plastic food containers door to door to the ladies, although later he branches out to breast enhancers.
He's also the bane of both Napoleon and Kip (Aaron Ruell) who he feels are beneath him and equally unworthy. When he urges Napoleon to get a job, it's at a chicken farm run by a pair of weathered codgers where lunch includes fly-covered sandwiches and a milkshake of raw eggs from a blender.
Forget Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.
Napoleon Dynamite is THE true underdog movie. Yes, you want to laugh at Napoleon and his friends, especially new-kid-in-class Pedro Sanchez (Efren Ramirez). He's the only kid in school with a moustache, though like Napoleon he approaches the world with a blank stare.
When Pedro decides to run for class president with Napoleon's help, it results in a wonderful small miracle starring the awkward Napoleon onstage during a school assembly. It has to be seen to be believed.
Heder and the rest of the cast approach their characters with such dead-on sincerity and naivete that they become extremely appealing.
Director Jared Hess, who wrote the script with wife Jerusha, never makes the characters ridiculous, even when they're doing outlandish things. Treated with affection, one wants them to succeed against the impossible odds they tackle.
Hess's own private Idaho is a place where geeks and nerds can hold their own and make their dreams come true. No wonder the film festival nerds loved it.
Rating: 5 out of 10
PLOT:
A big-time Idaho nerd doesn't quite fit into his high school surroundings and seems to get beat up by the jocks a lot. Then one day, he meets a new kid named Pedro and starts hanging with him for companionship. The two nerds try their best to make sense of their lives and their inability to date girls, and take part in various activities for stimulation. The first nerd's bro and uncle also take part. A few days in the life of a big-time loser...ensues.
CRITIQUE:
This film's tagline professes that Napoleon Dynamite is "Out to prove that he's got nothing to prove." A pretty cool tagline. Unfortunately, the film itself suffers from some of that slogan's intention and doesn't really have much to say, other than the story of a big-time loser kid who's funny at times, but mostly just annoyed, bored, inept, insecure and confused. If I wanted to spend 90 minutes with someone like that, I'd just watch myself in the mirror...for 90 minutes. That's not to say that the movie doesn't entertain, because it does, in some parts. There's no story per se-so basically we're just following this big nerd around for a buck and a half, as he tries to ask a girl out, gets beat out by jocks, goes back and forth with his bigger-loser uncle, helps his friend run for the school election and so on and so forth. Some have compared this film to both RUSHMORE and ELECTION, both of which I'd qualify as much better and more accomplished because those films had the laughs, the story and the quirky characters to go along with the similar themes of ostracization in high school. One of this film's coolest ditties is its opening credit sequence that had to be one of the most original ones that I'd seen in years. Good going on that front! The lead actor, John Heder, was also ideally geeky, with a certain "sleepy" quality about him that was endearing, as well as a hilarious "annoyed" way that he would finish most of his sentences, "What do you think!?!" I also liked the way he would qualify anything cool as "Sweeeeeeet".
Unfortunately, the film doesn't have too many inspired scenarios, spends a lot of time focusing on these hyper-real situations that don't sincerely reflect actual life (who walks around school with that type of zoned look on their face, how does one suddenly learn to dance so well in so little time, etc...) and ultimately didn't make me laugh as much as it wanted to. Also, this wasn't a problem in the film per se, but in what era was it set? The clothes seemed to come from the 70s, the tunes from the 80s and the Internet stuff from the 90s. That said, the audience with whom I caught the flick was in full "Napoleon mode", laughing at almost every two-bit word or look out of the chump, so if you're into lingering pauses by characters in film, and quirky situations that don't seem real, but might be funny to you, maybe you'll enjoy it much more than I did (read: arthouse). If, on the other hand, you like your comedies "straight" and don't see yourself getting into major-nerd characters who don't particularly win you over with their lame personalities, check out MEAN GIRLS instead. You also have to be in an "I don't give a shit" mood to appreciate this movie on its quirkier level...I was in "dicky" mood, so I didn't really connect. At some point, Napoleon's even bigger, nerdier brother (yeah, pretty much every single person in this film is a loser) hooks it up with a black woman and that situation turned rather humorous, and his uncle Rico was pretty damn consistently idiotic, sexist and goofy the whole way through (dug the time-travel bit), but again, the film as a whole didn't really blow me away, particularly since I'd been hearing such great things about it since Sundance. Check it out in theaters if it sounds like your kind of film, otherwise, video/dvd might just do the trick.
Rating: 1/2 [0.5 out of 4 stars]
The protagonist of "Napoleon Dynamite" is a mouth-breathing runt who responds to everything with bizarre hostility in his voice, all too indicative of poor education or poor nutrition or both. I found the character to be downright annoying, the way his jaw hangs perpetually open as he drags action figures behind the school bus with fish line. That's prior to his engaging in such disgusting acts as stuffing tater tots in his pants. Not since "Gummo" have I encountered a film character this repulsive, and not since "Police Academy" has a film comedy been this aimless and amorphic. That is a tremendous feat. The script trots through a series of episodes, the majority of which are entirely unrelated to each other, and then ends. It's kind of amazing how the writer-director, Jared Hess, has made absolutely no effort to even give the impression that he has stringed together said episodes into a cohesive story. Napoleon (Jon Heder) is a nerd who lives with his nerd brother (Aaron Ruell) and nerd uncle (Jon Gries) in a tri-level house in a rural Idaho town. He attends high school with a nerd best friend (Efren Ramirez) and a nerd love interest (Tina Majorino). Indeed, the movie is eager to make everyone so nerdy, stupid and socially inept that every scene intended to be funny just ends up being creepy or painful, especially those involving Gries, who drives around in a carroty Dodge Santana, flirting with high school girls a third of his age. Another example: when Napoleon decides he wants to take a pretty student named Trisha (Emily Kennard) to a school dance, he sketches a portrait of her from a yearbook photo and leaves it with her mom. What results is an uncomfortable and unpleasant scene with Trisha accepting Napoleon's invitation to the dance (under orders to be polite from her mother), something she clearly does not want to do.
A number of other *things happen* through the course of the film, but I'll be damned if I can *synopsize* what happens. The film just gets worse and worse, and ultimately becomes nothing but a mindless excursion into a derivative offering of Geek Cinema, made by people who have clearly overdosed on the sensibilities of directors Todd Solondz and Wes Anderson. It's superficial at best, content to settle on awkward dialogue and body language in a movie universe where all production of clothing, furniture and technology ended in 1984. Films such as "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and "Rushmore" are great primarily due to a connection to be made between their characters and the audience, and their exercising of a measure of movie style. But "Napoleon Dynamite" simply repels you like a homeless man on a bus; it is uninspired, ugly, elusive of any style, and leaves you feeling duped and taken for having seen it. I dare anyone to dream up a reason to see this putrid film.
Rating: 1/2 [0.5 star out of 4 stars]
Rating: *** [3 stars out of 5]
Napoleon Dynamite is misunderstood. After all, it's not every student in Preston, Idaho who has a tight red afro, wears moon boots in the summertime, spends nearly all of his time drawing medieval creatures and plays a mean game of one-man tetherball. He has a grandma who spends all waking hours four wheeling at the sand dunes, an older brother who is forever seeking out his soul mate in chat rooms and an uncle who never left 1982. It's little wonder, then, that he never cracks a smile. But he's in touch with his one, true feeling he's absolutely livid.
It's because he is so consistently angry that Napoleon (Jon Heder) is directly responsible for the biggest laughs in the movie. Give him one chore feeding the family llama, Tina and he'll do it, but he'll be pissed off about it. He'll let Tina know he is, too. If he's knocked off a bicycle by taking a perfectly spiraled steak to the noggin, he's not going to be happy about that, either. It takes meeting his new best friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez) to give him courage to break out his shell some and forge new ground. It's Pedro, after all, who convinces him to try his hand at love one day in the cafeteria, when he delivers the following line:
"I see you're drinking 1% milk. Is that because you think you're fat?" he asks, sincerely. "Because you could pretty much drink whole milk and get away with it." To which the girl stands up without saying a word, and leaves.
As far as Pedro and Napoleon's friendship goes, it's a beautifully crafted one. Having just moved from Mexico, Pedro's single ambition is to meet pretty girls in school and he stops at nothing to achieve this goal even if it means running for class president. While the movie sometimes wanes in its laughs, the union between the two friends never appears to feel less than real. It's a little reminiscent of Kumar Pallana's recurring roles in Wes Anderson's films (most memorably as Gene Hackman's sidekick Pagoda in The Royal Tenenbaums).
Napoleon Dynamite has all the makings of a cult classic just waiting to happen. How much of one it becomes, however, depends on how many take to it when it hits the theater on 1,200 screens even, according to the number Fox Searchlight has promised. On one hand, it could be that this is the voice of a bitter outcast from the sticks who conquers all in the end, but that's giving it too much credit. All first-time director Jared Hess wants to do is make his audience laugh and he mostly succeeds to that end. The 80's references get a little tiresome, but this still has all the raw likeability that won Rubin & Ed its own following in years not too distant past. It just remains to be seen if the buzz it generated for itself at Sundance will last until it hits theaters later this year.
Rating: **** [4 stars out of 5]
The Story: From Preston, Idaho comes Napoleon Dynamite (Heder), a new kind of hero complete with a tight red 'fro, some sweet moon boots, and skills that can't be topped. Napoleon lives with his Grandma (Martin) and his 30-year-old, unemployed brother Kip (Ruell), who spends his days looking for love in internet chat rooms. When Grandma hits the road on her quad runner, Napoleon and Kip's meddling Uncle Rico (Gries) comes to town to stay with them and ruin their lives. Napoleon is left to his own devices to impress the chicks at school and help his new best friend Pedro (Ramirez) win the election for Student Body President against the stuck-up Summer Wheatley (Duff); all the while making sure to feed Grandma's pet llama Tina, and avoiding association with Uncle Rico and the herbal breast enhancers he sells door to door. Napoleon and Pedro put their skills and knowledge of piñatas, cows and drawing to good use, but it is a surprise talent that leads the two to triumph in the end.
Review:
Vote for Pedro, indeed! Pedro is my new best friend.
Hell Mission Statement #40773: NAPOLEON DYNAMITE
What the sh*t is this? An exercise in neo-postmodernism? Yes, it is that. It's also the great equalizer. A polarization force that has parted most audience members like the Red Sea sailor of a menstruating vagina. You will either hate Napoleon Dynamite to the very bottom of that bowl of Chex Mix in your soul. Or, you will strangle it with geek love. Yeah, if your name is Lenny, this will be your cinematic rabbit of choice. That's the effect it's having on certain individuals.
Scary. Scary.
One problem, though: An army of hipper-than-thou street fashionistas have called this cool, pulled straight out of the box, without even taking the needed 88 minutes to look at it in whole. Judging from some of your toutable hype, most of you wannabe cinematic art faggots are claiming an affinity for Napoleon without having delved too deep, or far, into its luscious core.
Your praise has been screeched across the American landscape like a crying jackelope, shot in the head and dying on the sidewalk. A shameful pet put to rest before it even had a chance to walk. I know exactly why this is. It's because you jerks like to say, to anyone that will listen, "I only watch Independent films at the Art Cinema." Yeah, you like to say it, but you don't mean it. And I hate you. F*cking crack whores trying to fake the cool dip...
I made my trek up that hill today. I sat in my local Art House cinema waiting to watch Napoleon Dynamite. My god, the trailers beforehand nearly killed me off before the real movie even had a chance to start. They just kept coming. My eyes were viscously waxed with some foreign crap about a Guatemalan girl having an abortion. Then there was some other film by a director named Le Cunt, about a lady in need of therapy, and the man that pretended to be a therapist. They fall in love, don't you know? It's all set to subtitles and dentist chair music that had my upper teeth aching like a knuckle bruise. These tiny morsels of "things to come" looked like parodies within themselves. They crawled across my vast mind like separating strokes exploding at the apex of my skull.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
No wonder you spacky flanges are peddling Dynamite as the must see film of the year. It's the only Independent Project playing the Art House Cinema you'd actually want to sit through. And you see it as sweet relief. You don't really care if it's good or not. You've been waiting desperately in your self-stated chair for something that wouldn't bore you into a coma. You couldn't back down and go to the Maitreyaplex for a bit of popcorn fluff. Oh, no. Then how would you sound to the overanxious ears at the Bright Spot on Sunday morning, talking so loudly that everyone can hear you? Napoleon Dynamite is great in that it gives you faggots something that you might actually enjoy. Print this up, quote whores: "Napoleon Dynamite is this year's Popcorn Flick for the Art House set."
"So, Orange? What you're saying is fine and all. But you've claimed it a love or hate enterprise. Which side of the fence are you on? Take it? Or leave it? And don't say you're middle ground, 'cause nobody wins at absolute zero!"
Me? I'm in the "take it" camp. I dug the sh*t out of this stacked crate of dy-NO-mite! Yet, at the same time, I found the overall weight of its timing a bit slow. Kind of like the great state of Idaho itself, which is canvassed with Napoleon's precious, artistic eye. First Jon Peter Lewis, and now Jon Heder (playing the part of Napoleon; he's from Salem, Oregon, which is cool as sh*t and makes perfect sense, especially if you've ever spent time there). I might have to visit this potato state aboard an Amtrak train, blitzed out of my mind on a Quilmes high. If for nothing else than to people watch; my favorite thing to do in the entire world. Almost.
That's what this movie caters to. It's like sitting down on a park bench to voyeuristically watch a bunch of freaks frolic in the grass.
There is no story. There is a through-line, which connects each scene like a dot. But literally, there's no viable plot to speak of. It has a classic structure, though. Napoleon Dynamite is a bizarre staging of tiny moments; a string of short films that live individually amongst themselves. You could throw each fabricated beat in the air, and watch them land like mixed-up puzzle pieces. It wouldn't matter in what order they fell. It's a pitch-black jigsaw. There's a very viable give and take to these proceedings. You could literally rip chunks out of its flesh, and it wouldn't matter. It's the perfect drinking film; if only that were a genre. Example: There's one scene where Napoleon goes to work on a chicken farm. This tiny breath of cinematic air has no real reason for existing. It's quite literally inconsequential to the proceedings. Yet, the film wouldn't exist without this exact type of biological moment. That's what makes Napoleon so awesome. For its entire running length, I just sat in my chair, mouth agape, dumbstruck in awe, asking myself, "What the fuck are they going to pull next." I've heard from many a source that you can see some of these jokes coming from a mile away. That type of statement is bullsh*t posturing. It is simply not true. This is one of the most unpredictable car crashes ever put to film, and the only reason you might sit there, thinking your smart, thinking you know what's coming next, is because you've already read a hundred reviews that give most of the kick-ass moments away.
"You, son, are f*cking brilliant!"
Most of these same reviews are throwing the harsh criticism that ND is a Rushmore rip-off. That director Jared Hess is trying desperately to emulate Wes Anderson. Comparisons to Wes are notable, but semi-unfair. There are slight similarities, yes. But this thing is a wholly opposing beast. I guess people have a desperate need to associate images they don't quite understand. It makes them feel good to call a certain sameness on something that stands out as odd and different. Too bad, it distracts them from looking at the entire picture.
It's easy to hold Napoleon against a blueprint of Anderson's Max Fleisher character. They're both oddballs. Sure. But Christ, people, these are two extremely different characters. If anything, Napoleon is the antithesis of Max. One is an over-achiever, the other is an under-achiever. You might actually want to hang out with Max. You wouldn't want to get near Napoleon; instead you'd rather hide in the bushes and watch him without his knowledge of your sweet peeping skills. Both Anderson and Hess over-use their neo-postmodern pretentiousness. Anderson threw a sixties vibe and hand-dragged it through the late-nineties. Hess does the same thing, only he cops an 80s feel and mixes it with Computer Chat rooms and the "current-present". There is a certain semblance being worked up between the two camps. I won't argue that...
But to be more thematically accurate, I'd rather relate Napoleon back to the works of Harmony Korine. This thing plays like a G rated Gummo. Watching it had about the same effect on me. I really like that type of Home Town Entertainment. A white trash lesson for all involved. For some reason, this also reminded me of My Body Guard. I'm not sure why. I do have another one for the Quote Whores: "Jon Heder is a Chris Makepeace for the 04s!!!" (Someone, somewhere, told me never to use three exclamation points in a row. I think it was my literature professor...No, wait. It was Dr. Mark Chilcoat.)
Where's Ruth Gordon in the lane when you need her?
Basically, what it comes down to is: Napoleon Dynamite is a character study. A great one. And I'm basically a good kid. Like I said before, though. It's not a film for everybody.
You know you're in trouble when I'm laughing. I'm a notorious non-laugher when it comes to any type of cinematic fare (I like to continually point this out). I'll admit; this bad bitch had me squeaking out barely audible chuckles at revolving intervals. And there are two moments that literally had me on the floor making noise, loudly. Thing is, I was the only one busting a kidney punch to the lungs. Actually, there were two of us in attendance that laughed at the movie. About sixteen audience members had shown up all together (maybe these fifteen other people were trying to keep a pose; this is Hollywood and you have to act rather nonchalant and uncaring to live here). Me and the other gentleman that were finding this thing humorous, though...We never laughed at the same thing. Not once. I even had someone sitting in front of me turn around and give me an off-handed glare.
I can't chuckle up the beef at the back of my throat? Sh*t. I paid my admission price. Sign says it's funny. I'm not supposed to laugh, now? F*ck you, guy in front of me.
Well, that's unfair. I think he was looking at me because he couldn't figure out what I thought was so damn funny. You see, there's this guy named Pedro in the film. His take on Speedy Gonzalez had me cracking up. He's, like, the funniest thing I've ever seen in a movie. I might be the only one that feels as strongly about Efren Ramirez's on-screen persona. But he had me in his hands.
"You're the only person in this school that has a moustache."
That's brilliant writing on so many obscure levels, it's incomprehensible. What kicked me in the balls, though, was one certain segue. There's this part where he shaves off his hair because he's having hot flashes. He's sitting on the lawn, with his hood up over his head. Boom, it was like a tsunami ripping across my chest. A genuine laugh squeezer. That guy in front of me didn't know why I was laughing. Neither did I, to tell you the truth. There was just something internally gratifying about seeing Pedro sitting on the lawn with that hood pulled over his head. It hurts my tongue thinking about it as I type.
The other moment that raped my sense of humor was when Napoleon's Uncle buys a time machine off of Ebay to go back to 1982. This whole segment is so deliciously f*cked up, I couldn't help but stare in chalked ice delight. The best way I can put it...If you like the Conan O'Brien Show, you're going to love almost every minute of this nasty little blue-baller. (Sorry, Blake Snyder, but I think you're going to loathe it with an iron keyboard.)
At the end of the day though, Napoleon Dynamite made me kind of sad. ND gets a girl. A cute girl. This guy is the biggest loser I've ever seen. And he lands that hot bitch from Water World (She's all grown up now). God, the way she pulls her ponytail to the side of her head; delicious. I can't even get a cockroach to sit on my foreskin. And this guy scores. So much for someone I can relate too.
Actually, a lot of critics are having a hard time relating and adjusting to Mr. Dynamite. Some say he's such a character that he'd never exist in real life. Not true. Alan Wiggley. That's not a made up name. He was the Napoleon of my school. Robert Killington, too, was quite the oddball. These were the types of people you stared at; actually thinking they may have come from another planet. I had to wonder what their home life was like. Did they act like this all the time? Were they different at home? Jared Hess offers us a chance to peer into that off-type of life. Now I know that Andrew Goodemoot behaved with the exact same mannerisms at home, in front of the refrigerator, as he did in the cafeteria. Napoleon isn't necessarily someone you'd want to spend time with. 88 minutes is enough. This is a provocative showcase. Very voyeuristic. I don't want to be these people's friends, but I do want to stare at them from behind the bus stop to see what they're up to.
I give ND a big fat fist up your mom's ass...
Also, I like that fact that it's rated PG. It's a truly funny film that doesn't cop or stoop to playing dirty pool just to tease you in. It doesn't go for the PG-13, or R rated, gross out. It doesn't need to. It stands on its own. Call it refreshing. I mean, when was the last time we saw a PG rated film that played like this and retained its integrity? Not since the mid-80s.
Thank god, and Jared Hess, for this tiny time killer. I'll watch it again, and again. And if you don't like it, you can lick the rest of the peanut butter off my taint. I think Jennifer's dog missed a few drops...
(Was that long enough for you, Chris Monfette? You #1 bastard!)
Rating: *** [3 out of 5]
Napoleon Dynamite is not like anyone else. He's a nerd, but he's not the kind of lovable nerds you usually see in movies. He's not lovable at all. He's possibly the most off-putting and annoying person I've ever seen in a film. To make him the hero of a movie that seeks to subvert the usual lovable-nerd scenario is either brilliant or a complete failure. Since I laughed, but not nonstop, I don't know what that makes this film. My friends and I were nerds in high school, but we probably wouldn't have let Napoleon Dynamite sit at our table.
Jon Heder plays the title role half-asleep, or at least he looks that way. He rarely opens his eyes; he staggers around in moon boots and ill-fitting and ill-matched clothing, slackjawed and slurring his words. Unlike most movie nerds, he has no class consciousness: he doesn't really seem aware that he's a pariah, except for when jocks slam him into a locker or put him in a headlock. It doesn't seem to bother him, though. He has no real desire to move up the food chain at his Idaho high school. He doesn't seem to have any real desires at all.
The film, too, seems to lack most basic desires. Just as there's no character arc for Napoleon, so there's not really a story arc for the movie. The bare bones of the plot are thus: Napoleon is upset when his loser uncle Rico (Jon Gries, with a bad wig), a former high school football star who is stuck perpetually in 1982, moves in after Napoleon's grandma is injured in an ATV accident. Napoleon's brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), a loser on the same scale as Napoleon, courts internet romance and helps Rico with his get-rich-quick schemes involving door-to-door sales. Napoleon's new friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez), who is even more somnolent than Napoleon, decides to run for class president. And Deb (Tina Majorino), a shy girl who does Glamour Shots and sells lanyard contraptions, is interested in Napoleon, who is unaware of the existence of anyone else.
