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: *** 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 cliche 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!