Overall Rating
  Awesome: 50.93%
Worth A Look: 19.57%
Average: 6.83%
Pretty Bad: 5.28%
Total Crap: 17.39%
11 reviews, 256 user ratings
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| Napoleon Dynamite |
by DrChumley
"And now for something completely different"

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Disclaimer: In the spirit of honestly and disclosure, I must divulge that I have appeared in a film with the main character of this movie, and I knew the director from school. Neither one probably has any idea who I am, but that’s beside the point. The point (besides the one on the top of my head) is that I am a little biased.After a summer of lackluster blockbusters, and a very wide array of schlock, it is refreshing to see a small, independently made film succeed. Much like its main character, Napoleon Dynamite is a small, nerdy film that just lives it life the way it wants to, without worrying about what the more popular movies think of it, and perhaps that is what makes it so endearing.
Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is a painfully awkward high school student in the small, completely real, town of Preston, Idaho. Between his moon boots, thrift store duds, dreadful perm parted on the side, and his complete lack of anything resembling social ability, Napoleon goes through life as a loner and a joke. He lives with his grandmother and his computer-nerd brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), who spends several hours a day on the internet with his cyber-girlfriend.
When grandma falls off a ATV flying over a sand dune and breaks her tailbone, Napoleon and Kip’s uncle Rico (Jon Gries), a man stuck in 1982 and longing to travel back in time to relive his glory days as a high school football player, comes to live with them.
Other than that, not a lot happens in this movie. The whole point of this movie is not what happens, but how the caricatures who live in Preston react to what does happen. Watching Napoleon stumble through asking girls out, interacting with his wimp of a brother and bully of an uncle, and form friendships with equally awkward Deb (Tina Majorino) and Pedro (Efren Ramirez), it simultaneously painful and hilarious. Napoleon’s awkwardness and nerdiness is so thoroughly complete that we can see parts of himself in each of us.
Written by Jared and Jerusha Hess, Napoleon Dynamite is based on a short film Jared produced while attending film school. Filmed in his hometown, one gets the impression that the only reason these quirks and foibles go off as well as they do is because Jared Hess knows people first-hand who personify these off-the-wall characteristics he and his wife have scripted.Napoleon Dynamite is a very unusual movie. Consider it a cross between The Blair Witch Project and Dazed and Confused. And if that sounds like an unusual combination, you’re right. It’s an unusual, but hilarious, movie.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=8532&reviewer=311 originally posted: 09/06/04 04:47:41
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Sundance Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Sundance Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 SXSW Film Festival. For more in the 2004 South By Southwest Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 CineVegas Film Festival. For more in the 2004 CineVegas Film Festival series, click here.
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USA 11-Jun-2004 (PG) DVD: 16-May-2006
UK N/A
Australia 11-Nov-2004
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