Instead of a plot, we follow Napoleon around as he fails to interact with the world around him. The film is a series of short skits: Napoleon and Pedro testing milk at a Future Farmers of America meeting. Kip and Rico proving how strong their tupperware is. Napoleon and Kip attending a session at the dojo of Rex (Diedrich Bader, the neighbor from Office Space). The Happy Hands Sign Language Club recital. Napoleon attempting to get the pet llama to eat. Uncle Rico showing off his passing skills. Napoleon enlisting the help of Pedro's cousins to act as security guards for nerds. Etc.
The great thing about the film is that it refuses to cave in and make Napoleon a hero. We expect him to save the day, to win the praise of his classmates, to get the girl--he sort of does, but in his own dysfunctional way. The film's payoff is possibly the funniest dance number since Saturday Night Fever. Throughout the film, writer/director Jared Hess refuses to comment on his characters. His style makes the film eerily resemble a Disney documentary about some strange and rare animal species. I don't know what naturalists would make of Napoleon Dynamite.
I learn now that there's a five-minute scene after the closing credits. Sigh. The first time in ages that I haven't waited until the end of the credits. What was I thinking? I'm sure it was hilarious.
Grade: B
If you haven't heard of the dynamically titled Napoleon Dynamite yet, you soon will.
A glimpse at the life of a mega-geek (Jon Heder, in the titular role) surrounded by geekalicious friends and family, including dorky Internet dating service addict brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), long-ago high school football hero and current Tupperware salesman Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), quiet and astonishingly confident new classmate Pedro (Efren Ramirez, playing the most "real" character in the movie), and Glamour Shots photographer Deb (former child star Tina Majorino), the film delighted audiences at this year's Sundance Film Festival, and even touched the uber-cool folks at MTV Films, who are among its distributors. Thus, in the coming weeks you can look forward to some fun Napoleon interstitials nestled among The Real World and reruns of the MTV Movie Awards.
But does Napoleon deserve all the hype?
In terms of laughs, the movie definitely delivers. Watching it, I chuckled, giggled, tittered, and guffawed out loud more times than I can count. Often, this was due to a wonderful combination of the actors' delivery (the cast also includes The Drew Carey Show's Diedrich Bader as Rex, a hilarious send-up of cocky personal trainers/martial arts "experts") and the non sequitor lines and funny expressions in director/writer Jared Hess and co-screenwriter Jerusha Hess' script. A great example of the kind of stuff that may have you rolling in the aisles can be seen in one of the trailers currently on TV: at the opening of the film, our hero gets on the school bus and sits down. "So, what're you gonna do today, Napoleon?" a young boy in the seat across from him kindly asks. "Whatever I want to! Gosh!" replies Napoleon, sounding inexplicably outraged.
Besides its random angry nature, what makes the line and delivery even better is, of course, that this angry, disgusted tone is one we've all used, and as well as heard used, as and by teenagers.
But this is maybe all Napoleon has in common with "normal" teenagers though in a sense, we're all sort of like Napoleon, a little. Like him, we've all got our strange private pleasures (Napoleon's include drawing mythical creatures, playing solo tetherball, and learning the in's and out's of hip-hop dancing). Unlike films like Welcome to the Dollhouse, though, Napoleon doesn't portray its protagonist as lonely and misunderstood. Sure, he's beat up by the popular kids sometimes, but he seems to take it more or less in stride, and is more concerned with the goings-on in his own world.
In this sense, as well as in certain stylistic choices (the film's opening music, certain camera angles and shots), Napoleon's portrayal of a group of somewhat lost losers is very much in the style of Wes Anderson films like Bottle Rocket and Rushmore. There is a big difference, though. Wes Anderson's films, while often hysterical, have a certain quiet, poetic subtlety. Napoleon, on the other hand, imbues its characters with a kind of isn't-this-funny campiness, and at times, a joyous self-consciousness. It's like your high school drama club doing a play of a Wes Anderson script.
On the other hand, although it's a small, low-budget film, it's not like Napoleon's trying to go for that somber, earth-shattering indie street cred. In fact, it's refreshing to see a film that takes place in the middle-of-nowhere American heartland that isn't criticizing this place and its lack of cultural activities and such. Watching it, I realized that the only recent films I've seen that take place in states like Idaho, tend to deal with depressing, tragic circumstances (take, for example, Boys Don't Cry). Though they may be losers, the characters in Napoleon Dynamite don't seem to mind too much, and live with their idiosyncrasies in their idiosyncratic, isolated town, more or less happily. This isn't done in a sarcastic way, either; Hess isn't criticizing the "stupidity" of "country bumpkins" in this film, and even while he may use characters' behavior as something to laugh at, he never wants us to laugh at the characters themselves, but rather shows these figures to us with a smiling benevolence.
But benevolent or not, Napoleon Dynamite may not be funny for everyone who watches it. I'm not just talking about a matter of different tastes, here, but about different generations. When I saw the movie, I found myself laughing quite often. The older people around me, though, didn't seem to be enjoying themselves quite so much. They could have just been the exception to the rule, but as I thought about it, I realized that although it's anything but a mainstream Hollywood flick, Napoleon does have some "types" that my generation (people in their 20's) tend to respond to as funny almost automatically, as our forbears cracked up at hippies and beatniks. In Napoleon, there's the scrawny white guy who becomes a gangster, the ghetto-fab babe, as well as retro-eighties fashion statements. Sometimes it seems like the film relies a bit too heavily on these things; while Wes Anderson's humor is more refined and timeless, Napoleon's is like a group of kids wanted to make a funny movie and knew that these certain details would be guaranteed to draw laughs.
That's kind of a waste. Napoleon doesn't need to rely on these elements it's in the little things (like Napoleon's drawing of a "liger"), that Napoleon's true brilliance and uniqueness lies.
Ultimately, it may not be very subtle, but if you're looking for laughs (not to mention some unforgettable lines), to quote its titular hero, Napoleon Dynamite is flippin' sweet.
Grade: B+
Within the first ten seconds of the trailer, this comedy had won my vote even if this was going to be a light fun movie (which the ad somewhat suggested), it looked like the type of five-minute sketch that could actually be funny for ninety. Then when I saw a brief ad spot during the MTV Movie Awards, I had a pretty good feeling that this movie was going to be a treat. I walked into this film expecting to like it, but was quite amazed at its scope Napoleon Dynamite is an extremely well directed, very well told, and terrifically acted quirky comedy.
The one problem some film buffs might have with Napoleon Dynamite is that director Jared Hess obviously attended the Wes Anderson school of filmmaking. Starting with the opening titles sequence, which couldn't be any more of a blatant homage (or rip-off, depending on your view) to The Royal Tenenbaums (B+) and Rushmore's (B+) introductions, Hess has created a film that Anderson and Owen Wilson might have made if given the chance. But considering that there's barely a filmmaker out there who doesn't borrow off of other talents (Anderson probably had his own share of comparisons for his films), exclusively slamming Hess wouldn't be fair.
Napoleon is also a very obvious wink to Todd Solondz' pictures, with very offbeat characters and performances that couldn't be any more detailed. The production design (and cinematography) in almost every scene is reminiscent of Welcome to the Dollhouse (B), and one of the supporting characters, Pedro, is very much like Pagoda from Tenenbaums. However, these comparisons didn't hurt my viewing experience, as the elegant filmmaking is part of what made Napoleon such a memorable time in the theater. When you're not laughing out loud at the array of goofball characters, there are performances to marvel over, and a story to emotionally connect with.
The film revolves around the main character, Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), a nerdy, social outcast who is tormented at high school for his awkward demeanor. When he meets a new kid to the school, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), who is alike him socially, the two quickly become best friends. Napoleon also meets Deb (Tina Majorino), another outcast a quiet, good-natured girl who yearns to connect with someone. Part of the story is about Napoleon's older brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), who spends much of his time chatting online with a woman he has been romantically interested in but whom he has never met. These are all characters that the public would deem as losers, and Jared Hess applies an upbeat perspective very seldom seen in films.
The film's story is simple, but what the picture does with that setup illustrates what is possible with limited resources. In a way this movie reminded me of The Station Agent (B+): with quiet, low-key settings we have an intimate look at our characters (allowing them to grow on us quickly), with very fine acting, and a story that is consistently entertaining. This film isn't as sophisticated as Station Agent, but its tone and style is partly what captivated me.
I'm not sure if Jon Heder is a nerd in real life, but either way he has given one of the best performances I've seen from someone of his age (yes, I'd even argue that he's better than Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore). His delivery as Napoleon is flawless in every scene, and it is his willingness to invest in the moment during every scene that is what makes him not only the funniest character here, but also the most lovable. If Heder's performance is not acknowledged at any of the upcoming film awards ceremonies, it's going to drive me nuts. His delivery is what every director dreams for, and I'm sure Hess is grateful that he found him.
Hess pokes fun at his characters, but he does not insult Napoleon is a very real, likable person, which is part of what makes this movie so funny. Had Napoleon been an outcast who hated everyone, spending his time depressed about life, this would not be a funny movie. The viewer laughs because Napoleon has become his/her friend; in reality many people like to have these fun, goofball people around the person might be a goof, but that's what makes them so lovable. Hess has carved a personality and a sympathy level out of these oddball characters rather than just stereotyping them these characters become our friends, and we want them around.
Some people will compare Napoleon Dynamite to Election (B+) and Rushmore, and on a story front this film is not as good or clever as either one. But what I admire about Napoleon Dynamite is its ability to pull you into the characters' mindsets, make you feel for them, and root for them to come out swinging in the end. The film doesn't set out to accomplish anything glorious, but with its intention being to tell a simple story with real themes (of friendship) with solid character development, backed by a very impressive visual execution, the film is an achievement, and a small treasure.
Rating: *** [3 out of 5 stars]
Napoleon Dynamite was something of a sleeper hit in the States it opened there back in June and, as of October, was still clinging to the box office top 15. It remains to be seen whether it will do quite so well over here, but it's an enjoyable, offbeat film that doesn't rely on the usual teen movie jokes involving sex, drugs, and swearing, largely because writer-director Jared Hess and his wife, co-writer Jerusha Hess graduated from Brigham Young University film school and their Mormon faith prohibited such material.
Middle Of Nowhere
The film is set in Preston, Idaho (i.e. the middle of freaking nowhere). Jon Seda plays Napoleon Dynamite, a tall, gawky, mouth-breathing type with thick glasses and a flame red afro hair-do. He possesses little or no social skills and treats everyone with a sort of stroppy exasperation.
Napoleon lives with his even weirder family, including his older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who spends all his time in chat rooms looking for love ("Don't be jealous just because I've been talking to hot babes all day") and his quad-bike riding grandmother, whose temporary absence allows creepy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) to move in, a herbal bust-enhancement salesman obsessed with recapturing his high school glory days as a football player.
There isn't much of a plot to speak of Napoleon befriends Pedro (Efrem Ramirez) by default and decides to help manage his campaign to become class president. He also has a love interest of sorts in the shape of his friend Deb (Tina Majorino the moppet from Waterworld, all growed up), only his lady-killing skills only extend to a cut-in dance at the high school prom and a game of tetherball.
Wealth Of Little Details
The humour in Napoleon Dynamite doesn't come from characters being witty or knowing we're mostly laughing at them rather than with them. Napoleon himself isn't even all that likeable; he's a long way from the cliché of the lonely nerd who just wants to be loved or the supercool archness of Ghost World's Enid. Mostly he's content just to sit around drawing ligers (don't ask) or practising "sweet jumps" on Pedro's bike without injuring himself in the testicles. However, like the film, Napoleon gradually wins you over and there's a terrific pay-off in which Napoleon demonstrates that he really does have "sweet skillz" after all.
There's a lot to enjoy here, particularly in the wealth of little details (the inventive credit sequence; the bizarre costumes and hair-dos) and off-the-wall moments such as Kip and Napoleon's "Rex Kwan-do" class. There are also some quality slapstick moments that are up there with the similar gags in Dodgeball. It's also extremely well acted, particularly by Jon Seda and has a touching, understated final scene.
In short, Napoleon Dynamite is not your typical Hollywood teen flick instead it's an enjoyably off-kilter comedy that has no use for the usual clichés. It's also worth staying until after the credits, because there's an additional four minute scene that was added after the film became a hit in the States. Recommended.
Grade: A-
"Napoleon Dynamite" is a film about teenagers, and it is a comedy, but to call it a "teen comedy" would be to mistakenly place this persistently hysterical movie about southern Idaho misfits next to other "teen comedies," many of which have also come out in the summer months. Though it is summer, and though this film is, generally speaking, a "teen comedy," no bodily fluids are erroneously consumed. No virgins are deflowered. No cheerleaders are disrobed.
Lacking any of these genre staples, we're forced to look elsewhere for entertainment. Newcomer Jon Heder -- a former animation student at Brigham
Young University, where he met "Napoleon"'s 24-year-old director, Jared Hess -- is the leader of a perfectly calibrated ensemble of unknowns (the biggest star is likely Jon Gries, possibly best known for his role as the enigmatic Lazlo Hollyfeld in the 1986 sub-cult "Real Genius"). Heder plays the titular outcast, a perfect teenager in the sense that he is simultaneously wretched and endearing in the way that teenagers so often are: angry, anxious, hostile, loyal.
He lives with his equally awkward brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who surfs the Internet looking for romance, and his atypically spry grandmother (Sandy Martin). After Grandma is injured while riding her ATV across a sand dune, Napoleon's Uncle Rico (Gries) moves in to mind the boys. If Bruce Springsteen grew up in Preston, Idaho, he might have written about Uncle Rico, a former high school athlete still pining for the big game. And Uncle Rico didn't even play in the big game; he just sat on the bench and waited for the call. It is little wonder that Uncle Rico hopes to make a future for himself selling herbal breast enhancers door to door.
Uncle Rico's arrival might be the gentle catalyst that prods the movie into motion, or it might be Napoleon's best friend Pedro's decision to run for president of the student council against a prototypical Mean Girl -- played by Hilary Duff's sister Haylie, no less. Or it might be Napoleon's exceedingly hesitant courtship of his classmate Deb (Tina Majorino), with a sideways ponytail and a preciously grave demeanor.
But the plot is beside the point, and "Napoleon" is at its best when viewed as a collection of very funny moments, and of precisely chosen details, like a scene involving a cow and a bus of schoolchildren, or Napoleon's artistic productions, which include his pencil drawing a of "liger." There is less a plot than there is an ambience, an atmosphere of geniality, for as much as "Napoleon" is not "American Pie," neither is it "Thirteen."
It benefits from a prevailing gentleness that seems not entirely unrelated to the fact that both the director, his co-writer wife, and his star are Mormons. It's in no way a proselytizing film -- it's hard to recall the word "Mormon" even being uttered -- but it mines an unmistakably unique sensibility. Made on location in the dairy farm-centric Preston, it's that rare independent that actually feels independent, the product of a singular narrative aesthetic. It builds its own world, sticks to its own rules, and only infrequently nods to life outside its borders, as when Kip's Internet girlfriend improbably arrives on the bus.
In this world, Napoleon is the only possible hero, a hero because of his very non-hero-ness and his general ineptitude. But he does triumph, personally and Š artisitically, despite his surety that girls only like boys with "nun-chuck skills, bow-hunting skills, (and) computer hacking skills." Napoleon's own skills are scarce, but they set up a finale that's legitimately rousing, a triumph that lacks any of the elements usually associated with a teenager's triumph, including that false gravity -- the sense that a field goal at the end of the state championship, or some other copy-and-paste plot device, is somehow a metaphor for the human condition.
In the right hands, it can be. But it is so often not in the right hands. Napoleon's triumph is both small and grand. It is just Napoleon being Napoleon, and happily, in this careful gem of a movie, that's all that's needed.
Rating: *** [3 out of 4 stars]
Cinema loves the über nerd, the high school kid who doesn't fit in and wouldn't begin to know how. On screen, the nerd is a walking visual gag, a source of mirth even before he opens his mouth.
The latest in the line of these beloved losers is the title character in young Jared Hess' amusing, low-budget, smartly shot indie debut, "Napoleon Dynamite."
Set in the wide-open, underfunded regions of Preston, Idaho, "Napoleon" is a portrait of a geek that is, to borrow from the title character, "sweet" if a bit lacking in narrative muscle. Played by Jon Heder, Napoleon is anything but the dynamite character his name implies. This Napoleon is a loose-limbed, curly haired, bespectacled spazz who breathes through his mouth and has no idea how uncool he is. At school, he is a punching bag for a few of the school toughs. He knows it and does not even bother to fight back.
Left to his own devices, he plays solitary games of tetherball, shops consignment, feeds the pet llama his grandmother keeps in the backyard, and argues with his older brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), a thirtysomething who lives at home and centers his days around scheduled Internet chat-room appointments.
Aside from the sight of Napoleon, the bulk of the humor in Hess' film is derived from watching Heder act the part of an unapologetic geek and spew forth the language of the average school jock who sees everything as "sweet" and "awesome, dude."
Hess' story, co-written by his wife Jerusha Hess, moves about as fast as Napoleon's tetherball game and this is mostly a good thing. In place of things happening, the 24-year-old director and his collaborators evoke a sense of time standing still in the middle of nowhere. There are shots of Napoleon riding a bicycle against the barren expanse of sky or spinning his tetherball round and round and swatting at it. Plot points do arise but none approaches a focusing narrative line. At home, Napoleon's grandmother is hospitalized after she cracks her tailbone in a motorcycle accident and opportunistic Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) arrives to look after his nephews. At school, a new kid, another nerd called Pedro (Efren Ramirez), arrives and Napoleon makes a friend.
Hess' affection for small town personalities and quirks is always more compelling than the demands of narrative. Napoleon's enterprising schoolmate Deb (Tina Majorino) sells homemade key chains and sundries door-to-door and takes photo portraits of anyone willing to pay. Uncle Rico is obsessed with the year 1982 and his glory days as a football star. Propping a video camera on a tripod outside his van, he videotapes himself making stellar plays.
But if the ranginess of the setting and the oddball nature of the characters is a considerable part of the film's charm, the downside comes in stretches of the film when nothing much is happening and the characters are reduced to curiosities rather than sympathetic souls. The story, such as it is, culminates in Napoleon's attempts to help Pedro become class president in a race against the blond cheerleader Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff). But the election plot twist and its predictable outcome feel tacked on to give the film a certain payoff, and they rob the film of the originality and eccentricity that give it character.
Hess is a promising young filmmaker with a great eye and an original sensibility. With a few more lessons in screenwriting, he could become a dynamite one.
U.S. Rating PG
Overall: B-
Violence: B
Sexual Content: B
Language: A-
Drugs/Alcohol: B
Quirky may be the best word to describe Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder). There's certainly nothing conformist about the Preston, Idaho high school student with the curly red Afro, oversized glasses and moon boot footwear. But his peculiarities go beyond his looks.
Napoleon is different because he's on the fringe of the social circle, yet he doesn't seem to mind. Unlike so many teens who'd do anything to fit in, Napoleon seems casually comfortable with where he is. And that's what makes him, above anything else, interesting to watch.
Whether Napoleon's unconventional habits are the result of his genetics or environment, it's hard to know. He lives with his grandmother (Sandy Martin) who has a pet llama and goes four wheeling. He also lives with his nerdy, 31-year-old unemployed brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) who spends hours in chat rooms searching for a woman. Later, the boys' Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) moves in as well.
Rico is one of those guys who may have graduated from high school but never really left it. He relishes his past glory days on the football field and still considers himself a buff young buck. As a door-to-door salesman, he has a rather adolescent enthusiasm for selling bust enhancing supplements.
Trying to avoid his uncle, Napoleon hangs out with his friends, Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and Deb (Tina Majorino), the neighbor girl who's earning money for college by selling beaded key chains and shooting "glamour" portraits in her homemade studio.
Deciding they have nothing to lose, Napoleon and Deb agree to help Pedro when he decides to run for student body president against the popular Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff). Surprisingly, it's Napoleon's unabashed eccentricity that proves to be a pivotal turning point in the campaign.
The biggest challenge with this film is knowing whether to laugh with Napoleon, or at him. Often bullied at school and teased at home, he has experiences most of us can relate to. However, his behaviors are just odd enough to make one nervous about siding with him. Whether it helps young viewers be more sympathetic to others or not remains to be seen. For family viewing, some mild innuendo and an emphatic substitute for swearing are likely the biggest beefs parents will have.
Meanwhile, for those of us who grew up in small towns where blue FFA jackets and long, bumpy bus rides were more common than bikinis and surfboards, it's refreshing to see a familiar high school atmosphere portrayed.
Talk about the movie with your family...
Set in Preston, Idaho rather than Southern California, how does the portrayal of high school differ from many other movies? Are there characters you relate to in this film?
Pedro makes a piñata of Summer Wheatley during the election. How does this cultural tradition cause him problems? Can a lack of understanding or appreciation for others' customs create unnecessary difficulties?
Napoleon and Pedro are members of the FFA. Learn more about this organization for youth that helps promote leadership and agricultural education.
Video alternatives...
Like Pedro and Napoleon, two teens who are outcasts among their schoolmates become friends in The Mighty when they discover their combined strengths. A young boy with an amazing talent to play chess faces pressure from his father to achieve more and more success in Searching for Bobby Fischer.
Rating: * [1 out of 4 stars]
A first feature, apparently inspired by Mr. Hess's 9-minute short "Peluca. " Hess (now about 25) was born in Preston, Idaho --pop. under 5,000,--attended the film program at Utah's Brigham Young University (where he met his wife-to-be Jerusha,) and later worked in a few films as assistant cameraman and such jobs.
"Napoleon Dynamite" was shot in Preston. It centers on (and around) Napoleon, whose name and surname remain inexplicable. (Mr. Hess says that he once encountered in Chicago an old Italian so named). Hmm!
Napoleon is, in various ways, a nerd, a geek, an inarticulate freak in too large eyeglasses you name it. He lives with his older brother Kip and their grandma. Kip, 31, is glued to internet chat-rooms, in search of a female soulmate. When Grandma gets injured when riding a dune buggy (sic!), Uncle Rico shows up. His current profession is the (fruitless) door to door sale of plastic containers and, as later revealed, a breast-expanding product.
Napoleon is not exactly popular with his schoolmates. Still, he somehow forms a vague and un-dangerous liaison with timid student Deb who takes photographs of people (why, I cannot remember,) gets a side-job of selling (awkwardly and door to door) cheap key-chains (or something of the sort) and has fits in the process.
Then we get new student Pedro, a caricature of Mexicans or Mexican-Americans. I forget whether or not Pedro speaks English beyond its rudiments. Anyway, after Napoleon mistakes him for a janitor, the two fellows become friends in odd and inarticulate ways. Then Napoleon, very oddly campaigns for Pedro to become class President.
And on and on and more on, or is it "moron?" The movie keeps getting overcome by senselessness and nastiness. It spares nobody. Not even local chicken growers who hire Napoleon. In fact, there is a merciless sequence of chickens so horribly, densily packed in wire cages that the SPCA could use it ina protest.
There's no visible structure to this movie. Many years ago, after a discussion of an unorthodox picture by Jean-Luc Godard, a protesting spectator asked: "But, Monsieur Godard, don't you think that a film should have a beginning, a middle, and an end?", the filmmaker replied: "Of course it should but not necessarily in that order!" Bu then Godard is Godard, and director Hess isŠ well, we'll have to wait for his subsequent opus-es. Who knows? Jared Hess may become as famous as Rudolph Hess some day.
One relatively positive aspect of the movie is its deglamorization of its people. No sexy people, no beauties, no charmers. But then the film goes overboard in the opposite direction. It is misanthropic. It is suffocating in several ways, and this within its use of open spaces. In fact, Preston looks so claustrophobic that it makes infinitely smaller towns in old western flicks look big. Very peculiar. I wonder how my Idaho relatives will react. (And, by the way, contrary to a couple of reviews I saw, Idaho is NOT in the Midwest!)
The movie does produce some laughs in its audience, but they are mere like Band-Aids on a victim of terrorism. What is extremely odd is the number of high grades given by many (and smart) film critics while others rate it most negatively.
A few hours after screening this picture I saw again the almost splendid and almost 20-year-old "school movie" "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Enough said.
Rating: ** [2 out of 4 stars]
Blackout routines performed by people who act as if they're on the verge of blacking out. That's the comic mechanism of Napoleon Dynamite, a deadpan farce named for a sour, gangly, bespectacled high-school misfit (Jon Heder) who lives with his endlessly computer-chatting thirtysomething brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) and their salty grandmother (Sandy Martin) in the small town of Preston, Idaho.
Random acts of unkindness mingle with bungled acts of generosity as Napoleon, a fantasist by nature and a rebel by default, eventually joins forces with good-hearted Pedro (Efren Ramirez), the one Mexican in school, and nice-girl Deb (Tina Majorino), who snaps "glamour shots" at a mall store. Together they wrest control of Preston High from the likes of blond, cheerful in-crowd types like Summer (Hayley Duff).
Despite its surface eccentricity, the movie divides along normal teen-flick lines - the insiders are superficial no-goodniks, the outsiders have heart. When Summer runs against Pedro for student-body president, she proves her badness when she says she doesn't want chimichangas served in the cafeteria.
Director Jared Hess depicts Preston as a white-bread suburbia plopped down in a redneck rural landscape. A rancher can shoot a cow without compunction in front of a packed school bus; a chicken farmer pays helpers with loose change and raw-egg juice. And the movie develops a lower-depths teen humor that proves infectious in a semi-degrading way.
The laughs come from embarrassment, the comic momentum from how much more embarrassing life always gets for Napoleon, especially after his Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) enters the picture. Fixated on 1982, the year he's convinced Preston could have won a state football championship if only the coach had deployed him properly, Rico engages Kip in door-to-door sales schemes. Napoleon resists, but that doesn't save him from shame when Rico peddles herbal bust enhancers.
What's distinctive about Napoleon Dynamite is that Napoleon himself never plays nice or cops to his own geekhood, even when he's asking babes to join him in games of tetherball. And his friends typically give him bad advice, as when Pedro recommends that he woo a popular girl by drawing her portrait. (When her mom makes her go out with Napoleon, she ends up dumping him at the dance.)
But attitude and a rough, staccato style alone do not a movie make. At the end of Napoleon Dynamite, you're glad the geeks have their day (even Kip's chat-mate turns out be a winner); you're also relieved to be rid of them.
Rating: *** [3 out of 5 stars]
Napoleon Dynamite, ou l'avènement d'une nouvelle race de héros, faite de mal vus, de reclus, d'abrutis et de pas beaux. Les Quatre Fantastiques version tache, avec un grand rouquin acariâtre, un maigrichon gai qui s'ignore, un immigré complètement dépaysé et une petite timide qui se croit boulotte. Un bel échantillon de «rejets»; de ces jeunes gens à qui les sportifs et les blondasses infligent mille misères à l'école secondaire. En étiez-vous? Avez-vous déjà visité l'étrange purgatoire des impopulaires?
Napoleon, donc, grand rouquin aux bras trop longs, affublé de lunettes hideuses, fait ce qu'il peut pour se tirer d'affaire au collège dans l'effroyable jungle étudiante. Il ne l'a pas facile. Pas plus que ses seuls amis Pedro, immigré récent, et Deb, mignonnette gravement complexée, qui ne savent trop comment s'intégrer à la faune environnante. Tous trois tâcheront ensemble, péniblement mais sans s'abandonner au désespoir, de prendre leur place et de se faire valoir. Dans leur cas, ce semble être une mission impossible. Pourtant...
Cette comédie du tout jeune Jared Hess (24 chandelles) veut rendre hommage- sans s'agenouiller, au contraire, en s'en moquant- à tous ces laissés pour contre qui traînent mollement leur malaise dans les corridors des polyvalentes. Hess doit les avoir fréquenté- ou avoir lui-même subi leur sort- pour les connaître aussi bien et montrer leur petit monde avec autant de justesse.
Car Hess n'est pas toujours tendre avec ses anti-héros: Napoleon lui-même a, objectivement, une face à fesser dedans, comme on dit (chapeau à l'inconnu Ron Heder, immensément crédible). Mais il assume tout, les moqueries de ses camarades, les intimidations et les frustrations de toutes sortes, avec une inébranlable dignité, sans toutefois tendre l'autre joue: c'est un naÏf, il se croit fort. Et, le pire, c'est qu'au fond et à sa manière, il l'est...
Les personnages sont la grande force de cette comédie légère, autrement assez prévisible. Dans l'immense majorité de ces films qui parlent de l'adolescence, les reclus sont dépeints comme des êtres souffreteux et intérieurement torturés; comme des victimes qui, vers la fin, connaîtront l'approbation des autres et la libération. Oui, il y a bien un bal de graduation dans Napoleon Dynamite. Et oui, le héros saura y faire excellente impression. Mais on sent très bien que le jeune marginal n'y laissera rien de sa personnalité véritable: nerd un jour, nerd toujours.
On peut reprocher à Hess de faire à l'excès dans le kitsch. Ses personnages évoluent dans un monde qui en serait resté aux années 1978-1982 (les vêtements, les coiffures, la musique, tout est très rétro) bien que le film se passe vraisemblablement de nos jours. Mais ce n'est encore qu'une minuscule réserve. Dans l'ensemble, Napoleon Dynamite est étonnamment très maîtrisé, toujours réjouissant et annonce la venue d'un nouveau cinéaste sensible et original, comme Ghost World annonçait Terry Zwigoff, comme Donnie Darko annonce toujours Richard Kelly...
Grade: A
"There are all different kinds of nerds, and this is just one of them," said actor John Heder of his character at the FilmFest DC screening of the off-beat high school comedy, "Napoleon Dynamite." True enough, it's Napoleon's particular, pathetic breed of nerd that inspires us to laugh at him and his environment without feeling too badly about it. "Napoleon Dynamite" is one of the best movies of this year and one of the funniest teen comedies in over a decade.
With the exception of 1999's "10 Things I Hate About You" and "American Pie" and 1995's "Clueless," there haven't been any good high-school genre comedies since the heyday of the 1980s. Especially ones featuring lovable losers. But even when grouped with the 80s crowd, Napoleon stands alone. His moon boots pale against Duckie's shoes. He's no "Breakfast Club" brain. No hot car, no emerging Lane Myer sporting skills, no money stashed to afford his dream date. He doodles, akin to Hoops McCan, but who's going to be impressed by unicorns? He can actually ... dance ... per se, but would have probably been laughed out of the "Footloose" prom.
There's no overarching story to "Napoleon Dynamite." This is a day-in-the-life presentation, much like "Ferris Beuller's Day Off" except without the ambition, cunning, great locations, friends, or style. Napoleon wouldn't bother pursuing the hottest girl in the school even if he thought he could get her. There's no bully to outwit and not much in the way of a Big Competition. But the movie is far from dull.
Napoleon's challenges are manifested in the people ("Idiots!") that surround him. Napoleon lives with his older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell, in his first role) in their grandmother's house. Both are tall, lanky, with a hang-dog gleam in their eyes and on-the-edge-of-boredom speech patterns. Droopy Dog in human form. Kip, all of about 130 pounds, is planning for a career as a cage fighter. The two take up a free lesson of tae kwon do, but no amount of training would turn either of these guys into anything but alley meat.
When the fighter thing doesn't work out for Kip, he joins up with their visiting Uncle Rico (Jon Gries, who played the great supernerd Lazlo Hollyfeld in 1985's "Real Genius"). Rico can't break with the past, constantly talking up his glory days as a high school star quarterback. Napoleon finds him annoying, but Rico enlists Kip to help sell Tupperware and other products door to door, chiding Napoleon for his lack of financial foresight. Not exactly a "Risky Business," enterprise.
Napoleon does find a peer in Pedro (Efren Ramirez), the new kid in school, a heavily bouffonted latino who seems even more on the verge of dozing off than Napoleon. For the approaching school dance, Pedro decides to ask out his object of affection by making her a cake. Napoleon follows suit, attempting to impress Deb (Tina Majorino, who appeared in "Waterworld"), a nerd of the girl kind and really just the most convenient choice for Napoleon, with a sketched portrait. "It's pretty much the best thing I've ever done" he says of his work. It's tragically hideous. But Deb reluctantly accepts, and Napoleon decks himself out in the worst brown three-piece 1970s leftover in town. It's one of many of his behaviors considered genius by him and ridiculously funny to us.
As an additional afterthought, Pedro puts his name on the ballot for class president. Napoleon agrees to promote Pedro's campaign and be his bodyguard, because Napoleon has skills and stuff. This results in the funniest moment of the film, when Napoleon spices up Pedro's dry campaign speech with a spontaneous solo dance routine in front of the whole school. Nobody moves like Napoleon, believe me.
An additional humorous part of the movie other than the characters is the setting itself. At first glance, it appears that writer-director Jared Hess chose to set the story in the early 1980s, enhanced by the film's low-budget look. The clothes, the houses, the ancient VCR, Napoleon's moon boots, are all vintage. Kip and Rico buy a time machine that looks like an elementary schooler's mockup of the flux capacitor. But clues here and there lead the audience to realize that the town of Preston, Idaho and its inhabitants are simply on a slower timeline than everyone else. Kip flirts via computer with a girl "in cyberspace". The school dance features Alphaville's 1984 song "Forever Young," but Napoleon later moves to Jamiroquai's "Canned Heat" (itself based on a disco beat that wouldn't have been so out of place in the early 80s.)
A Preston native, Jared Hess came up with the concept of "Napoleon Dynamite" while at Brigham Young University. The title character's name comes from a real individual that Hess happened to meet. This is his first feature. It must have been a challenge to describe the story and character to others before shooting, and a risk to pull off correctly. Whatever Hess envisioned for Napoleon, school friend Heder brought to life brilliantly. His nerd is an honest lens on the embarrassment most of us probably were but refused to acknowledge during high school. The rest of the cast does an equally excellent job of keeping the subdued humor working throughout the movie. When I saw the film, the young Idaho natives sitting next to me were there for their second viewing and said that the humor and tone was right on, beaming with pride over the depiction of Idaho life as the butt of the joke.
"Napoleon Dynamite" was released in selected cities on June 11 and is expanding slowly. Check the well done website for pictures and audio from the movie, and for showtimes near you. This is a very funny movie that deserves your visit to the theater. Go and enjoy - I certainly did.
Rating: 10 out of 10
From the opening sequence of the film, you know that Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is something special. A film that will one day enjoy the benefits of being a cult classic or even better yet, one of the better movies of the year. You see, in those opening segments of the film, you realize you are about to see something along the lines of the great films of the last ten years. Yes, dust off the spot on the top shelf, because here comes Napolean Dynamite.
The film is simple in scope, showing the life of Napoleon Dynamite who could easily represent the everyday nerd. His signature, "sweet" makes you laugh, and the way he talks without making eye contact only serves to let you know he's not as confident as he sounds. He is the loner in the school, more by social standing than by choice, and it is outside of this circle that Napoleon entertains us. When a transfer student comes to the school who speaks very little English, Napoleon has finally found a friend. Together they talk about their dreams, and to put it in Napoleon's words, "have each other's backs."
Nevertheless, let me let you in on a little secret. Napoleon Dynamite might be the star of the film, but his family comes in at a close second. His older brother Kip (acted by Aaron Ruell’ think an even nerdier version of Napoleon) stills lives at home, and has a chat relationship with the girl of his dreams. Napoleon has an Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) that still lives in the past about his football career (much like Al Bundy of Married with Children fame), and his grandmother might be the toughest of the bunch. These wacky characters only serve to let you know the environment Napoleon Dynamite has come from.
The story revves up when Napoleon Dynamite tries to help his newfound friend become school president. In his battle for the presidency, Pedro (Efren Ramirez) must take on the most popular girl in the school. Will he and Napoleon be able to battle against popularity?
I enjoyed this film from beginning to end, and can completely understand why many people have touted this film as one of the best from its showing at the Sundance Film Festival. Napoleon Dynamite captures the spirit of the times, and his quirkiness makes you like him. He is the consummate underdog and you cannot help but cheer him on. This is definitely a must see.
This low-budget, loopy comedy from MTV Films seems intentionally designed to alienate the straights, especially mainstream movie critics who choose not to get it (hello, Roger Ebert), yet it has already acquired a fervent cult following that will doubtless parrot the movie's nutty dialogue for years to come.
Director Jared Hess, who co-wrote the original script with his wife Jerusha, fields perhaps the most bizarre dysfunctional family since What's Eating Gilbert Grape. Personality-challenged brothers Napoleon (Jon Heder) and Kip (Aaron Ruell) mark time in an Idaho suburb, with Napoleon a high-school geek of daunting proportions and 32-year-old Kip not that far off the mark as a shut-in cretin who carries on a long-distance e-mail romance with an unseen cutie. When Grandma (Sandy Martin) gets disabled after a dune-buggy accident, Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) comes calling to baby-sit. Unfortunately, Rico is a sleazy salesguy of Tupperware-esque products who's still stuck in his glory days as a 1982-vintage jock ("If the coach put me in the fourth quarter," he endlessly recalls of his high-school career, "we'd have been state champions.") and his presence only serves to ratchet familial tensions in the Dynamite household.
Hess conjures a surreal world that likely won't be appreciated by the Idaho chamber of commerce, with bizarre sequences of local color entailing a chicken farm and a milk-tasting contest. (Flies are always aurally buzzing on the soundtrack, an example of this comedy's tongue-in-cheek condescension.) And things get even stranger when Napoleon's lone pal Pedro (Efren Ramirez) runs for class president against a popular blonde student (Haylie Duff, Hilary's older sis). Also on the fringes are Napoleon's sort-of gal pal Deb (Tina Majorino, from Waterworld and Corinna, Corinna), adept at glamour photography and boondoggle chains, and The Drew Carey Show's Diedrich Bader as a dopey dojo.
A hit at last winter's Sundance Film Festival, Napoleon Dynamite is currently hitting multiplexes in an expanded version, thanks to a five-minute epilogue following the end credits that concerns the nuptials of a central character. Hess filmed the new sequence after Napoleon's initial opening in early June; while it's amusing enough to warrant sticking through the identities of the best boy and key grip, the segment also feels tacked-on and superfluous.
Yet Heder's un-dynamic characterization is really something to see: Imagine the love child of Beavis and Butt-head and you're halfway home. Heder's Napoleon occupies his own privately quirky universe, delineating a nerdism so exactingly intense that at times he appears on the verge of implosion, especially in visual scenes devoted to interpretive dance and tetherball, as well as ferocious dialogue aimed at those who always body-slam him against the lockers: "Why don't you get out of my life and shut up!" At times recalling the dementia of early John Waters features, Napoleon Dynamite mines a deadpan uniqueness from its distinct dweebdom.
High school isn't easy for anyone. But it's hell for Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), main mover in the movie of the same name and underdog to his own worst demons. Even the bullies who routinely punch him at Preston High, a deadwood school at the ass end of Idaho, do it halfheartedly, as if they are simply fulfilling an unpleasant chore that someone else initiated.
He doesn't help himself, exactly. An ill-dressed beanpole with a shock of red-blond curls, aviator glasses, and the perpetually open mouth of a stunned trout, Napoleon is more likely to call the biggest jock "a freakin' idiot" than to say something nice to a girl. This makes it doubly difficult when it comes to asking someone to the prom. ("Damn! I don't have any skills.") But you start to understand when you (briefly) meet Napoleon's chain-smoking, foul-mouthed grandmother (Sandy Martin) and his meek older brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), a black-socked nobody whose walrus mustache makes him look like a 12-year-old pretending to be grown up.
Napoleon's lame role model is his Uncle Rico, played by cast standout Jon Gries, unrecognizable from his usual bald-loser roles (Jackpot, The Snow Walker). Rico, a grease-ball scam artist still living in his high-school-football glory years, wishes it were still 1982, although there's little on the scene in Preston to tell newcomers it isn't. Anyway, his plan to sell Tupperware door-to-door does get Napoleon out of the house, and Rico is able to meet some lonely housewives.
Napoleon Dynamite is so low-budget, its biggest name is Tina Majorino, most widely seen in Andre, the talking-seal movie. She plays the timid girl who seems to like our nerdy hero, at least a little. Also featured are Efren Ramirez, as the only kid doofus enough to hang out with him, Haylie Duff (Hilary's slightly older sister) as the local bitch queen, and Diedrich Bader, a macho moron who hawks his own brand of "Rex Kwon Do" in TV ads.
The filmmakers, all in their early or mid-20s and mostly veterans, like writer-director Jared Hess, of Brigham Young University's film school, have taken a page from the twisted realism of Wes Anderson and Terry Zwigoff. The people here are not exactly lovable or smart, yet the movie and its characters have a certain bittersweet originality to them. By the time Napoleon improvises his idea of hip-hop dancing for a school assembly, you will find yourself shouting "Sweet!" at his antics. My favourite thing about this offbeat venture, though, is that no one seems to notice the weirdness of our hero's name.
From out of the west - specifically the small town of Preston, Idaho - comes a charming little film that could be the sleeper hit of the summer. It's called "Napoleon Dynamite," which is the name of its leading character, a gangly, uncoordinated, mouth-breathing high-school nerd who spends much of his school time being slammed against his locker by the jocks, plays tetherball by himself in P.E., and is saddled with the most disfunctional family in ages. But don't feel sorry for him; he is resilient, has only contempt for his abusers, and is unruffled by his many setbacks. He is played - inhabited, really - with astounding virtuosity by Jon Heder, an actor whose only previous work was as the lead in a short film by "Napoleon Dynamite"s director Jared Hess.
Hess and his wife Jerusha have written a high-school comedy that owes little or nothing to the genre; it's like a comic version of Todd Solondz's "Welcome to the Dollhouse." Napoleon lives with his grandmother and his older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who spends his days in chatrooms on the internet, looking for the perfect mate. But when his grandmother is injured in a dune buggy accident their uncle Rico (Jon Gries) comes to live with them. Rico is a piece of work; he drives an ancient camper-van and sells plastic kitchenware door to door, which in Preston means going miles between customers; but he lives in the memory of 1982, when he quarterbacked Preston High nearly to the state championship. He even buys a time machine on the internet so that he can go back and try to undo the mistakes he made before the coach took him out of the game.
Napoleon, who has never in his life initiated a conversation with a girl, somehow finds a friend in Deb (Tina Majorino), a classmate who takes studio photographs and also sells her own hand-made key chains. His only other friend is the school's one Latino student, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), whom he persuades to run for student body president against the most popular girl in school. How the campaign turns out, and how Napoleon, the gorky dork, contributes to it by turning into a swan for a moment, is the delicious resolution of the film.
This is a film of moments, all well conceived, directed and acted: the Hesses have written a dozen or more perceptive and witty sequences, Jared as director knows when to cut and when to let a scene go on, and none of his actors ever relax their control over their characters. Whenever we're led to expect something, Hess gives us something better, as when Kip's search for a soul mate is rewarded in a way that's only barely tipped off in advance; or the way in which Napoleon salvages Pedro's campaign.
This is a first film, made on what was obviously a minuscule budget, with actors willing to take a great chance on a new director; and the delight of the film is that it works, that it will help their careers, and that it gives us in the audience a nice summer jolt. You can't ask for much more than that.
Rating: * [1 out of 5]
Watching this movie, I could not help but be reminded of the low budget indie films that dominated the early and mid-nineties, Welcome to the Dollhouse especially. The style is sparse, and the fact that the filmmakers did not have a lot of money is part of the film's charm. Unfortunately, that is where the similarities end. Napoleon Dynamite quickly reveals itself to be the one joke horse that it is, and the laughs are few and far between.
The one joke, of course, is that title character Napoleon (Heder) is anything but dynamite. He is the biggest dork in school, the laughing stock of classmates who body check him into the lockers at any opportunity. In his cheap, no-one-ever-wore-that clothing and out-of-season snow boots, Napoleon is an easy target. The humor comes in watching him be a geek, humor that the film pretends not to be aware of, and it grows quickly tiresome. Worse, Napoleon is not a likeable character, and the film makes no effort to make him so, so when the initial humor wears off, we really don't care what happens to him.
Filling in Napoleon's world is his brother Kip, a 35-year-old unemployed nerd who spends every waking moment cruising Internet chat rooms. There is Pedro Sanchez, the new kid in school, and the only Latino, who Napoleon is somehow able to make friends with. Deb is the apple of Napoleon's eye, the girl he likes but cannot connect with. His efforts lead Deb to inadvertently go to the prom with Pedro, and when Napoleon's own date (who was forced by her mother to go with him in the first place) ditches him, Napoleon's prom experience is quickly reduced to cutting in. I wasn't sure if the filmmakers wanted us to laugh at Napoleon here or feel sorry for him, but it does not matter. By this point we really don't care what happens to him.
The other person in Napoleon's life is Uncle Rico (Gries). When Napoleon's grandmother finds herself laid up after a dune buggy accident, Uncle Rico steps in to look after the two boys. Not much is made of Grandma and the dune buggy; it is an aside to open the door for Uncle Rico, the door-to-door salesman whose head is stuck in the 1982 high school football season and what might have been. Like Napoleon, Uncle Rico is not a likeable character, and he gets boring quickly.
The film ultimately isn't about anything. It is as though someone had a vision of this super geek and put him in a movie without there being much a movie built up around him. There is nothing compelling here. Napoleon would have been better off as comic relief in another movie; small doses. There is little to like about this film, and the laughs quickly run dry.
Rating: **** [4 out of 4 stars]
Do the chickens have very large talons?" Napoleon asks a farmer.
"Boy, I don't understand a word you're saying." The farmer responds.
The title character of NAPOLEON DYNAMITE is misunderstood often, but occasionally he is heard loud and clear. When the moment of clarity arrives, you aren't sure whether to cheer or feel bad because you ignored or ridiculed a fellow student like Napoleon when you were younger. Napoleon's uncle Rico in the film (played perfectly by Jon Gries) describes Napoleon as a tender soul who still wets the bed at night. He probably doesn't wet the bed, but Napoleon is clearly a tender soul and while NAPOLEON DYNAMITE is a wonderful comedy, it is also a tender story.
The story is about a weird kid named Napoleon Dynamite who lives in a small mid-western town with his grandmother and older brother. Both boys are odd; the brother is an effeminate heterosexual who lives in online chat rooms and Napoleon is, well, a kid named Napoleon might be a little different from birth. Napoleon's grandmother is played by the hip grandmotherly actress Sandy Martin (buried this actress' filmography is a cool sounding rated X film entitled 2076 OLYMPIAD).
One day, grandma is hospitalized after having an accident while driving her dune-buggy in the desert. This leaves the boys in the care of their older uncle Rico who is an amiable loser still living in the past when he played high school football. Uncle Rico is a man who honestly admits that he wishes he could go back in time to 1982 and finish the last quarter in a football game; it's subtly touching and, in a tiny strange film like this one, true blue.
When I saw this film at a screening at Sundance my hopes were high that director Jared Hess could build on the offbeat comic tone set forth in the short film upon which this feature was based. The short film, PELUCA, played at Slamdance in 2003 and was special, like nothing I had seen before. I still have the fanny pack the director handed me before the screening in which were placed the press materials for the short film. After the screening, Mr. Hess was so happy folks liked the short he could not contain himself smiling humbly when we clapped. Luckily, he found the funds to expand on his premise and the result was one of the best narrative feature films of Sundance 2004.
Building on the short film Co-Writer/Director Hess (his wife wrote the feature with the director) brings back the hilarious central character played by Jon Heder. In NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, the new feature length film, Heder's character is given the name Napoleon; however, in the short Heder's character's name was Seth, although the two appear to be one and the same, with Napoleon being a great upgrade in name category. Also, returning is the character of Pedro but this time the role is played by Efren Ramirez. Pedro is a new kid at school who Napoleon gravitates toward. Pedro's innocence matches Napoleon's and both boys, from extremely different backgrounds, have in common their odd view of the world and desire to pass this view onto others.
Napoleon's uncle Rico is a ridiculously quirky character played delightfully by Jon Greis who must be one of the most underrated character actors working today. His role in last year's hardly or never released THE BIG EMPTY was one of the highlights of that film and I remember first seeing him in REAL GENIUS, one of my favorite movies. At times, you understand exactly how Rico feels partly because the dialogue is clever but above all because Gries can sell an otherwise unbelievable character with affecting facial expressions and odd body language which are unique in every character he inhabits. The fact that Gries can make these traits fresh each time is a testament to his screen presence.
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE is a whole lot of good clean fun which could have garnered it a possible "G" rating. It is suitable viewing for ages 12 to 42 (perhaps even older if one can give in to the comic goofiness of the story). It plays like the best romantic teen comedies of the 1980's with the genuine depth associated with certain moments in GHOST WORLD. At Sundance 2004, the buzz was about GARDEN STATE which had the look and feel of a top notch Hollywood production. By contrast, NAPOLEON DYNAMITE has no typical trappings.
I was surprised when talking with critics at Sundance that one critic, who claimed to not be a child of the 1980s, could not get into the film citing the music and 80s references. Of course, this was his opinion but I think it is a minority one. You don't have to be familiar with the clever references to be moved when Napoleon takes the stage to dance imparting his funky moves on us. NAPOLEON DYNAMITE is engaging and touching right to the very end when tether ball in the school yard has never taken on such a genuinely sweet meaning.
If you turn down your cynical side, you might just understand the connection that Napoleon makes when the film concludes. I think that it's called growing up and few films understand and appreciate the kinds of things young people everywhere experience when maturity begins to creep in. I guess the folk writing romantic teen comedies these days are often so out of touch with what it is to be a teen that it is impossible for a sincere take to be presented in an entertaining fashion. This is the same problem that plagues the new twenty-something genre that is so over-sexed and drug laden that one wonders how young people in America today survive.
In Napoleon's world some chickens do have large talons, and with Napoleon's help, we may be fortunate enough to see them.
I keep hearing over and over again how Deliverance isn't really against the Appalachian back-woods folks it depicts, and how honest a depiction it is, and how it's an appeal for understanding, etcetera, etcetera. I think this is bunk- not because Deliverance is inaccurate, but because of the spin it puts on what it's accurate about. Nobody comes out of that movie identifying with its famous antagonists; the words "squeal like a pig" are now synonymous with unpleasant emasculation, because the filmmakers couldn't adopt the point of view of the people it was so sharp in defining. So it is with Napoleon Dynamite. Though it's gruesomely accurate in defining a stage in some people's development that they'd really rather forget, it objectifies them as freaks instead of locking in to their perspective and understanding it. And so if you've ever been weird, unpopular and socially inept, you'll probably cringe all the way through this cruel freakshow and want to kick the filmmakers when it's done.
The eponymous hero (Jon Heder) is the main object of scorn, a frizzy-haired teenage beanpole with nerd glasses and an unkempt bird's-nest of curly red hair. He's largely ignored (and occasionally abused) by his classmates, which doesn't seem to have much of an impact on him; he wanders through the movie impervious to his surroundings, looking vaguely anaesthetized as he draws his fantasy drawings and imagines himself a normal member of society. Others in his family are equally deluded. His introverted 30ish brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) is unemployed and buries himself in internet chat rooms; his more aggressively macho Uncle Rico (John Gries) is so hung up on his blighted football career that can't stop talking about it. And between his few friends- slow-witted Mexican loser Pedro (Efrem Ramirez, cruelly stereotyped) and timid shopping-mall photographer Deb (Tina Majorino), he's got little chance of looking normal.
The film's social accuracy isn't in question (at least not until the unconvincing upbeat ending). Napoleon is a familiar species of individual, one who lives far out of the mainstream loop without knowing that loop exists; he makes up his own fanciful-nerd universe out of cheesy bikes, fantasy animals and castoffs from the local thrift shop. And director Jared Hess makes him more than just a caricature- he's sharply observed, instantly familiar and full of nuances that go beyond even Heder's pitch-perfect performance. But the one thing that's missing is pain. Though he's understandably irritated at the machinations of his clueless relatives, irritation is as far as it goes; he has no real feelings, and gets up for more punishment every time the filmmakers knock him down. As he's in no danger of showing hard feelings, one can feel fine about subjecting him to derision; he's programmed to be a good sport, and so the snarky bastards in the audience have full licence to point and laugh.
This is a disaster, because identification with Napoleon is more transgressive than one would expect. Unmoved as he is by fashion or anyone's negative opinion, he's a potential spanner in the works of the cultural machine; a film that actually locked into his point of view would shatter all of the conformist assumptions that drive people to move with the herd and centralize their image. Napoleon may be a geek, but there's no real reason he has to be a loser; his total indifference to what people think of him (and crucially, the exaggerated codes of masculinity that occasionally push him around) should make him a hero instead of a clown. But that's not going to happen, because the people who make this kind of movie are either so interested in feeling superior or so interested in disavowing their own nerdy past that they fail to take the road less travelled. And so poor Napoleon Dynamite is trapped on an endless loop, punished when he should be glorified for his treachery against the status quo.
Rating: **** [4 stars out of 4]
Filmmaker Jared Hess is only 24 years old and hails from small-town Idaho, but this unconventional route to filmmaking has only served to create a thoroughly engaging and wonderfully unique debut.
Mining his own adolescence for whimsical weirdness, Hess's Napoleon Dynamite follows the misadventures of its namesake character: a red-headed, moon-booted late-teen who spends his days drawing mythical beasts, practicing ninja moves and bearing the weight of the world on his slumped shoulders.
Napoleon, who may or may not be slightly dimwitted, is a misfit possessed of an inexplicable swagger despite his obvious social inabilities. Played by first-timer Jon Heder, the lead character is simultaneously hilarious and touching, with most of the laughs with and not at.
Napoleon lives with his hard-as-nails grandma and his snickering, fey, 30-year-old brother Kip in a town comprised primarily of vacant lots, dry grass and crumbling tract housing. The plot loosely traces Dynamite's blossoming friendship with Pedro -- the new kid just arrived from Mexico, and a grimly cheerful sophomore named Summer, a young woman with entrepreneurial aspirations and a regrettable fashion sense. Summer is played to the hilt by Hillary Duff's younger sister Haylie, and if Napoleon is any indication, the younger Duff is an actress with a much wider (and wilder) range than that of her famous sibling.
As Napoleon progresses, our unlikely hero begins to establish his own ad hoc family of outsiders whom he enlists to help Pedro on his quest to win the lofty office of class president against their nemesis Summer. At this juncture, Napoleon treads a bit on Election territory, yet retains a decidedly surrealist bent. While the film might be labeled a teen comedy, it actually comes across more as a David Lynch remake of Better Off Dead.
Another signpost is 1991's unsung Ruben and Ed, an oddball cult comedy starring Howard Hesseman and Crispin Glover. Napoleon shares the same off-kilter tone and matter-of-fact narrative eccentricity. As Hess would have us believe, that's simply the way things are in Preston, an ordinary place populated by out-of-the-ordinary people.
As the director, Hess conveys his message with a huge amount of heart despite the fact that his characters operate far outside the norm. But weirdness alone is not the point of Napoleon. The film is less about teen alienation than the alienation of everyone -- Dynamite's older brother and his overbearing uncle included.
What Hess's characters desire is what we all do -- to find that scrap of affirmation, love or approval that helps us to find ourselves.
Rating: **** 1/2 [4.5 stars out of 5]
"Napoleon Dynamite" is about the most antisocial misfit I've ever seen onscreen. As played with pitch-perfect timing by Jon Heder, Dynamite (that's his last name) would rather be left to his own devices. He doesn't socialize much, draws pictures during class and plays tether ball by himself. Other kids pick on him and, while he doesn't like it, he doesn't retaliate physically, but verbally. He withdraws into his own world where no one else exists. Tall, with bad hair and exposed upper teeth, Napoleon lacks the football-player look that permeates other high school movies. For every jock that roams the hallways, there is a Napoleon Dynamite who has few friends and no luck with the girls.
The movie is funny in a number of ways, and none of it is conventional. There is a school dance, but it serves to reaffirm Napoleon's status on the high school social scale, rather than as a ploy to give the bullies what they deserve. He lives with his grandmother, who suffers an injury from riding a dune buggy in an early scene. His skinny brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) spends every minute in Internet chat rooms and is in training to become a cage fighter. When the grandmother goes to the hospital, their uncle Rico (Jon Gries) moves in to take care of them. He's a football washout who had a big game in 1982 and wishes he could travel back in time to capitalize on that event. At one point, he and Kip buy what they believe to be a time machine off the Internet, but it backfires when Napoleon tries it out in a deliriously funny scene.
Fellow classmate and door-to-door salesgirl Deb (Tina Majorino, the girl with the map on her back in "Waterworld") stops by Napoleon's house, but she gets freaked out and runs off, leaving her merchandise on his doorstep. Napoleon returns them to her the next day, and for what might be the first time in his life, he falls in love. Of course, he's too shy to say anything. His only friend is a new student named Pedro (Efren Ramirez), who decides to run for class president against the popular Summer (Haylie Duff, Hilary's sister). Pedro is also attracted to Deb, but he has more nerve to say something to her, and she accepts, so once again Napoleon falls short of his goals.
The movie is organized as a series of small chapters that follow Napoleon throughout his daily routines. Rico encourages him to get a job, and he does so, on a chicken farm where the owners drink a substance that is nearly equal to the gross-out factor seen in Stifler's pale ale in "American Pie." Rico and Kip try to sell tupperware to the small-town residents, and when that idea runs out, they advertise breast enlargement herbs. Since Napoleon can't ask Deb to the dance (she's going with Pedro), he asks another girl by drawing her portrait. He apparently spent hours drawing what looks like a child's sketch.
Despite his ordeals, Napoleon always gets up when the day is new to endure it all over again. Whether it's putting up with pushy classmates or intrusive family members, he remains unchanged. He reacts in the most unexpected manner to hostility and says things that may make sense to him but make no sense to anyone else. In fact, I suspect bullies taunt him because they want to hear what he'll say in his defense. Here's an example:
Guy - "Hey, Napoleon. What did you do last summer again?"
Napoleon - "I told you! I spent it with my uncle in Alaska hunting wolverines!"
Guy - "Did you shoot any?"
Napoleon - "Yeah, like, fifty of them! They were surrounding my cousin! What the heck would you do in a situation like that?"
Guy - "What kind of gun did you use?"
Napoleon - "A freakin' 12-gauge, what do you think?"
Napoleon knows he'll never be popular, so he just acts however he wants with disregard to what anyone else thinks. He gets frustrated when people ask him too many questions, and if he's in an uncomfortable situation, he speaks his mind. When forced to view his uncle's personal video, for example, he shouts that it's the worst video ever made. He's like the Adam Sandler character in "Punch-Drunk Love," only more vocal about how he feels.
The co-writer and director, Jared Hess, fashioned a film that draws nearly all of its humor from its eccentric characters. Everyone here has a story, and nothing was deemed too outlandish for inclusion. In this dazzling display of comic timing and strong writing, it is Jon Heder's performance that comes out on top. He delivers his dialogue as if irritated just to talk and his physical comedy is unexpectedly funny. Watch him as he rushes off the stage towards the end once the music stops, or when dismounting a horse, or when he climbs over a fence to escape Uncle Rico. I saw "Napoleon Dynamite" at the same theater that was playing "The Village." How often is it that one of the year's best movies plays right alongside one of the year's worst?
It's charming. It's hilarious. It is perhaps the most beautifully crafted, lovingly rendered portrait of extreme geekitude ever to grace the screen. It's Napoleon Dynamite--the first feature film from 24-year-old Brigham Young University student Jared Hess--and, if there is any justice, it's going to be huge.
Remember that kid who was always drawing mythical beasts in his notebooks? Whose hitched-high pants and tucked-in T-shirts merely served to attenuate his gangly limbs? Whose evasive, half-shut eyes complemented his permanently slacked jaw and perpetual wheeze? And who, with no apologies, panted over time machines advertised in the back of comic books and posted a sign on his bedroom door establishing "Pegasus Xing"? That's Napoleon (Jon Heder), a teenager who has reached such Olympian heights of nerdishness that he's oblivious to it, either as failure or achievement. Even as Napoleon is harangued and abused at school, tossed against lockers and left, daily, to a solo game of tetherball, he reacts with righteous indignation, utterly unconvinced that he's the problem. And for this--for his dignity in the face of scorn, for his unabashed himselfness--we love Napoleon Dynamite.
The movie loves him, too. In fact, it's nothing less than a celebration of its central character--hardships, foibles, bad hair and all. It takes place in Preston, Idaho, the hometown of director Hess (who co-wrote the film with his wife, Jerusha), and it catalogs, with patience and art, the disappointments and victories (however small) in Napoleon's life.
Napoleon lives with his brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who at 32 has no occupation other than searching for his "soul mate" in Internet chat rooms, in the home of their feisty grandmother (Sandy Martin), owner of an equally feisty llama named Tina. When Grandma breaks her coccyx in a dune buggy accident (truly, it's hilarious), Napoleon and Kip can hardly be entrusted to take care of themselves. So Grandma sends Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a sleazy salesman caught in the glory days of 1982, when even as a benched high school football player, he "could have gone pro." As if born to the role of meddlesome caregiver, Rico immediately sets about establishing a Tupperware business, eating all of the family's steak and ruining Napoleon's life.
Such as it is. In general, Napoleon wants little more than to be left at peace with his "ligers" (combination lion-tigers, "known for [their] skills in magic"), though, like any human, he craves connection. To that end, he's in luck, as new student Pedro (Efren Ramirez) appears at school and accepts Napoleon's halting friendship with nary a blink. (Short, perpetually sweating and mustached, Pedro is Sancho Panza to Napoleon's Don Quixote.) The two have an understated connection, to say the least: "So," Napoleon mutters beneath his breath, "you and me are pretty much friends by now, right?" Unlike Napoleon, Pedro has a way with (or at least a strategy with regard to) girls: When he likes one, he bakes her a cake.
Napoleon can barely communicate with anyone, let alone girls. And when Deb, a shy student who braids gimp lanyards and runs a home glamour-shot business, shows up on his doorstep, he's confronted with the need to learn. At first, Deb tries to sell Napoleon a lanyard, and he makes the ultimate geek mistake of saying exactly what he means: "I already made, like, infinity of those in scout camp." This, of course, is not what Deb needs to hear, and she runs away in shame.
Later, Napoleon makes it up to her, in his staccato, painfully awkward way. But she doesn't mind. Like Napoleon, Deb is untroubled by appearances; instead, she seeks (and sees) inner beauty. Actress Tina Majorino plays Deb like a young Lili Taylor, all buttercup sweetness and light. You want to reach out and give her a big, everything-will-be-OK hug--though, of course, she doesn't need it. She already feels the love.
What a pleasure it is to watch a film that so adores its characters, and that allows them the space to be totally themselves. Though Napoleon and his friends often seem locked inside their bodies, unable to break out into authentic expression, they manage to get their points across. And whenever they do speak, or mumble, or drone, every utterance is authentic; their unbending earnestness is enough to melt even the iciest heart. When the slinky-smoove star of Napoleon's instructional dance video asks him whether he's ready to get his groove on, Napoleon, a boy any self-respecting groove has long since abandoned, says, "Yuuuus." And then he does it. He totally gets his groove on.
Ultimately, there's not much in the way of a plot here; if Napoleon Dynamite has a flaw, it's the sense of loss one feels about two-thirds of the way through, when the tension has largely failed to mount. But there is so much compassion, wisdom and comic insight that the film is hugely rewarding in any case. Deadpan irony is the rule, understatement is the lingua franca, and the result is an unceasingly accurate portrayal of real people whose quiet lives are touching and humanly grand. Napoleon, Pedro, Deb--even Kip and Uncle Rico: All of these folks dare to dream, and their dreams are beautiful.
Grade: B+
Finally, there are the nerds who are actually arrogant and abrasive. Their attention always seems to be somewhere far, far away. If you interrupt their reverie by attempting to engage them, they're likely to call you "stupid" or an "idiot." You walk away thinking, "No wonder no one wants to talk to that guy. What's his story, anyway?" Well, " Napoleon Dynamite" won't quite tell you what makes that guy tick, but it will make him into someone who at least entertains you.
As any child of the 1980s knows, "nerds" come in many flavors. There are the shy nerds. Even if you took it upon yourself to pry these wallflowers from their hiding place, you wouldn't get much of a response. Then there are the relatively outgoing nerds. Those folks may not talk much to the popular kids, but within the nerd society, they are the big shots and hardly stop to catch a breath as they pontificate about operating systems or anime. And, finally, as I said before, there are the nerds.
Yes, our red-headed hero carries the unlikely name "Napoleon Dynamite." (Elvis Costello fans may recall that this was an alias that Costello used on his album "Blood and Chocolate.") Director Jared Hess relates that he got the name from a strange man he met in Chicago, and didn't know that most likely, this mysterious transient had copped it from Elvis. "I wish I could change it now," Hess says. This high school student from Idaho looks through perpetually squinted eyes at a world that is a somewhat disturbing cross between the world of today and the world of the Bangles and Kool Moe Dee. Although his reclusive older brother Kip spends most of his life in those newfangled Internet chat rooms, Napoleon kicks it '80s style with his frizzy white-boy perm, swank moon boots and those huge glasses that are staples of any embarrassing yearbook picture. And the rest of his class has a similar sense of style: Pastels dominate fashions, " Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper gets cranked at the school dance, and Napoleon's lone female friend Deb ("Waterworld"'s Tina Majorino) has a ponytail pulled so tightly to the side that you could probably use it to swing her around the room. Napoleon is played by 26-year-old Jon Heder, who -- like much of the cast -- is making his feature film debut. The gangly Heder doesn't look anything like a high school student, but it works in this instance, as towering over his peers only brings his misfit status into more vivid relief. Hess ably emphasizes his character's isolation by using slow, wide camera shots that showcase the quiet Idaho landscape.
Anyway, the fact is that just looking at Napoleon is funny. Heder had already played the character in a short film that played at the 2003 Slamdance Festival, and in an interview, often talked about "Napoleon" as if the nebbish were right there in the room. On the surface, at least, Napoleon is either truly laid-back or borderline autistic: He can't even be bothered to open his eyes fully or glance in someone's direction. Napoleon lives largely in a fantasy world, in which he is one step away from gaining the skills of a ninja and where spinning tales about how he spent his summer shooting wolverines will prevent a beatdown from the jocks (it doesn't work). But real life begins to intrude on his teenage reverie in a variety of ways. First his grandmother injures herself in a dune buggy accident, leaving Napoleon and his 32-year-old brother "alone." This brings about the return of Uncle Rico (Jon Gries of "Real Genius"). Rico is a former high school quarterback who lives in regret that Coach didn't put him in the big game. Now, he hawks Tupperware and "breast enhancers" with equally little sense of shame. Another interloper into Napoleon's world is a new student, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), who is every bit his equal in underreaction and nonconformity... and who unwittingly becomes his competition for the hand of Deb. The simmering tension, however, doesn't stop Napoleon from backing Pedro's underdog bid for the class presidency against the prohibitive favorite, perky cheerleader Summer (Haylie Duff -- yes, her sister.)
If those last couple of sentences give the impression that this is all leading up to a boilerplate "Revenge of the Nerds" resolution, well, you can rest easy. Much like its lead character, "Napoleon Dynamite" is not about to start playing by the general rules of society. Indeed, in a plot development that has no basis in the reality of any high school of which I know, the presidential election ends up being settled by a dance competition. And although we presume that lessons are indeed learned, they're not exactly dwelled upon, as the 86-minute film makes a quick dash for the exit.
Although folks might expect more than 86 minutes for their ticket fee these days, it's probably for the best, because "Napoleon Dynamite" is, to an extent, a one-joke film. Much like a "Saturday Night Live" sketch, you will most likely recognize the lead character as the prototype of someone you've met yourself. It's easy to laugh both with him and at him, as he spouts outdated slang ("Dang!" "Sweet!" "Retarded !"), and gets into surreal scrapes involving things such as a bar of Chap Stick or an unhappy llama. However, much like a "Saturday Night Live" sketch, there's not that much meat here besides the well-realized lead character and some physical humor. Uncle Rico's desire to correct his past wrongs is drawn out at length and then put to rest via a "dick joke." He then continues to pop in for some more moderately amusing, but ultimately random and directionless, scenes. Despite a valiant effort by Ramirez, who matches Heder blank stare for blank stare, the character of Pedro remains enigmatic. Summer and the other "popular kids" could hardly be more cliche or undeveloped. Since the film's climax is based around a nominal showdown between Pedro and Summer, these turn out to be major flaws.
What's designed to be the " big ending" ends up, just like the rest of the film, a gag based on physical humor and the " wackiness" of the Napoleon character. Not that that's bad; it's a helluva lot more than most "SNL" movies deliver, I can tell ya. Still, it's not exactly the level of humor -- along with other emotions -- that Wes Anderson was able to wring out of the triumph of a deadpan teenager in "Rushmore."
"Napoleon Dynamite" can't really claim to be much more than a funny film. But it can make you laugh, and it can give you a character you'll remember for quite a while. And that is, indeed, pretty sweet.
Rating: *** 1/2 [3.5 out of 4 stars]
"Quirky" doesn't even begin to describe Napoleon Dynamite, an overly colorful but often hilarious look at a small-town high school loser. Refreshingly, director/cowriter Jared Hess creates characters with few likable traits, and yet somehow makes a very funny and entertaining movie. In the endless onslaught of teen movies, Napoleon Dynamite stands apart as fresh and original.
Super-nerd Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) doesn't fit in well at school. He has a large red Afro and wears T-shirts with unicorns on them. His membership in the Happy Hands Club (they do interpretive sign language to song) does little to improve his social standing. From the beginning, it's clear that Napoleon is a different kind of movie nerd: he's not a very likable geek, even to the audience. To him, most everyone is an "ID-iot!" Napoleon is whiny, petulant, and hostile, and barely has enough interest in the world to open his eyes all the way.
Napoleon lives in Preston, Idaho with his Grandma (Sandy Martin) and his 30-year-old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell). The brothers are left home alone after Grandma is hospitalized following a nasty spill during a joy ride on a four-wheeler. Sleazy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) then arrives to babysit the brothers, despite Kip being over 30. The unemployed Kip wastes his days away chatting online with "soulmate" LaFawnduh, but Uncle Rico convinces him to help with a new business venture, selling faux-Tupperware products and herbal breast enhancers door-to-door.
At school, Napoleon finds a new best friend in Mexican transfer student Pedro (Efren Ramirez). The two see dating potential in fellow outcast Deb (Tina Majorino), yet it's Pedro who asks her to the prom. Pedro then gets the insane idea to run against the beautiful and popular Summer (Haylie Duff) for class president. Can Napoleon help Pedro do the impossible? Perhaps Napoleon performing an Election Day funk-dance number in moon boots in front of the entire student body will do the trick.
The unique humor of Napoleon Dynamite comes in the details provided by Hess (he cowrote the screenplay with his wife Jerusha Hess). The movie is set in the present day, yet life in Preston seems stuck in the mid-1980s. Hess peppers the soundtrack with all-Œ80s music, from When in Rome's "The Promise" to the "A-Team" theme. Uncle Rico purchases a time machine off the Internet to take him back to his high school football glory days of 1982. Deb wears a ponytail on the side of her head and sports several large, clunky, plastic bracelets. And Napoleon lives in his own universe entirely.
Heder's fearless comedic performance as Napoleon is the true key to the film's success. Whether Napoleon is griping about having to care for Grandma's pet llama, Tina, or performing that climactic dance number, Heder plays the character full-throttle, warts-and-all. The movie is all the funnier for it. Like the nerd himself, Napoleon Dynamite is hilarious, original, and surprisingly endearing.
Rating: ** [2 out of 4 stars]
Boredom is like catnip to some filmmakers. Nothing stirs up the sludge of their creative juices like the prospect of people with nothing to say and nothing to do not saying it and not doing it. I offer this as a working axiom: a movie about boring people being bored is very likely to be boring.
Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is a gawky, gangly teenager in Preston, Idaho, the hometown of the movie's 24-year-old director Jared Hess and his co-writer wife Jerusha. The filmmakers are not long out of high school themselves, and their debut film is a look back at the interminable agonies of school days through the person of Napoleon. He's a social outsider, a slacker virtually immobilized by ennui, an awkward kid with a shambling gait, a head of carroty curls, and a mouth shaped like a pork-pie hat. He lives with his even-nerdier 30-ish brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), and his feisty, motorcycle-riding Grandma (Sandy Martin). He seems to be the only kid his age to ride the school bus, and sits there like a sight gag towering above the little kids, waiting to be spoken to so he can respond with withering scorn ("What are you going to do today, Napoleon?" "Anything I want to! Gosh!")
When Grandma fractures her coccyx jumping her Harley on the dunes, Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) comes to babysit the boys. Rico, like the Hesses, is looking back with nostalgia at his high school years. That was the peak of his now-fortyish life, when he played football and almost won the state championship ("If Coach had only put me in in the fourth quarter...") He videotapes himself throwing passes, and throws passes of another kind in his job as a door-to-door salesman of plastic containers and a herbal breast enhancer.
The main plot thread of Napoleon Dynamite involves Napoleon's managing the campaign for student body president of his only friend, the slow-talking, slow-thinking Mexican immigrant Pedro (Efren Ramirez). Pedro, like Napoleon, is so non-expressive he barely moves his mouth when he talks, but he is the only kid in school with a mustache, which is credentials enough for tossing his hat in the ring. Being Pedro's campaign manager taps into reserves of action and determination not much used in Napoleon's life to this point, and it climaxes in a rousing display of talent and creativity that is so wildly out of left field that it's as if another character has been introduced, as if John Travolta has done a walk-in and taken over Napoleon's body. There's also something of a romantic thread, involving Deb (Tina Majorino), a girl who undergoes a similar personality transplant during the course of the movie.
There are funny moments, and signs of a nascent creative potential, in Napoleon Dynamite. It's encouraging to see a feature film of this assurance from filmmakers on the sunny side of the quarter-century mark, and you've got to love the names Jared and Jerusha, which sound like something out of Star Wars. The Hesses condescend to their characters, playing them for laughs, while at the same time affecting an attitude of not caring, pretty much as the characters themselves do. There are in fact plenty of events in the movie, but they take place in that slack, bloodless atmosphere that works like hemlock on character and viewer alike. Nobody in the movie seems to have much fun, with the exception of Granny before the accident, and the bullies who slam Napoleon into his locker at school.
But audiences at Sundance (where the movie was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize) apparently had a lot of fun with it, and so have many reviewers. Heder's performance in the title role struck me as profoundly uninteresting, but at the same time there is talent legible between the lines. Ruell's Kip is more faceted, and his transformation from internet geek to hipster geek has the satisfaction of actually coming out of something understandable. The most interesting work comes from the cast's most grizzled veterans, Gries (Twin Falls, Idaho) and Majorino (who at 19 has an impressive string of credits that includes Waterworld and Andrew Shea's Santa Fe). Gries captures the painful self-awareness of failure that lurks beneath Uncle Rico's macho swagger. His internet purchase of a time machine to transport himself back to 1982 is a shallow gag, but the yearning for that time of almost-greatness in Rico's life is made palpable by Gries. Majorino survives a mystifying character leap from painfully shy door-to-door salesgirl to fairly assured young lady with a goal-oriented interest in Napoleon.
Movies, like any art form, are largely a matter of taste. Whether or not your taste runs to the sort of slack-jawed, slow-witted world that the Hesses are offering here, it's probably worth keeping an eye on them. They could be heading toward the creative company of such filmmakers as Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse) and Wes Anderson (Rushmore). For now, if boredom turns you on, Napoleon Dynamite could light your fuse.
I have discovered a film that I knew nothing about coming into this year and it completely blew me away. Every year if we're lucky enough we will have a few of these and for me Napoleon Dynamite is that film. The film made its premiere at Sundance this year and garnered great reviews. Fox Searchlight saw the potential in it and bought the film right away for $3 million. Napoleon Dynamite is the feature length directorial debut of 25-year-old Jared Hess. After the success of his 9 minute short Peluca at the Slamdance Film Festival, Hess was encouraged to turn his short into a feature length film. I myself am grateful he did. Napoleon Dynamite is sincerely one of the funniest films I have ever seen and every scene will make you smile or laugh out loud.
Napoleon Dynamite (John Heder) is NOT just a nerd or a geek or a dweeb or a dork. He's all those things and then some, living life on a whole different plane than anyone else in Preston, Idaho. He has a fascination for medieval warriors and an obsession with unicorns. The world around him is made up of a meager looking 32-year-old brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), that fancies himself an online Romero and Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) who is stuck in his glory football stardom days of 1982. Uncle Rico comes to look after Napoleon and Kip after their sole guardian, Grandma, suffers a dune boogie accident. Napoleon soon meets the new kids at school, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), a recent Mexican immigrant that looks just as out of place in the town as Napoleon feels. Pedro is a mostly quiet companion with droopy eyes, a blank stare and a killer mustache. Both boys are as equally matched in their outcast style by Deb (Tina Majorino), a mostly quirky and colorful young girl that becomes a love interest of sorts for both of them. During a school dance that exclaims everything '80's, Pedro is motivated to run for school president. His opponent for class president is Summer (Haylie Duff), the peppy popular girl that has every chance to win. Unwilling to let Pedro lose and be humiliated by this experience, Napoleon uses all the skills he can muster up to help his friend in his time of desperate need.
The look and feel of the film is so detailed to 80's and 90's culture, the school dance itself might trigger flashbacks for 30-somethings. The art direction of this film portrays the sometime 10-year gap between mainstream culture and small town culture that exists in today's society. One other example is a boy band song that is used during a school performance. This is the kind of humor that feels like a live action Simpsons episode. It's that good.
All the performances are impressive in this film. Jon Heder brings out a frustrated and angered performance from Napoleon. However, what is much more impressive is Heder's subtle portrayal of Napoleon's charm and care. Although Napoleon seems to be an odd and angry kid at first, his relationship with Pedro demonstrates a side of Napoleon that values friendship and loyalty. That itself is the essence of the film.
Before I went into the theater to experience this wonderful film, I heard many comparisons to The Royal Tenenbaums. That in itself is quite a compliment, but Napoleon Dynamite does not need any comparisons, it stands on its own as a great film. Simply said, I loved LOVED this film and everyone should go see it a hundred times when it is released.
Rating: 7 out of 10
Film trends are sometimes confounding. We're currently in the midst of a teenage comedy cycle, while simultaneously an independent film resurgence is also on the rise. Surprisingly the two haven't really met. Sure, there have been a few teenage indies in recent years, but their themes have been darker, usually singing the tune of angst and rebellion (Igby Goes Down, Donnie Darko), and the humor has been accidental for the most part. This makes sense once you consider the successful teen comedy formula: popular kids, witty catch phrases, buxom, beautiful women. All of these attributes would turn the typical indie audience sour. Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately), Napoleon Dynamite has crossed that bridge in typical indie fashion by becoming the antithesis of the formulaic Hollywood production.
Our protagonist, Mr. Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) himself, isn't your typical high school kid. He wears his hair like John Shaft, his glasses like Billy Holly, and his wardrobe would fit perfectly in Screech's closet. He may not seem to have a lot of direction, but he has plenty of skills, such as nunchucks, tetherball, sketching and ripping bike jumps. People don't seem to understand Napoleon too well at school, save for his best friend Pedro, who is planning a run for Student Body President. He lives with his brother Kip, who spends his days scamming women in internet chatrooms, and his uncle Rico, who yearns to return to his glory second-string quarterback days of 1982.
The characters are what make Napoleon such a joy to watch. Their incognizant goofiness endears the audience, while their cliche-ridden actions and antiquated dialog make them a riot. Next to Napoleon, the strongest character is his Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who eats nothing but steak, videotapes himself throwing footballs, and sneaks quick peeks at his muscles when he thinks nobody's looking. He's also a businessman, porting his tupperware from door-to-door, using his charm to induce lonely housewives to take in his wares. Napoleon's brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) is the weakest character of the bunch, but he still has his moments as he modifies himself to be more appealing to his cybermate LaFawnduh. Pedro's (Efren Ramirez) cool restraint and broken English makes him the perfect straight man, who surprises us with effective, yet odd lines such as "I will build her a cake." The characters are mostly flat, with little evolution throughout the course of the film, but their excessive quirkiness ensures that we don't lose affection for them.
What sets Napoleon Dynamite apart from other teenage comedies is how it explores the less glamorous aspects, the underbelly, of high school life. The main characters live in a run-down house, in the middle of nowhere, get around by courtesy of Uncle Rico's rust colored Dodge Van, while wearing secondhand Walmart wardrobes. The character quirks ease us through the barren landscape as we witness the destitute life through the eyes and perception of those who are living it.
Napoleon Dynamite cannot be judged like other flicks, even by indie standards. In addition to the flat characters, there is no tight or guided narrative. These aren't goal oriented characters, thus they are subject to chance and like the audience, they seem to be watching their life from afar, powerless to alter it. Again, Dynamite can be forgiven these flaws, if you can even call them flaws, because it doesn't aspire to be cohesive and wouldn't be successful as a comedy if it were. It has no pretensions whatsoever for being high art. In fact, it's quite the opposite, but it's highly satirical nature keeps it from being brainless either.
Dynamite is set in the modern day, but we only know that due to the presence of the internet. The set design, costumes, music, and just about every other mise-en-scene element owes itself to the late-70s and eighties, at their worst moments. This makes the already preposterous characters seem even more backwards, as they are living a good decade or two behind everyone else, yet are completely unaware.
Napoleon Dynamite is hardly a perfect movie, but it's one of the more memorable offerings of the year, exactly the type of film that keeps indie filmmakers on the map. I expect its square vernacular with plenty of "dang"s and "shuck"s to be echoed in the high school halls and the office water cooler alike this year, as it is the strongest contender for the indie cult classic right now.
Vote for Pedro.
Napoleon Dynamite is one of the most refreshing comedies in years, a dry satire about Midwestern teens that skewers its prey more accurately than Tina Fey's Mean Girls or even the brilliant softball lob that was Saved.
Shot for just $400,000 and sporting a cast of complete unknowns, Napoleon scored at the Sundance Film Festival before landing a distributor in Fox Searchlight, who then spun a grass roots campaign to an impressive $41 million take. But prior to becoming The Little Indie That Could, writer-director Jared Hess first spun this world in Peluca, a nine minute short that won raves at Slamdance in 2003.
Not surprisingly, Jon Heder first played this part under the name Seth as the focus of Peluca and it was the success of that short film that allowed Hess to develop Napoleon Dynamite. And if this were to become a weekly show and could maintain the same creative team, I'd program my TiVo for a Season Pass.
Heder's Napoleon isn't the most likable guy at first. A tall, lanky, brillo-headed nerd with a chip on his shoulder, he makes the most of his miserable world, which spins even further downhill when his biker grandma is hospitalized after breaking her coccyx. Forever trying to prove himself and the whipping boy to the jocks, he doesn't make it easy. He lies about girls he's dated and weapons he claims he has mastered. After all, he tells us "Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills. You know, like nunchuck skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills..."
His main source of grief is his effeminately weird older brother Kip, played with nerdy sass by Aaron Ruell. As bad as Napoleon thinks he may have it, he doesn't come close to Kip, who is perhaps the biggest dork ever depicted on film. Kip spends most of his waking life in chat rooms on his grandma's dime. Most hilariously, Ruell plays him a bit macho. When Napoleon asks him a question, Kip's response is "Napoleon, don't be jealous that I've been chatting online with babes all day. Besides, we both know that I'm training to be a cage fighter."
His creepy uncle Rico shows up when Grandma goes into the hospital. Addicted to get rich quick schemes and stuck in 1982, which is when he brushed up against greatness for just a moment, Rico is someone we've all known at one point: someone so desperate to relive the greatest instant of their life, they'd go so far to, say, buy a time machine on the internet. Think I'm kidding?
Napoleon also meets two people who will affect his life: Pedro, who, despite a half-hearted grip on the English language, has a kick-ass bike and will run for school president; and shy teen photographer Deb (Tina Majorino) who wears her ponytail on the side of her head. Being smooth with women isn't Napoleon's strongest suit. When he spots Deb sitting by herself in the cafeteria, he tells her "I see you're drinking 1% (milk). Is that because you think you're fat?"
This odd trio all has one thing in common that none could articulate in the clearest of moments: that they all yearn to be more than they are without realizing what they are capable of. Except for Pedro, maybe, who seems pretty confident, if not very successful at times.
Like Wes Anderson's droll comedies (The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore), Hess' style is deliberately paced with a minimum of camera moves. It's enough to the just watch these people as they scheme, plot and cause each other more stress than should logically be there. Completely devoid of sentimentality, Hess pulls a pretty clever trick out of his bag: he makes us gradually care for these folks to the degree that when the movie ends, it disappointing because we have to leave them.
And speaking of which, don't stop the movie until it's completely finished because you'll miss one of the best gags: an additional scene that runs a full 5 minutes once the credits end.
Napoleon Dynamite manages the rare feat of being laugh-out-loud funny without relying on crude antics or fart jokes. The film is loaded with wonderfully self-referential touches: the opening credit sequence reflects all the food that the characters eat or drink. The characters are so original and well written that the actors can't help but be good and it doesn't hurt that in the film's promotion, nowhere does the creative team or the actors take precedent over the concept.
To quote Napoleon, "freakin' sweet!"
Rating: 2 out of 10
Movie Review: Napoleon Dynamite
Alternate Title: Revenge of the Nerds (2004)
Story: Slap me upside the head for going to see this loser. It was released in early June and is still playing in the theaters. The 'buzz' was that it has developed a cult following. I hear the word 'cult' and I am interested. What a mistake!
Director, co-writer (with his wife, Jerusha) and star, Jared Hess try to deliver a Dumb and Dumber Nerd film for this generation. OY! Napoleon Dynamite is one of those mouth breathing dorky teens that most other kids avoid and bully. He manages to make a few friends (Dorks Unite!) and through goofy vignettes we see the development of his character which ultimately gets recognition.
Everyone is stereotyped throughout. There are no nuances or surprises. Even though the film had a smugness to it and was flawed in almost every way - I did get an occasional big laugh. I should have had a clue when I saw that it was an MTV production. Maybe I am too old for this type of film. (I did like the original Revenge of the Nerds.)
Acting: If they gave out awards for deadpan poker faces, this film would receive the largest trophy. It must have been hard not to laugh at the script and the wardrobe but the cast stayed in character (or lack thereof). Jared Hess as Napoleon might want to consider another career (although anywhere after this film would be in an upward mode). Tina Majorino (the cute, Molly Singer in Corinna, Corinna) is all grown up and I am sorry to say - in this film.
Predilection: This was a favorite at Sundance and has cult following.
Critters: A llama (or alpaca, I am not sure), lots of chickens, cows and dogs.
Food: Food is a large part of the film. Steak is eaten for many meals. Eggs are also a big item.
Visual Art: Wonderfully tacky stuff throughout.
Opening Titles: The opening titles gave me hope that I was about to be thoroughly entertained. They were, in fact, the best part of the film. The titles were written out on food items that teenagers would eat. Funny visuals.
Theater Audience: Six other (no make that five, one person left in the middle) dumbstruck folks.
Quirky Meter: Tried way too hard to be quirky.
Predictability Level: Over the top.
Tissue Usage: I cried for joy when it was over.
Oscar Worthy: NO!
Nit Picking: Not everyone can be a film maker. Most people should be in the audience - not behind the camera.
Big Screen or Rental: Neither. But if you are looking for stupid silly stuff try renting any of the three Nerd films.
Length: 90 minutes.
LOBO HOWLS: 2
Rating: 8 out of 8
I don't mind at all that this "indie" film is startlingly well-promoted and sports a fancy animated web site. I have no shame--I don't care if Spielberg directed it. It's so flippin' funny I can hardly stand it. But I should preface all this by confessing that part of my giddy delight comes from the fact that our hero, Napoleon Dynamite, strongly resembles my socially inept younger brother.
Like Napoleon, my brother has perfected the Inaudible Mumble, the Inappropriately Angry Response To An Innocent Question, and the Outrageous Request For Others To Drop Whatever They Are Doing And Drive Across Town For Some Completely Ridiculous Reason. These things, plus the uncanny physical resemblance, had my husband and I rolling in the aisles.
And like my brother, Napoleon suffers from delusions of martial arts grandeur and his idea of a compliment goes something like: "I see you're drinking 1% milk. Is that because you think you're fat? Because you're not. You could probably be drinking whole milk." Needless to say, it's Napoleon's lack of social skills (not numchuck skills, as he believes) that holds him back in the challenging world of high school politics. He hates everyone and everything. His perpetual exasperation and totally unacceptable response to the people and llamas around him is simply hysterical.
But on to the actual story.... Our unfortunately named hero lives in present-day rural Idaho. Were it not for the mention of internet chat rooms, you might easily assume that the film takes place in 1983. But no. The costume and music choices sadly show just how behind-the-times small towns can be. The plotline is fairly subtle. Napoleon lives with his geeky brother, Kip, and endures the temporary presence of his smarmy uncle, Rico, while riding bikes with his apparently brain-damaged best friend, Pedro. The genius of this movie is all in the characters, every one of which is flawlessly conceived and performed.
Tracking Napoleon through a few weeks of high school hell, a kind of alternative Revenge of the Nerds story emerges. Napoleon strikes up an awkward romance with a strange girl who tries to sell him an amateur Glamour Shots photo session and together they set out to get Pedro elected as class president.
I can't say too much more without revealing the jokes that you will so relish discovering throughout this absurd story. I'll leave you with the enticing thought of two horrendous hair pieces and not one, but two sign-language dance sequences to enjoy. And in what may be an homage to the 80's culture in which he is trapped, Napoleon also uses the power of dance to overcome his fear and change the course of his high school career. You won't forget it.
Whether or not you have a little Napoleon in your life, you'd have to be brain-dead not to appreciate the humor of the universal asshole found in all teenagers. It's the nerdy jerk in all of us that Jon Heder portrays so well as Napoleon Dynamite. You won't get an explanation of his bizarre moniker. And there's no mention of where his parents might be or why he is... well, the way he is. It's just a-day-in-the-life kind of story, which you will probably find utterly side-splitting.
Roger Ebert thinks the folks at Sundance only laughed at this movie to avoid appearing uncool. Yeah. Right. Show your age much, Ebert? If you don't find teenage social bungling amusing and you don't find humor inherent in the Future Farmers of America organization, then maybe you won't like this film. I can't imagine it, but I guess it's possible. I think the characters in this film are genuinely, unavoidably, and brilliantly funny. It takes a special kind of sourpuss not to laugh at them. Anyway, for you film know-it-alls... here's the obligatory mention of the filmmaker's influences: Wes Anderson and Todd Solondz. There you go. Done. Vote for Pedro!
PLOT SYNOPSIS: A young man, with the unlikely moniker Napoleon Dynamite, lives in Idaho with his grandmother and older brother. One day his uncle comes to live with them when his grandmother is injured in an accident, and the rest of the film revolves around these three eccentric people trying to figure out how to get through their lives and find some kind of contentment. With Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez, Aaron Ruell, Tina Majorino and Diedrich Bader. Directed by Jared Hess. [1:26]
Sex and Nudity: 3 out of 10 [with 0 meaning none at all]
Violence and Gore: 4 out of 10
Profanity: 3 out of 10
SEX/NUDITY 3 - A woman gets off a bus, looks at a man waiting for her, she runs to him and they kiss (we hear smacks). A woman takes off a man's glasses, looks at him suggestively and they play footsie under the table. A woman kisses a man on the cheek a few times. Young men and young women dance together at a school dance. A young man asks another young man if his girlfriend is "hot." Two young men talk about "hookin' up with chicks." A young man touches a young woman's hand and then pulls away. A man touches another man's knee and they both jump and move away from each other. Two young men talk about asking young women to a dance. A young man dances on a stage thrusting his hips several times. Five young women wearing short skirts that reveal bare legs dance on a stage. A woman wears a low-cut dress that reveals cleavage, and young women wear evening gowns that reveal bare shoulders and backs. A man tries to sell an herbal product that claims to enhance women's breast size. We see the engorged udders of a cow.
VIOLENCE/GORE 4 - A man shoots his cow in the face at close range (we see the man holding the shotgun, then hear the shot), a bus load of children passes as we hear the shot, they apparently see the shooting and they scream. A young man is bullied repeatedly: a young man holds another young man in a chokehold then slams his head against a locker, a young man is held by the neck and shaken repeatedly until he gives the bully money, two young men tussle over a bike until two men look at the bully threateningly, a young man is kicked in the leg, and a young man shoves another young man against a locker a couple of times. A young man throws an orange at a van, the driver gets out, tackles the young man, holds him by the throat, the young man elbows the man in the chest and he crawls away in pain. We hear a man being beaten (we hear him grunting and hear the crunching of the landing blows) and see him later with his arm in a sling and a bandage on his nose. A young man holds a man in a chokehold. A woman rides a four wheeler over a sand dune and jumps off the peak (we hear that she has been injured). Two young men ride a bike over a ramp, one crashes into the ramp support (a cinder block), bangs his crotch on the bike bar and lands hard on the ground. A young man holds a metal pole between his legs, puts a metal ring around his head and plugs in a machine that is attached to both, he grimaces and asks for the machine to be unplugged as an electrical charge is sent through his body. A man throws a steak at a young man as he rides by on a bike and it hits him in the face. A man is hit in the head several times by a martial arts instructor. We see a TV commercial for a Taekwondo school and a man demonstrates a few martial arts moves. A man tells a young man to try to hit him, one ends up being smacked on the head and the other being slapped in the face. A young man goes into a huge chicken coop and forces two chickens into a small cage. A young man yells at his pet llama, telling her to eat, and he throws the food on the ground near her when she doesn't seem interested. A young man shoves tater tots in his pants pocket (to eat later). A young man throws an action figure tied to a string out of a moving bus and drags it along, bouncing off the pavement. We see food on a table with flies buzzing around it, a man puts a raw egg into a pitcher of orange juice, and a young man drinks some and gags. A young man burps.
PROFANITY 3 - 5 scatological terms, 12 mild obscenities.
DISCUSSION TOPICS - Being different, friendship, love, soul mates, humiliation, bullies, living in the past, time travel, being shallow, condescending treatment of people of a different ethnic background, companionship, steroid usage, making changes in your life, electronic dating.
MESSAGE - Being different is OK. We can find friendship and love in the most unlikely places.
Rating: *** [3 out of 4]
Quick Look:
In rural Idaho, spazzy nerd Napoleon Dynamite must battle bullies, cheerleaders and his evil Uncle Rico. Does he get the girl and the respect he deserves in the end? Should you care? Find out.
Review:
There are very few films out there quite like "Napoleon Dynamite".
That's not to say "Dynamite" is an original masterpiece. Instead, "Napoleon Dynamite" is a sitcom, transformed into a film.
Many people come out of this feature and immediately comment about where Napoleon could go after high school. Some suggest college, others suggest the business workforce of New York City.
Others see Napoleon's future wrapped around some sort of fast food establishment. All of the above are strong possibilities. Why do people feel this way?
Napoleon is such a strong character that it's very likely he could move on to any one of those places. He's a strong leading man. Unlike NBC, who has pigeonholed ŒJoey' into a state of perpetual auditions mixed with dumb jokes making him an uninteresting lead, Napoleon is so versatile that we believe he's capable of just about anything.
The character at hand here is a Œspaz'. He's not smart. He's not cool. He's actually rather mean and defensive. Napoleon is weird. He's interested in odd things and he lies about virtually every facet of his miserable life. He is partnered with two unlikely friends, Pedro, a Mexican transfer student and Deb, a photo nut who also appears very out of date. Together they take on the world's many obstacles.
To describe the plot of "Napoleon Dynamite" would be nearly impossible as there is no coherent narrative. Rather, "Dynamite" is strewn together with three smaller plots; an origin story, the prom and the student class election. Running about thirty minutes a piece, each story has an opening, rising action and a climax. Only the election story has any real falling action.
The advertisements are slightly misleading; leading one to believe that the film takes place in the early 80s. Napoleon actually appears to be living in present day Idaho. What makes this town so interesting is that it's as though the town hasn't culturally evolved. Instead, each member lives life in whatever way they please. Napoleon's Uncle Rico lives life as though it was still 1982 and he was still a high school football star. Rex, a kung fu instructor, lives life like its post Desert Storm while the cheerleaders dance to the Backstreet Boy's early work from the 90's.
This could all just be a miscommunication between the set designers and the director, but it appears quite intentional. One would probably need to live in Idaho to truly enjoy the silly nature of this film.
Since the story leaves little to be desired, the film ends up placing all of its eggs into one basket. "Napoleon" relies on the character's different quirks for laughs. It's strange since there is virtually no characterization to speak of yet these characters feel so alive. It may take two viewings to really get into them, but there's a lot to learn beyond the surface level.
One major discomfort felt during the films short running time is that we're not watching these guys beat the bullies. We're watching them and mocking them. This is, for the most part, a new age "Revenge of the Nerds", and like that film, we are made to feel bad for themŠkind of. Most of the jokes that make us laugh though are jokes geared towards each character's deficiency. It's often very, very funny, but your moral bone, the one connected to your funny bone, might start to feel some pain by the end.
Additional cheers to Jon Heder, Tina Majorino , Aaron Ruell and Jon Gries as Napoleon, Deb, Napoleon's brother Kip and Uncle Rico. There are literally hundreds of quotable lines to choose from between these four. Though the entire cast is great, these guys are the standouts.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is guaranteed to become a cult hit despite its flaws. One would hope that that director/writer, Jared Hess will stick with this character and develop him further either in cinema or televised form. Napoleon needs to return and the sooner, the better.
*Scorecard*
As entertainment: * * * 1/2
As a film: * *
Overall: * * *
Napoleon Dynamite, as played by Jon Heder, is perhaps the most pathetic individual you've ever seen in a film. That is until later in the same film when you meet his older brother Kip. And then his Uncle Rico. This then is the peculiar allure of "Napoleon Dynamite" as written and directed by Jared Hess. In a world of wildly diminished expectations it doesn't take much to be a hero.
Napoleon Dynamite -- and there is no suggestion that this is not his real name -- is the kind of guy who was born to be slammed into a high school locker for no apparent reason. Unless, of course, you count his big glasses, bigger teeth, bad blonde Œfro and his uber-geek hobbies of sketching mythological creatures and playing tetherball by himself. When challenged, Napoleon can kick into a rough approximation of an alpha male, talking about his proficiency with nun-chucks, his totally sweet girlfriend who lives in another state and his summer spent hunting wolverines in Alaska. He can even verbally assault someone without uttering a single profanity. It's like watching a Mormon trying to cop a 'tude. But the film provides no one to look up to -- not the knobby kneed older brother who lives in online chat rooms, nor the uncle who is so desperate to live in the past that he buys a homemade time machine on Ebay. There's no teacher, student or parent with anything to emulate. I don't even recall most of these people having a name. Leaving it to Napoleon, a meek girl named Debbie and a laconic new Mexican student named Pedro to form a loose alliance in order to carve out a little niche of self-respect.
"Napoleon Dynamite" is a funny film. Often very funny. The laughs are unexpected until you start to figure out that the film aspires to be nothing more than idiosyncratic. One of the hot buzz films from the Sundance Film Festival, "Napoleon Dynamite" appears to have been specifically geared to the Sundance audience, famous for rewarding the aggressively quirky and not penalizing for twinges of smugness. While it laudably refuses to overplay the triumph of the nerd story arc, it still leans heavily on proven devices, including the assumption that white middle-class small town Idaho is inherently funny, and thus Mexicans will be inherently threatening. The film also borrows an off-brand Duff, Hillary's sister Hayley Duff to play a straight-up version of the popular high school blonde we can root against. There's even a sunny someone-for-everyone finale.
Still, props must be paid to Jon Heder for creating a singular character and delivering the goods in an audacious dance solo. Napoleon Dynamite isn't the most sympathetic hero. And on second thought, he's really not that pathetic after all. Even if we are laughing at him more than with him, I never for a moment worried that our man wasn't going to come out of this with his 'fro intact.
I waited in the rain to go into the Alamo Drafthouse during SXSW 2004 to see "Napoleon Dynamite" and found myself unaccustomed to having to maneuver an umbrella in a crowd. It's very important to be conscious of your surroundings when attempting this undertaking. I finally got into the inside and headed upstairs while the line moved slowly forward. The hold-up was so that the RIDICULOUS FUCKING ASSHOLES OF FOX SEARCHLIGHT FILMS could check everyone's bags and wand them for metallic items. I admitted that I had a camera but I was press and that my camera was approved by SXSW and THE FUCKING ASSHOLES MADE ME LEAVE MY BATTERIES WITH SECURITY. Is that not the stupidest fucking thing you ever heard? I left my batteries and while heading up into the lobby shouted, "IT'S A FESTIVAL!" I felt better anyway.
I realized the screening would be full to the brim so I made the quick decision to not eat or drink (no waiter ever ask me if I wanted anything anyway) and to give the film a horrible review because of the RIDICULOUS FUCKING SECURITY. Fuck these moronic fucking assholes. The overwhelming evidence continues to support the fact that it is the labs and the effects houses and other people who get to prints of the films before the public are the ones pirating these films! That Fox Searchlight and a number of other distributors insists of harassing the people who come to see their films (mainly people they are hoping will promote the film by "word of mouth") is just absurd. This piracy hysteria continues to be out of hand and the distributors are ridiculously pissing off the very people who might promote the film for them. Whew. I fumed for 30 minutes and I hated the film. I still don't know if I hated it because it was bad or because I was so pissed off at the distributor.
So can I give you an honest evaluation of the film after the fuckers who are spending millions of dollars on it pissed me off so badly? I'll try.
The film often seems like an "SNL" skit that goes on for 80 minutes. The titular character is played by Jon Heder, a young man who seems to have taken this one unique and quirky character and physically and mentally embodied him. His performance reminded me very much of Heather Matarazzo in "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and I think it will be a long time before anyone can separate him from the role. But, in fact, the film is much to reminiscent of that Todd Solondz film. It's as if some kid who saw "Dollhouse" nine years ago when it was released grew up and decided to become a filmmaker.
But where "Dollhouse" was dark and cruel, "Napoleon Dynamite" is quirky and funny. Without a doubt there is much angst here but none of the excruciating dark underbelly that Solondz insists upon. This film was much more in common with Gilda Radner's Lisa Lupner than it does anything cryptic or cynical. Eventually, we grow to love Napoleon and our love of him does not go unrewarded by filmmaker Jared Hess, much as it might if Solondz were in charge here.
This is a film about life in the land of the nerdy and eventually you just begin to fall in love with its spirit and charm, even if it seems to be pretty much a one-note film with nothing particularly new or interesting in the script. Heder just cannot help but win you over. Watching him, we are reminded of so many of the nerds we knew in school, even if he is a complete exaggeration. Notice how Heder often has his eyes closed or nearly shut in the film. He isn't just acting, he is embodying a character. He IS Napoleon Dynamite.
The film has a real low-budg feel but that only helps to make it more charming. Although obviously set in modern day (there are cell phones, computers and discussions of Internet chatting in the film), the film has a real 80's retro feel to it. Set in Idaho, this feeling doesn't emerge as hip and cool but rather reflects that Midwestern small town feeling of being WAY behind the times.
In addition to Heder, several members of the cast are quite exceptional. Of course, most of these have been in films for quite a while with the exception of Aaron Ruell who is just perfect as Napoleon's equally nerdy older brother. Much 80's feel is gained from John Gries' Uncle Rico (who actually wants to go back in time to 1982). Meanwhile Tina Majorino, Emily Kennard, Haylie Duff (Hilary's sister), and Shondrealla Avery makes interesting feminine counterparts to the males in the film. The best counterpoint to Napoleon, however, comes in the form of his new Hispanic schoolmate Pedro, played wonderfully by Efren Ramirez. Ramirez is the only actor in the piece that matches the wonderful tone set by Heder, but then again he's the only actor who has to. Together this wonderful ensemble make the entire film, even with its loosely structured plot and script, come to life. They also make it often as funny as hell.
Damn those security Nazis for making me pissed of at the beginning of this film. I wanted to hate it. I just couldn't.
Notes:
Also with Diedrich Bader.
Written by Hess with his wife Jerusha. She also does costumes here.
Heder played a similar character who was named Seth in Hess' 2003 short "Peruca" which screened at Slamdance. This film premiered at Sundance in January 2004. Fox Searchlight acquired the film for distribution but is yet to set a date for its release.
Report Card
Script: C+
Acting: A+
Cinematography\Lighting: A+
Special Effects\Make Up: A+
Music: A+
Final Grade: A-
Rating: ******** [8 out of 10 stars]
Ever since Sundance 2004 we have been hearing raves about a little 80,000 dollar indie called Napoleon Dynamite. The film about a nerdy Idaho kid and his weird family and friends has been a hit at arthouses and online where fansites spout dialogue and debate the film's deeper meanings, if there are any. Finally after months and months of buzz this little indie that could is finally opening to wider audiences and you can believe the hype, Napoleon Dynamite is friggin' sweet.
Napoleon Dynamite is unique because it is essentially plotless. Jon Heder plays Napoleon, a highly unlikable, antisocial misfit with thick glasses, snow boots in summer and a shock of orange curly hair that looks like a David Lynch creation. His family is equally odd. His brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) is a mousy nerd who spends all his time on the net chatting with his "girlfriend." Both Kip and Napoleon are the type of guys who have girlfriends no one else has ever met.
Napoleon's uncle Rico (John Gries) is a traveling salesman who lives in his van and can't get over his high school memories of imagined football glory, he never actually got on the field. Then there is Napoleon's grandmother, unseen for most of the film after she is injured in an extreme sports accident. Napoleon's only friend is Pedro (Effren Ramirez), a new kid in town who seems shy and reserved but has no fear when asking out Summer (Haylie Duff), the most popular girl in school. She turns him down.
Despite being highly unlikable, Napoleon still attracts the attention of Deb (Tina Majorino) who sells crafts door to door and takes glamour shot photos. What she sees in Napoleon is anyone's guess, but hey it's a movie. It's not necessarily a romance but this is not necessarily a movie where any kind of conventional plot is involved.
The key to Napoleon Dynamite is getting through the rather dreary first 25 minutes of the film. Once you get past the introductions, writer/director Jared Hess quietly begins piling absurdity on top of absurdity until the film's climax, which is an absolute laugh riot of a dance sequence. The film is structured so that every odd detail leads to another and the laughter builds to the climax by which time you just can't stop laughing.
The whole thing is played completely serious. Deadpan is an understatement, every outlandish detail from Napoleon's hip hop dance lessons and Pedro's campaign for class President to Rico and Kip's time machine are all played without a hint of irony. There are plenty other quirky subplots like Kip's girlfriend, Deb's glamour shots and the school dance.
The strangeness extends to the film's setting, a small town in Idaho on the Utah border, which looks entirely stuck in the 80's. All of the characters, especially Napoleon, look as if they were aliens from 1983. The only way to tell the film is not from the 80's are references to the Internet and the film's unusual pop soundtrack. The timelessness is just another in a film overflowing with quirks.
Hess and his cast do not condescend to winking at the audience and that makes every layer of weirdness that much funnier. These characters are completely committed to every last bit of oddness in this story. Even Haylie Duff has a scene where her dignity is tossed to the wind and she plays it as straight as possible with no pop star pretension.
Jon Heder is terrific as Napoleon especially considering that he is never likable. Napoleon is rude, dull-witted and not the most handsome guy. He has zero social skills, it's truly a chore to root for him and yet by the film's climactic dance sequence you can't help but cheer him on. That is if you can stop laughing, which is hard.
Movies like Van Helsing or Day After Tomorrow may rake in big bucks but where those films are disposed of within days of their release, Napoleon Dynamite is the kind of cult phenomena that will be around for years to come. This one may not be for everyone but those who love will watch it again and again. I know I will.
Rating: *** [3 out of 4 stars]
In the "Director's Statement" that was distributed to the press at the Sundance Film Festival's screenings of this movie, cowriter-director Jared Hess's feature debut, Hess recalls, "One day on the streets of Chicago, I met an old Italian man who had the best name I've ever heard of in my life: Napoleon Dynamite. I decided then that it would be the title of my first feature film." Cute story, but a rather curious one to those of us who remember that the singer Elvis Costello was using the name Napoleon Dynamite as a playful alias back in 1986, when Hess was all of six years old. Well, maybe the old Italian guy was a big Costello fan. Or maybe Costello himself met the old Italian guy on the streets of Chicago and stole his name! Or maybe Hess is completely full of it!
I probably shouldn't be so hard on Hess--a superegoless instinct for self-promotion is something of a necessity for fledgling filmmakers today. The more germane issue is that, as catchy a movie title as it makes, Napoleon Dynamite is a rather inapt name for this picture's title character (played by newcomer Jon Heder), a swizzle-stick towhead teen geek whose eyeglass frames are wider than his shoulders and whose open-mouthed gape is so constant that you'd be surprised he doesn't pull whole flies from between his teeth when he flosses. Like all of the other principals in this film, Napoleon is not unlike a cartoon character. And here's where the good news starts.
Contrary to any reports that the flat midwestern milieu and outlandish characters of this high-school--outcast--makes--sort-of-good movie bear any resemblance to the work of Todd Solondz or Wes Anderson or any other live-action filmmaker, Napoleon Dynamite is doing something completely different. While Solondz's world is a hell hole and Anderson's Rushmore is a place of high-toned and often poignant whimsy, Napoleon Dynamite's unceasing burlesque creates a world that is pretty much a cartoon--and it's a damn funny cartoon to boot. Its goofy characterizations and nonsensical sight gags may not hew to the Aristotelian unities, or have anything to do with The Way We Live Now (it's hard to believe, for example, that any high school in the country, be it in a red state or a blue one, is as thoroughly devoid of sexual intrigue as the one depicted here), but by golly, they did make me laugh. And as Roger Ebert once observed, when you're reviewing comedies, the only thing that really counts is whether they're funny. (I'll admit for the record that I thought Home Alone was pretty damn hilarious the first time I saw it.) Napoleon Dynamite is, finally, too funny for me to stay ticked off at--funny enough that I'll refrain from describing the gags that made me laugh, lest I spoil them for you.
Grade: B+
Rating: *** [3 out of 5 stars]
SUNDANCE REVIEW
Napoleon Dynamite lives in a rural town of Preston, Idaho, and though I did not always appreciate this film's humor, there is no doubt that Napoleon will be remembered as one of the more memorable screen characters in recent memory. "With a tight red Œfro, some sweet moon boots, and illegal government ninja moves, he is a new kind of hero." Hard to disagree, this is as a unique a teen comedy I've seen, and one that I respect. It got its laughs with some stupid and sophomoric stunts, but it never was lewd or disgusting. I don't recall too much profanity, if any. This is a story of Geek, Geeker, and Geekest. I'm still not sure who is the geekiest. Napoleon's family consists of his loser geek brother Kip, who is looking for love in online chat rooms; Uncle Rico, who, like almost everyone else, is stuck in the 80s when he was a high school football star; and Grandma, who enjoys going out to the dunes on her quad-runner. When his friend Pedro decides to run for class president, they must defeat ever popular cheerleader, stuck on herself, Summer Wheatley. Jon Heder gives a truly awe-inspiring performance as the titular character. Writer-director Jared Hess and co-writer wife Jerusha Hess deserve recognition for a truly unique and in the end heartwarming story, though one you have to be willing to open up to and take the good with the bad
Rating: * [1 out of 5 stars]
Five minutes into Napoleon Dynamite, and I'd already had it. The slack-jawed main character, the dead-eyed supporting cast, the monosyllabic dialogue, Jon Gries wearing seventies porno-chic jumpsuits with fake cleavage sewn on and hair that looks like it belongs to Erik Estrada circa "ChiPs"--all add up to what seems like the longest Sprite commercial ever.
The title character (Heder) lives in Preston, Idaho, with his grandmother (who's into dune buggies) and his 31-year-old unemployed brother, Kip (Ruell), who spends his time chatting with his chat room girlfriend, LaFawnduh. Sporting a red 'fro and soda bottle-glasses, Napoleon Dynamite ambles down streets and hallways doing anything but living up to his name. Tall and lanky, like one of those clowns on stilts, he hardly looks like a "Napoleon." Always peering out from half-closed eyes, playing tetherball by himself, or standing in the middle of a room with his mouth hanging open, he's hardly dynamite, either. And yet, he's strangely confident, fully self-possessed as if he were in on a joke that could never hope to make sense to the rest of the world.
When his grandmother is injured in a dune buggy accident, Napoleon's uncle (Gries--re: those outfits? My god.) moves in with them. Uncle Rico is one of those entrepreneur-wannabes without capital or business sense but a stubborn pipe dream of striking it rich. His plan of action? Door-to-door sales. He recruits a reluctant Kip to sell plastic bowl sets (kind of reminds you of a certain scheme that rhymes with "Flupperware," yeah?), and the expected hijinks proceed.
Meanwhile, Napoleon has become friends with a new student, Pedro (Ramirez, giving Heder a run for his money in the sleepwalking department). After his request to go to the school dance with cheerleader Summer (Duff, giving the best, least mannered performance in the film) is denied--she gives him a coy note with the word "NO!" scrawled inside--Pedro decides to run against her in the class presidential election. With the help of Napoleon and Deb (Majorino), a mopey local girl who sells homemade weave bracelets to save up money for college, Pedro mounts his campaign.
What follows is yet another the-geeks-will-inherit-the-earth story whose stiffness is matched only by the characters on screen. Napoleon Dynamite feels like a vaudeville routine put on by a group of sixth graders. The players are smart enough to get the humor, just not observant enough to understand the concept of nuance. Everyone speaks in an uninspired somnambulistic style, as if they think they invented the notion of the Teenage Wasteland. Heder's Napoleon may bring to mind Bill Haverchuck from TV's "Freaks and Geeks," except without Bill's emotional depth or the joy in Martin Starr's performance. "Freaks and Geeks" also cared for its characters. I'm sure Napoleon's director, Jared Hess cares as much about his, but it doesn't show. Napoleon Dynamite acts like it's a shrine to misfit culture, but the key ingredient that's missing is empathy. Hess seems more interested in fitting as many non-sequiturs and sight gags into his film than in giving us characters or a story that has any emotional bite to it. So the picture limps along, not quite billing itself as a stoner comedy but definitely targeting that audience. Thing is, stoner comedy, when done right, is gold. It's when the movie itself is as stoned as its audience that a problem arises. And Napoleon Dynamite is the thousand-yard stare in movie form.
Moral Rating: Good
Moviemaking Quality: **** [4 stars out of 5]
Primary Audience: Teens
Expecting a film about the nineteenth century French emperor? If so, the movie could entail a fabricated story about how the fascist leader tried unsuccessfully to invent explosives. But the title of that flick would be "Napoleon Blownapart." No, Napoleon Dynamite is a totally new, modern character, and as authentic and uniquely drawn as the film that is named after him. In this forum, you'll be infused with independent cinema and explode with laughter.
Perhaps adhering to the idea that it's "chic to be geek," newbe director, Jared Hess, has spared no expense in celebrating his anti-hero, Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), a completely socially inept high school student in a small Idahoan town. Napoleon lives with his gruff, four-wheeling grandmother (Sandy Martin) and his thirty-two year old effeminate brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), and is the epitome of the passé idea of "nerd." Centered around typical teenage issues involving high school dances, student government elections and frustrated adolescent love, the uncomplicated plot is clearly a platform to highlight the quirkoholic character Napoleon.
As conventional as some of the story choices are, they work, and the film is so well built with other refreshingly original choices that it's nothing to scoff at. Beyond his name, Napoleon amuses us with his usual abrasive tone and fantastic stories. In the locker room, the jocks pick on him and ask what he did last summer. He irritatingly replies, "I told you, I was hunting wolverines with my uncle in Alaska!" Also entertaining is Kip's relationship with his internet girlfriend, LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), and Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who comes to be guardian over Kip and Napoleon while their grandma is away. And their karate lesson at the local dojo gives us more to laugh at.
As raw as this film is, the cleanliness is quite incomparable to most contemporary comedies. At no point was any cuss word detected. The closest it comes is when Napoleon is frustrated and adds in a "freakin'" or "flippin'" to what he says. The most offensive thing might be a business Uncle Rico starts later, working with breast enhancers. It is only mentioned a couple of times and over the course of the film as we have learned to dislike Uncle Rico, our distaste for him is associated with this business. This film does not try to be anything other than it is: a newfangled, straightforward comedy to incite honest laughter.
With blatant attempts to make us laugh, there are a few moments where we hit our head on the ceiling of the humor. Still, the reason we can find Napoleon so amusing is because, to some degree, we might identify with being the outcast or with the awkward adolescent era of our lives. Underneath all of the mockery, we can have sympathy for people like Napoleon struggling to find acceptance and their place in this world. Where Gus van Saint's "Elephant" might be a depiction of the tragedy of high school misfits, Napoleon Dynamite is the comedy. And the ending is capped off with a euphoric experience that leaves you uplifted.
Violence: None / Profanity: Minor / Sex & Nudity: Minor
Producer's Synopsis: "From Preston, Idaho comes Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), a new kind of hero complete with a tight red Œfro, some sweet moon boots, and skills that can't be topped. Napoleon lives with his Grandma (Sandy Martin) and his 30-year-old, unemployed brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who spends his days looking for love in Internet chat rooms. When Grandma hits the road on her quad runner, Napoleon and Kip's meddling Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) comes to town to stay with them and ruin their lives.
Napoleon is left to his own devices to impress the chicks at school and help his new best friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez) win the election for Student Body President against the stuck-up Summer Wheatley (Haylie Duff); all the while making sure to feed Grandma's pet llama Tina, and avoiding association with Uncle Rico and the herbal breast enhancers he sells door to door. Napoleon and Pedro put their skills and knowledge of piñatas, cows and drawing to good use, but it is a surprise talent that leads the two to triumph in the end."
Rating: ** 1/2 [2.5 out of 4 stars]
Try to remember the biggest dork you have ever met, multiply the dorkiness another ten times, and then you would have Napoleon Dynamite. Jon Heder needs to prepare himself for cult icon status. His portrayal of Napoleon Dynamite will cement him in film history as the greatest dork ever put on celluloid. I laughed at every single thing that Napoleon said and did. It's such an original character. Jared Hess, the film's writer and director, comes out of the gate blazing with his first film. It's flawed, but refreshingly creative. It reminds me of the first time I saw Wes Anderson's Rushmore. The stroke of brilliance is there, waiting to be fully realized.
Napoleon is tall and lanky, with a curly red afro parted down the middle, and wears salvation army t-shirts with parachute pants and snow boots. He lives with his brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) and grandmother in the farming town of Preston, Idaho. Kip is thirty-two and spends all day in internet chat rooms talking to chicks. Their grandmother races dirt bikes and has a pet llama in the backyard. Napoleon is the outcast and biggest dork in his high school. He spends his time drawing pictures, honing his nunchuck skills, and telling stories of hunting wolverines. Napoleon's grandmother breaks her coccyx, that's the ass bone if you're wondering, and his Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) comes to look after the boys. Rico is permanently stuck in 1982. He believes life would have been much better if he'd been put in the big high school championship football game. Now he lives in a van and spends all his time selling tupperware and breast enhancement products door-to-door.
Napoleon's world is turned upside down by two new friends. Deb (Tina Marjorino) is a fellow classmate that sells keychains, does manicures, and shoots glamour shots to raise money for college. Pedro (Efren Martinez) has just migrated from Mexico. He doesn't say much, but wants to ask out the hottest girl in school and run for class president. Napoleon becomes Pedro's best friend, and with Deb's help, tries to get Pedro elected. Meanwhile, Kip is finally meeting his internet girlfriend, Lafawnda, and Uncle Rico is going crazy with his harebrained schemes.
The film is all about the characters. The plot is just a secondary device used to peer into their peculiar lives. They are strange in every way imaginable. The fun comes from watching these weird people go about their lives in this dinky little town. It's not mean-spirited or cruel. In fact, you root for everyone to succeed, even Uncle Rico. Their interaction with each other and the setting is hilarious. It's almost as if these people could only come from a desolate place like Preston, Idaho. It's like looking into a warped, alternate universe.
Jared Hess focuses a lot of attention on specific looks for each character. He makes their outward appearance reflect what they're like inside. I think this is brilliantly done. One look at Napoleon and his cohorts easily gives away their personalities. No one has any deep revelations. What you see is what you get. That kind of honesty makes the film incredibly entertaining. Napoleon would have been such a letdown if he had some great epiphany. Doesn't happen, he's a dork to the bone and it permeates everything he does. He is a nice guy, as are his friends, they genuinely care for each other, but go about it in their own unique ways.
It's hard to describe just how funny this film is. It has to be seen and experienced. I thought it was wildly creative. Others have complained that the story is lacking. I disagree, what happens in the film is not supposed to be earth shattering. It's a high school kid dealing with his friends and family. What makes it work is just how different the kid, friends, and family are. Napoleon's goofy sayings are stuck in my head. I find myself saying stuff like "friggin sweet" in normal conversation. The mark of a good film is what you take from it and I'm still uttering Napoleonisms two weeks later.
Rating: * 1/2 [1.5 out of 4 stars]
"Napoleon Dynamite" is an example of a curious modern phenomenon: films that seem designed to attract a cult. It's as if immediate commercial success would somehow foul up the marketing plan.
But it's hard to imagine just who the audience for this would-be comedy might be - unless it's people who enjoy making fun of clueless geeks.
Red-headed, awkward and intermittently surly, Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is a teenager whose days consist of being barely tolerated by his family and largely misunderstood by everyone else. His only friends are Deb (Tina Majorino), a sad-eyed girl with whom he's smitten, and Pedro (Efren Ramirez), a Latino classmate whose ambition he admires.
The plot, such as it is, involves Napoleon's efforts to cope with his geeky brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who's constantly cruising the Internet for potential sexual liaisons, and their Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), an oily character who, rather improbably, hawks a breast-enlargement concoction door-to-door.
The story doesn't come to a conclusion - it just stops. Nothing is resolved. Some might argue that, through his actions in the course of the narrative, Napoleon scores a small triumph. But an equally persuasive argument could be made that he merely experiences a brief respite from his ongoing misery.
Heder can't be faulted. He throws himself into his thankless role with such exuberance that he almost salvages it. But as the saying goes, if it's not on the page, it's not on the stage.
It's possible that Jared Hess, the film's director, sought to explore territory similar to that of Terry Zwigoff's "Ghost World" and Todd Solondz's "Welcome to the Dollhouse." But those films made clear, provocative statements about modern American life, and their humor was humane. Zwigoff was commenting on the emptiness of consumer culture and its impact on personal relationships. Solondz gave us a vision of the suburbs that was far more disturbing than the slick sentiments of "American Beauty."
In contrast, "Napoleon Dynamite" is little more than a bitter and ineffectual joke. Indeed, there's something pathetic about the film.
True, you may laugh. But ask yourself: Are you laughing at the situation or at the characters? Is your laughter good-natured or malicious? And is it any different than the laughter that, in the world of the film, causes the characters pain?
Rating: 7 out of 10
Story:
At Idaho's Preston High School, Napoleon Dynamite is the weirdest kid in class with his red afro, strange attire and a penchant for one-man tetherball and drawing mythical creatures. His odd family and the school bullies make his life miserable until he befriends a quiet Mexican boy named Pedro and a shy girl with hobbies as strange as his own. The question is whether Napoleon can rise above his geek status to achieve something great, like getting Pedro elected class president.
Analysis:
The Sundance Film Festival is having a good year. This year's festival has already introduced an impressive array of unique and quirky films, and Jared Hess' Napoleon Dynamite can be added to the list of Sundance discoveries.
Like Mean Girls and Saved!, this is another comedic look at the lives of high school teens, this time from the viewpoint of a rather strange kid from the Pacific Northwest. Napoleon-we assume that is his real name-is a guy out of time and place, living in a world that doesn't appreciate his "skills", which include telling the deficiencies in milk from taste. Determined to be himself, he suffers from the misery of living in a town made up of characters right out of "King of the Hill": his effeminate brother Kip chats online with an Internet sweetie; his womanizing Uncle Rico is a complete loon, stuck in the past with a football win that remains the high point of his life. When the two of them start working on a get-rich-quick door-to-door sales scam involving Tupperware, it's a bit too much for Napoleon.
Napoleon Dynamite may be one of this year's great oddball character, like something from a "Saturday Night Live" or "SCTV" sketch, and possibly one of the strangest movie characters since Jason Schwartzman's compulsive geek in Wes Anderson's Rushmore. This odd protagonist is brought to life by Jon Heder, a talented new discovery, who brings just the right amount of boredom and deadpan delivery to make it seem like he really is the normal one in the crazy world around him. His character doesn't necessarily evolve, as much as the viewer begins to buy into his delusions of grandeur as they develop over the course of the movie. His proclamations that something is "sweet!" or someone is a "frickin' idiot" becomes almost endearing after awhile, threatening to become instant catch phrases. Heder is also a talented physical comedian, making every pratfall work that much better, and though you're always laughing at him rather than with him, he makes the part and the movie work.
Rico (Jon Gries) and Kip (Aaron Ruell), steal many of the scenes with their over-the-top performances, and though you would never believe that these three could possibly be related, it makes Napoleon's situation more outrageous and his frustration more deserved. Some of the scenes between the three will have you crying with laughter--Rico's "time machine" that he bought online, Kip's finally meeting his sweetie and going through a startling transformation-and the physical comedy is excellent.
Despite the abundance of laughs, Napoleon Dynamite gets a bit tepid after awhile due to its banal dialogue and stiff performances. Much of this may be intentional to emphasize the humor of the slow, lazy town, but the majority of the characters are base stereotypes. Napoleon's friend Pedro is the worst of the lot and could be potentially offensive to Mexicans, while Tina Majorina's Deb is barely awake in most of her scenes. Hillary Duff's sister Haylie plays the obligatory popular cheerleader type who runs against Pedro for class president and treats the outcasts with suitable scorn, but that part of the story is played down. Blink and you may miss "Third Rock from the Sun" star Diedrich Bader in a small and forgettable role as an inept martial arts instructor, who is completely unnecessary to the script. None of these might be considered great "performances" as much as small town stereotypes thrown into odd situations.
The movie's originality and weirdness is charming at first, but once it gets into a set pattern, it's not nearly as surprising or entertaining. Too often, it turns its back on the intelligence and cleverness of similar movies in favor of cheap laughs. Most of the humor comes from throwing Napoleon into a number of awkward situations to see how he deals with them, and essentially, the movie is a bunch of vignettes with a minimal overlaying story. There are a lot of funny ideas in play, but the whole thing is a bit hit or miss. For every visual gag that get laughs, there are two more that don't work. Many of the situations are far too outlandish to seem real.
The biggest shame is that the movie resorts to the "win them over" performance ending that has been used in every "outcast" movie from Revenge of the Nerds to About a Boy. At first, Napoleon's climactic dance routine is amusing, but the humor is short-lived and the reaction of the school, immediately accepting him due to his dance "skills" is so contrived and unbelievable that it ruins any enjoyment of the usual "weird guys wins them over" ending.
The Bottom Line:
Napoleon Dynamite, the movie, is a weird and often hilariously funny movie, and the same can be said about Napoleon Dynamite, the person, thanks to Jon Heder's entertaining performance. The lack of a cohesive story and the disjointed way the segments are assembled lessens the impact when compared to some of the more clever high school movies. Still, if you were the awkward outsider in high school, the movie will take you back to those days and help you realize that maybe things weren't so bad back then, and that alone is worth more than a few hearty laughs.
Napoleon Dynamite is more than a nerd -- he's the literal embodiment of the term; he's the eternal nerd. The jocks at his Preston, Idaho school joylessly give him noogies and slam him into his locker as if it was their daily obligation to do so. Napoleon reacts, as real nerds do, with a sense of righteous indignation -- he huffs and puffs and kicks at the air in frustration. At home, when his eccentric grandmother asks about his day he responds with a petulant, "It was the worst day of my life, okay?!!" It's business as usual in his world, but he never really seems defeated.
This is the kind of movie that wears its pedigree a little too obviously; Napoleon Dynamite is the love child of Pee Wee Herman and Dawn Wiener from Welcome to the Dollhouse. It's a pretty funny movie but it's also a bit of a robot-baby, written as if by a Sundance savvy "scriptomatic" (insert eccentricity here: Napoleon has a pet lama named Tina!) and is directed by Jared Hess as if he were channelling the deadpan wit of Wes Anderson.
Napoleon Dynamite may be a tad too calculating for its own good, but it has its own pleasures too. Hess has an eye for a good visual joke. Napoleon sketches away like a ten-year-old drawing a creature called a "liger" -- a combination of a lion and a tiger "bred for its skills and magic." And there's a soaring tetherball scene at the end that builds to an ecstatic finish.
Along the way the movie hits all the marks that goose our emotions a little as well. There's a prom scene that's kind of touching without being cloying (the song? Alphaville's icky classic "Forever Young"), and there's an assembly scene where a supremely confident Napoleon gets to display his "skills" and win over the hearts of his schoolmates. That's the charm of this movie: Napoleon is an archetypal loser who never once doubts that he's something of a hero and deserves to get the girl in the end.
Le recours aux farces grasses est-il l'unique pré-requis auquel un film doit répondre pour être classé dans la catégorie comédie? À voir Napoleon Dynamite, le dernier gagnant au US Comedy Arts Festival qui a aussi fait un tabac à Sundance, il faut se rendre à la triste conclusion que oui... Ce film indépendant qui marque les débuts du jeune Jared Hess dans le monde du long métrage constitue une suite de gags tout aussi prévisibles que primaires.
Véritable symbole du degré infini que peut atteindre la stupidité humaine, Napoleon (Jon Heder, air lobotomisé en permanence) vit à Preston, petite ville de l'Idaho, où les démonstrations Tupperware et les lamas domestiqués sont monnaie courante. Autour de lui gravite une kyrielle de personnages menant des existences toutes plus pathétiques les unes que les autres. Arborant afros surdimensionnés, moulés dans d'atroces vêtements fluorescents et affublés d'immenses lunettes teintées, ils semblent tout droit sortis des années 70, un écart temporel qui ne suffit guère à justifier leurs sévères lacunes au niveau psychologique. De l'oncle pervers (Jon Gries, repoussant à souhait) qui vend des pilules destinées à augmenter la masse mammaire de ses clientes, à Pedro (Efren Ramirez, peu loquace), l'étudiant étranger qui courtise tout ce qui bouge, en passant par Deb (Tina Majorino, étonnamment juste), l'élève rejetée qui se consume d'amour pour le héros, tous les protagonistes sont inspirés par des clichés obsolètes à l'extrême. Ce détail ne semble toutefois pas déplaire aux acteurs qui s'accommodent avec un plaisir évident de rôles dénués de profondeur.
Malheureusement, leur contentement ne suffit pas à détourner l'attention du public de la futilité du propos. Certaines expressions originales, quelques chorégraphies absurdes et deux ou trois gags parviennent à nous soutirer un semblant de sourire, mais l'ensemble reste lourd à digérer - à l'image de cette bouffe de cafétéria envers laquelle Hess semble nourrir une véritable obsession et qu'il nous sert constamment en gros plans. Délire entre jeunes adultes nostalgiques ou portrait d'une Amérique qui se repaît de plus en plus de son ignorance? Difficile de dire ce qui qualifie le mieux ce croisement entre American Pie et Beavis and Butthead. Chose sûre, cette glorification de la bêtise a de quoi désillusionner l'humaniste le plus acharné...
Rating: $$$$ [4 out of 5]
If you're seeking a summertime diversion from the blockbuster mode (a la last year's "Bend It Like Beckham"), look no further than "Napoleon Dynamite," a quaint, quirky and surprisingly skilled feature from first-time director Jared Hess.
Written by Hess and wife Jerusha, shot for some $200,000 in a vast on-screen nothingness that apparently is Idaho, this is an odd but honest and somewhat tragicomedy about a kid who just doesn't fit in. Napoleon, played in a breakthrough understatement by Jon Heder, is a monument to awkwardness and a treatise in dysfunction. Geeky and gawky, he's an easy mark for crushing against a locker amid the traffic of a highschool hallway.
It's a friendship with Pedro (Efren Ramirez), every bit the outcast himself, that spawns a tad of brightness in Napoleon. In turn, Pedro's campaign for class president against the coolest of the cool girls (Haylie Duff, faring better than kid sister Hilary of "A Cinderella Story") "releases" Napoleon and fuels the laugh-out-loud humor which Hess captures in brief, bright and sometimes brilliant doses.
The climax, though a stretch, puts Napoleon literally in the spotlight, and Heder responds with an unquestionably strange but undeniably poignant moment. It's simply dynamite, befitting this little "Napoleon" of soon-to-be-fame."
Every high school has them: those kids who seem lost in their own world, tragically unhip and perpetually excluded from the ranks of the beautiful and athletic. Napoleon Dynamite paints a quirky, satirical portrait of "them" as they try to make the most of their low-key lives in the rural community of Preston, Idaho.
The opening scene sets the stage for what we can expect from the film's antihero, Napoleon Dynamite. On the bus to school, Napoleon surreptitiously ties fishing line to a plastic action figure and tosses it out the window. He gleefully trolls the plastic hero behind the bus--for no apparent reason other than the joy of simpleminded (and typically harmless) mischief.
The gangly, bespectacled Napoleon, who is the quintessential object of derision for the popular crowd, then proceeds to meander through a random series of seemingly meaningless vignettes involving his friends, Deb (a budding photographer with a nearly imperceptible crush on Napoleon) and Pedro (who is almost completely devoid of personality, yet decides to run for class president), and his older brother, Kip (a 32-year-old chat room junkie who still lives at home). Each character is focused on a particular, if modest, goal, and each must endure the mockery of those who oppose them. In addition to the jocks and popular kids, Napoleon also squares off against his Uncle Rico, a sadly misguided character who's living in the past (1982, to be precise) and who seems determined to thwart Napoleon's best efforts.
One typical--hilarious--scene has Napoleon lamenting his inability to attract girls because he lacks "skills": "Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills. You know, like nunchuck skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills." Pedro reminds him that he likes to draw, and suggests that Napoleon sketch a portrait of the girl he wants to ask to the dance--putting his skills to work.
Positive Elements
Napoleon Dynamite offers many opportunities to laugh heartily at (with?) its underwhelming characters. It also invites us to identify with their determination to take risks in pursuit of what they want in life. Their progress is modest, but real--just as is often the case in our lives.
Napoleon has a taste for unfashionable T-shirts with animals on them. One such shirt has the word "Endurance" emblazoned over the top of a faded horse graphic. One suspects that endurance might be the primary subtext in the film, as each of the four main characters perseveres through ridicule, scorn and mockery in their respective pursuits.
Spiritual Content
Pedro comes from a Catholic home, and the family's house is full of pictures of Jesus and Mary. Napoleon mentions magic twice in passing; his favorite animal is a "liger." "It's like a lion and tiger mixed," he says, "bred for its skills in magic." He claims that a wizard's magic spell protects the Loch Ness Monster.
Sexual Content
The film doesn't have any overt sexual content. One of Uncle Rico's money-making schemes, however, is "Bust Must," an herbal breast-enlargement product. Rico pitches his product to an older woman named Starla, but also to Napoleon's high-school classmates Summer, Trisha and Deb. (The scenes with Rico interacting with high school girls about their breast size have a creepy, inappropriate feel.)
Violent Content
Napoleon tries to ride Pedro's mountain bike over a jump, but the ramp collapses, and Napoleon rams his groin into the handlebars as he goes down. Napoleon's grandmother rides over a sand dune ridge on her ATV, flying off the back of it.
Napoleon and several other "nerdy" characters are frequently harassed by the jocks at their high school. These bullies slam Napoleon up against his locker, put him in a headlock, and generally push him around. One jock does the same thing to another geeky student, putting him in a head lock until he coughs up 50 cents. Later, the same bully tries to intimidate that student into letting him "borrow" his bike.
Kip is convinced that he's a karate master and asks Napoleon to hit him. Napoleon offers a weak jab that Kip blocks, then kicks him in return. When Kip doesn't expect it, Napoleon slaps him in the face. Later, Napoleon puts Kip in a headlock while they're wrestling. Napoleon and Kip check out Rex Kwon Do's karate school after seeing a commercial for it on TV where the martial arts master disarms an assailant with a gun. At the karate school, Rex humiliates Kip by blocking Kip's lame attacks and showing the students how to strike back.
Uncle Rico flings a half-eaten steak at Napoleon, hitting him in the face. Napoleon hurls a grapefruit at Rico's van, then at Rico himself. The two then begin wrestling on the ground, and Napoleon elbows Rico in the chest to get away from him.
Rex Kwon Do pummels Rico. (Sounds of the encounter are all moviegoers experience; the camera retreats to the front of the house.) A farmer shoots a cow, horrifying a passing busload of schoolchildren.
Crude or Profane Language
Napoleon frequently uses exclamations such as "gosh," "jeez," "freakin'," "crap" and "heck." One character talks about being "p---ed off." Napoleon intones, "There's like a butt-load of gangs at this school," calls people "idiots" several times and says, "You guys are retarded."
Drug and Alcohol Content
None.
Other Negative Elements
Uncle Rico is duped by an Internet offer selling a time machine. The machine consists of a control box, an electrified headband and a T-shaped plunger that the user puts between his legs. Both Rico and Napoleon find out the hard way that time travel isn't real but electricity is, a lesson that leaves them limping.
Napoleon is prone to lying and storytelling. Responding to a classmate's inquiry about what he did over summer break, Napoleon responds, "I spent it with my uncle in Alaska hunting wolverines." Later, Napoleon brags to Pedro, "This one gang kept wanting me to join because I'm pretty good with a bowstaff." And when Deb gives him a picture of a woman she's photographed as an example of the kind of work she does, Napoleon keeps the photo and tells Pedro that it's his girlfriend from Oklahoma.
Conclusion
Napoleon Dynamite is an odd yet appealing and funny film. On the surface it appears to be just one more iteration of the popular Revenge of the Nerds theme: misfit kids banding together to throw off the oppression of those who are stronger, more beautiful and more popular. Underneath, it's less about battling the privileged than about four kids trying to make their own unique way in the world.
Likewise, it's a typical teen movie. And yet it isn't. Some of the standard features are very much in place: the odd-kid-out looking for his place in the world, and popular teens mercilessly harassing the geeks. But that's where the formula ends. Other elements that countless teen movies have programmed us to expect--profanity, flagrantly rebellious behavior, sexual exploits and unbelievable plot twists--are absent from this curiously un-edgy film. Call it the anti-teen movie.
Yes, it does go for some easy, slapstick laughs at the characters' expense. But at the same time it exudes a knowing self-awareness. For example, Napoleon Dynamite might be the most misnamed character in the history of cinema. It would be hard for Napoleon to have less in common with his namesake, the French emperor and would-be conqueror of Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte. In contrast, Napoleon Dynamite's gentle goofiness marks him as a social pariah. Dynamite he is isn't. His very name is a wink at the audience, a clue for how to watch.
I don't believe the filmmakers intended their work to be taken at face value. Instead, we are to recognize that these characters are creative caricatures. We all know these people, somehow. Thus, Napoleon Dynamite becomes an everyman whom we can all relate to. We laugh at his idiosyncrasies even as we realize that we may be blind to some of our own. What could be a mean-spirited film picking on hopelessly unaware nerds is actually very aware of who these characters are--and we root for them. Napoleon Dynamite is hip precisely because its makers are aware of how unhip it is. We're not invited into the film's world to mock these characters--though some desensitized teens and twentysomethings may well do so--but to relate to them and use them to reflect on our own foibles, and our own dreams and goals.
That said, Napoleon Dynamite is a cult comedy classic in the making (it could easily take on a Monty Python--like mythos), and it elevates geek chic to a whole new level. It doesn't, however, exalt geekiness as much as it lauds the idea of being who you are. In the words of the movie's tagline, "He's out to prove he's got nothing to prove."
Napoleon Dynamite... dud or plenty of bang for your buck, you decide. Either way you see it, Napoleon Dynamite is bound to be a cult-classic before long, due to the vivid characters and memorable quotes that Director Jared Hess has laid out for us. That said, I hardly recommend this movie to everyone who enjoys a good indie comedy some people won't get it. But to those of you who grew up with sci-fi games, insane relatives, chat rooms, low self-esteem, public high school, a rural community, or had friends as a teen who only knew "hip" as a body part, go see this movie.. right now! For the most part, Napoleon Dynamite is a typical teen comedy spoof about an ill-fitting, delusional teenage boy trying to live his life in a small Idaho town. The movie rolls through various cuts of comical situations that surround his family, friends, foes and his own sweet skills. You shouldn't expect a well-developed plot, a moral to the story, or even a common theme.. unless mundane can be considered so. What you should expect however, is to be warmly entertained, experience moments of reflection back upon your own geekish moments of yester-years, and to gush forth at least a chuckle a minute (which is 82 if you're counting.. GOSH!). Simply put, I loved this film. And since it revolves solely around the characters, so shall this review.
Napoleon Dynamite (played by Jon Heder), sets your tongue firmly in cheek from the moment you see him. He's a tall, four-eyed, gangly, red afro'd geek, who wears pegasus t-shirts, has high-water pants and some sweet moon boots. Poor Napoleon lives with his grandma and older brother Kip in a semi-rural house in Preston, Idaho. And somewhere within his trials, tribulations, drawings, milk tastings, need for chapstick, Gatorade chugging and sweet dance moves.. you will either take a liking to him or want to pound Napoleon against the lockers like the rest of the bullies.
Napoleon's brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) takes geekdom to a whole new, creepy level. Not only is he in his 30's and living at home, but he has greasy hair, wears glasses that give him a Bill Gates"ish" look, has braces, a bad lisp, and stays home and eats chips while spending hours on his computer chatting with "serious babes" in Internet chatrooms. Besides, everyone knows he's training to be a cage fighter.
The brothers' grandma (Sandy Martin) makes an early exit from the film after she takes off on a mysterious trip, only to land herself in the hospital over an ATV incident in the sand dunes.
Unfortunately for them, this means that Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who "would have taken State back in '82 if the coach would have only put him in", moves in to watch over the boys. A splendid character, Uncle Rico is a portrait of self-fascination who consequently eats their steaks, sells tupperware and breast enhancement products, buys a time machine on the Internet and makes videotapes of himself throwing the football to relive his never-was glory days.
As the movie progresses, Napoleon finds a friend in the new slow-speaking kid at school, Pedro (Efren Ramirez). Pedro, who is the only student who can grow a moustache, is a shining co-star in this movie as he makes his run at class president. And at some point in the midst of him shaving his head, "building" a cake to ask the hottest girl in the school out to prom, making a pinata of his election opponent, and having a sweet bike with pegs and a Mexican flag on it, it hits you.. wait a minute, I remember Pedro.. he was Speedy Gonzalez's cousin! The resemblance is uncanny, but then again, that Pedro never "offered you his protection".
Meanwhile, fellow gal geek Deb (Tina Majorino) provides glamour shots of our guys, sells boondoggle keychains for college, makes her own dresses and wears a one-sided ponytail. While not as comical as the rest of the gang, this works for the audience as she does provide some balance and well-needed film bouyancy at times when you fear the story might begin faltering with too many whacky characters in one cast.
Other memorable appearances include: LaFawnduh - Kip's Internet jungle-love girlfriend who arrives for a visit from Detroit. She also does a number on him and transforms him into a super fly, dew rag wearin' playa with a little bling-bling. Is there a jab here at Eminem? Or a similarity to Bringing Down the House? I thought so, but you be the judge.Tina - The family llama who eats left-overs. Napoleon hates her.Rex - The founder of Rex Kwan Do, a hilarious must-see bit of this movie. Part played by Diedrich Bader (Drew Carey Show, Office Space, etc). Summer - The requisite hot chick (Haylie Duff), that like in all nerd movies, we learn to hate because she's self-centered and will ultimately fall to the power of the geeks.
Be it the characters, the comedy, or the sweet skills, somehow Jared Hess makes this movie work. The many farcical moments in this film play out one after another, culminating in the marriage of Kip and LaFawnduh.. which seems an odd end to a tale mostly about Napoleon. Regardless, this movie was pure joy. And if you want a couple of extra laughs (Heck yes!), stick around until after the credits, for a bit more of the story. To me, any movie that you leave and quite continuously over the days thereafter, is a winner. All in all, Napoleon Dynamite is a refreshing film that is quickly headed to cult-classic status.. but I already told you that like infinity times, GOSH!!
Single Guy Cliff Notes: Guys, if you're dating a gal who loves guffawing comedy and is say, between 20 and 40, this is a good one for you. It's not littered with potty humor, it's not mushy or intellectual, it won't offend anyone, it's just a good, clean story about a geek getting by. And guaranteed, it will give you plenty to laugh about later. And if you're daring, try the "milk" line on her..
Drawing on such great flakes as W.C. Fields, Preston Sturges, and John Waters, a rarefied strain of cinema strives for utter nonsense. When it succeeds, it can be excruciatingly funny, like Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket, or merely excruciating, like Trent Harris's immortal Rubin and Ed. If this mini-genre were a facial expression, it would be slack-jawed and vacant-eyed and with a suggestion of something dark, twisted, and knowing deep within. Not unlike the title hero of Jared Hess's feature debut, which maintains its pure idiot savant inspiration with only occasional lapses into self-conscious inanity.
Napoleon (Jon Heder) is a nerd who undergoes the requisite hazing at his backwater Idaho high school, but all that seems negligible in the context of his absurd and unwholesome personal universe, which includes his minute, mustachio'd 31-year-old brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), who spends his time in a cyber chat room with unseen love LaFawnduh; his oddly Clintonesque Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who sells plastic dishware while seeking a time machine to return him to 1982 and the day his high-school football team lost the state championship with Rico on the bench; and his pal Pedro (Efren Ramirez), who has a killer bike and is the only kid in school with a moustache. Give it a kick in one direction or another and Napoleon Dynamite would fall into the darkness of David Lynch or the crudity of the Farrelly Brothers. As it is, it's one of a kind, and kind of a masterpiece.
Rating: A-III -- adults
Offbeat, low-budget comedy set in rural Idaho about the high school misadventures of an oddball, wooly-haired misfit (Jon Heder) who lives with his slacker older brother (Aaron Ruell) and cheesy uncle (Jon Gries), and who befriends a shy Mexican student (Efren Ramirez) running for class president against the school's reigning queen bee (Haylie Duff). First-time director Jared Hess' quirky film is light on plot, but Heder's deadpan performance makes this tender ode to eccentricity curiously amusing, if not wholly satisfying. Some comic violence, and a few instances of mildly crude language and sexual humor.
Full Review
"Napoleon Dynamite" (Fox Searchlight), an offbeat, low-budget comedy set in rural Idaho, details the high school misadventures of an oddball, wooly-haired misfit (Jon Heder) who lives with his slacker older brother (Aaron Ruell) and cheesy uncle (Jon Gries).
In first-time director Jared Hess' quirky film, the title character befriends a shy Mexican student (Efren Ramirez) running for class president against the school's reigning queen bee (Haylie Duff).
Although the film is light on plot, Heder's deadpan performance makes this tender ode to eccentricity curiously amusing, if not wholly satisfying.
Due to some comic violence and a few instances of mildly crude language and sexual humor, the USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is A-III -- adults. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG -- parental guidance suggested.
(2004), PG -- you will probably leave not certain whether you liked it or not.
Dry wit. Not much substance. Eighty-seven uneventful minutes except for a school dance and a student body president election. A retelling of the story of every nerd and every misfit in every high school rolled up into one -- Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) -- the king of "It ain't good enough, no matter what 'it' is." But Napoleon Dynamite can grow on you if your let it. If you watch it you will probably leave not certain whether you liked it or not while wanting to like it battles with the discomfort it left with you.
Napoleon lives with his "working" grandmother (Sandy Martin who has very little screentime). She traipses off to somewhere, leaving Napoleon's sleaze living-in-the-past Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) in charge of Napoleon and his equally misfit older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) who spends hours each day in Internet chatrooms, building himself into anything he dreams of being.
Napoleon is at the very bottom of the social totem pole, subject to intense and frequent ridicule and physical tormenting. Napoleon has but one friend ... the new kid Pedro (Efren Ramirez). One of the popular girls, Summer (Haylie Duff) runs for class president. As a social warfare maneuver, Napoleon convinces Pedro to run against Summer. After a speech by each candidate a little skit is required of the candidates. Napoleon and Pedro did not know this. Caught unprepared, Napoleon decided to do a dance routine he had just learned by watching a video tape. It proved more helpful to Pedro's campaign than Pedro's speech. And Napoleon finds a girlfriend, Deb (Tina Majorino).
Napoleon Dynamite is rated PG for thematic elements (whatever that means) and language. With a final CAP score of 71 it earns a place among the scores earned by PG movies in the comparative baseline database (86 to 68 out of 100) but in the lower half of the scoring range, making it a "hard" PG. The only uses of the three/four letter word vocabulary I could find in the cut I saw was the conversational snippet of being angered and the use of the name of eternal fire as an expletive in a background song. But there were several uses of the euphemism of the most foul of the foul words which where treated not as the most foul of the foul words but the same as one of the three/four letter words.
The largest single loss of points was due to many lies. Together with several uses of the euphemism of the most foul of the foul words, these two culprits plus a few instances of ridicule reduced the Impudence/Hate score to equivalent to some R-rated movies. [Prov. 22:11] Sexual Immorality lost about half of its starting 100 points due to Uncle Rico trying to sell breast enhancements to women including a teenager, pelvic thrusts in dance, and a couple other typical indications of Hollywood's fascination with the body. It was clear by some of Rico's tactics that his interests were not limited to sales, especially regarding the teen girl. [Col. 3:5] Wanton Violence/Crime lost about a fourth of its starting 100 points to physical torment several times and assault to commit theft. [Hab. 2:9] Offense to God found four uses of God's name in vain but without the four letter expletive, causing the loss of a little over one third of the starting 100 points. [Deut. 5:11] But each of Drugs/Alcohol and Murder/Suicide earned the maximum of 100 points, making the film equivalent to G-rated movies in these three investigation areas. The listing in the Findings/Scoring section will reveal all that was found.
CHAPTER/VERSE
* Prov. 22:11 He who loves a pure heart and whose speech is gracious will have the king for his friend.
* Col. 3:5 Put to death [defeat, expunge, deprive of power, destroy the strength of], therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.
* Hab. 2:9 Woe to him who builds his realm by unjust gain to set his nest on high, to escape the clutches of ruin!
* Deut. 5:11 Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain: for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. [Vain is shav' {shawv}: emptiness, nothingness, vanity, such as an expletive. With or without the four letter expletive, the use of God's name in any way other than respect, reverence or thoughtful discussion is in vain. That includes the popular three syllable sentence with His name trailing it AND the misuse of Jesus' name.]
[Score of 100 is best, meaning the film does not have objectionable content in a particular category.]
FINDINGS / SCORING:
(The heart of the CAP Analysis Model)
Wanton Violence/Crime (W): 78
Impudence/Hate (I): 18
Sexual Immorality (S): 61
Drugs/Alcohol (D):: 100
Offense to God (O): 70
Murder/Suicide (M): 100
FINAL SCORE: 71
Wanton Violence/Crime (W)
- physical torment, repeatedly
- physical assault to commit theft
Impudence/Hate (I)
- drawing of flatulence
- five uses of the euphemism for the most foul of the foul words
- lies, repeatedly
- two uses of the three/four letter word vocabulary
- ridicule, repeatedly
Sexual Immorality (S)
- crotch injury
- sexual reference
- attention to crotch
- retreated attempts to sell breast enlargements to women with suggestive comments, once to a teenager
- pelvic thrusts in dance, repeatedly
Drugs/Alcohol (D):
- none noted
Offense to God (O)
- four uses of God's name in vain without the four letter expletive
Murder/Suicide (M)
- none noted