Napoleon Dynamite
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Movie Reviews of Napoleon Dynamite
Movie Review: AWESOME Work of Accidental Cinema GENIUS! Heartfelt & Inspiring! SWEET!
Summary: 5 Stars
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE is an extremely original story idea that accidentally ended up being a work of comedic genius! Who would have ever thought of making a movie hero out of the biggest loser in your high school? That's what this film does, and it succeeds with great enthusiasm and sweet moves. Awesome!
For a comedy, NAPOLEON DYNAMITE has MANY hilarious moments!
Anybody who has gone through High School in the USA will quickly be able to identify and recognize the character types portrayed in this film.
This film takes place in a small mid-western town that time forgot somewhere in the last 25 years. The citizens all have values and references about things from the 1980s, with things from the year 2005 appearing once in awhile.
It is hard to tell whether or not the filmmakers are making fun of retarded people? Napoleon, his best friend Pedro, and their mutual friend Deb form a strange triangle of friendship and dating for dummies. But these dummies are loveable and endearing. By the end of the movie, the audience is cheering them on to succeed and beat the insurmountable societal odds against them.
Napoleon is the movie's hero, and he saves the day, so if they are mocking retarded people, they at least give them much more dignity, respect and character development in this film than retarded people usually get in a real life High School.
Everybody is pretty much a half-wit in this movie. What is funny is that they will explain their latest plan of action, (something so dumb and simple-minded that any "normal" person would immediately see that the plan is doomed to fail), but then somehow the plan will end up working itself out, after all, in a funny way.
All the main characters are hopeless, helpless losers, but they somehow manage to work out something doable by sticking together and staying loyal--they got each other's backs.
There is something innocent, naive and desperate in Napoleon's daily plight that we can all relate to, so we all end up rooting for Napoleon. He wants all these great things out of life, but feels practically helpless to be able to attain anything--which is where we all have been at some point in our own lives.
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE is as funny as THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY, but Napoleon has more repeat viewing appeal, and much more incredible, memorable, quotable dialogue.
This film reminds me of a more wholesome version of the real life documentary CRUMB, about the underground comic book artist R. Crumb. The CRUMB documentary shows what it's like for nerds of this caliber in real life, but CRUMB shows the dark side of life, where the Crumb family ended up--drugs, pornography, obscenity, mental illness. NAPOLEON DYNAMITE is the family friendly version of a nerd's life story.
The first few times you watch NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, you will be laughing out loud with your friends, but after the shock and surprise has faded out of the gags, you will still end up watching the film, because it seems like you're hanging out with the gang--Napoleon's gang. They are good company, after all.
Movie Review: This Flippin' Sweet Flick has got Skills. Vote for Pedro!
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie is like infinity times better than the last million movies I've seen. You should definitely quit chatting with babes on the internet and check it out!
What happens when you take a cast of unknowns (except for one actor who's biggest other parts were in "The Country Bears" and playing Jethro in the movie of "The Beverly Hillbillies") and combine them with a script about high school geeks where the entire plot could be described in 3 sentences?
Magic happens.
Jared Hess and wife Jerusha co-wrote the script and John Heder brings to life Napoleon Dynamite, an awkward Idaho high-schooler who is sooooo far from cool. He is tall and gangly, all knees and elbows with an unruly mop of orange hair. Like all teenagers, he has dreams about being more than he is, but poor Napoleon is so far from the mainstream that he doesn't bother dreaming about things your average teenager fantasizes about. When the other kids dream about going to the major leagues, becoming a movie star or getting into medical school. Napoleon would be satisfied to have "computer hacking skills" or "numchuck skills". Like a lot of high-school geeks, Napoleon spends a lot of time drawing fantasy pictures, and because he's Napoleon, they're not very good. Unlike the geeks in, for example, the "Revenge of the Nerds" movies, Napoleon is so clueless he doesn't recognize how far out of the mainstream he is. At one point he decides to impress a girl by drawing her portrait. He gives her the pitiful drawing and tells her "I spent like three hours doing shading the upper lip. It's probably the best drawing I've ever done."
In the universe of this movie, Napoleon almost fits right in, because his family is dysfunctional in the extreme. (There's never even a mention of his parents.) Napoleon lives at home with his thrill-seeking grandmother and 30-something loser brother, Kip. In many ways Kip is more pitiful than Napoleon because he's had an extra dozen years or so to develop into... a guy who spends all his time on the internet "chatting with babes". (One of the best sequences of the film comes later on when his online girlfriend, LaFawnduh, actually takes a bus out to the middle of nowhere to meet Kip.)
The film is populated by other lovable losers like Pedro, a dull boy who imagines that he can get the most popular girl in school to like him if he bakes her a cake. Uncle Rico, another odd family member, comes to babysit Napoleon (and 30 year old Kip) after Grandma is injured in a scene that couldn't have been better if Larry, Curley and Moe had been in it. Uncle Rico dwells on his high-school football glory, when his team WOULD have won the big game if the coach had only put him in at quarterback.
The allure in the film comes from the characters, their situations and especially their language. You just have to SEE it to get the magic in lines like "Hey, Napoleon, what are you gonna do today?" "Whatever I feel like I wanna do. Gosh!"
This movie is lightning in a bottle. It's got skills. Vote for Pedro!
Movie Review: Watch without expectations!
Summary: 5 Stars
Okay, the first time I sat down and watched NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, my reaction was the same as many: "What the heck was that?" Aside from some occasional laughs, I wasn't impressed, dismissing the film as overrated and trying too hard to be quirky. But something odd happened. As weeks passed, moments from the film started creeping into my consciousness. Sure the one-liners were memorable, but I started to remember whole scenes...and actually laughing about it. Ironically, I began remembering NAPOLEON DYNAMITE more fondly than when I originally saw it. So I decided to view it again. It was as if I were watching it with completely different eyes. The film is basically a slice-of-life story about an awkward high school kid named Napoleon Dynamite and how he deals with life's little triumphs and defeats. Practically all the major characters...Napoleon's friends Deb and Pedro, his brother Kip and his uncle Rico have their quirks but none quite as colorful as Napoleon himself (so brilliantly played by Jon Heder).But while Napoleon can be characterized as nerdy, he lives so blissfully in his own world that it's hard to feel too sorry for him. Some viewers don't like him at all. They think he's too prickly or unsympathetic. But I like him very much. Napoleon (like Deb and Pedro) is a bit of an outsider and it's possible that's because of his personality, or perhaps his personality was born out of being CONSIDERED different...a sort of defense mechanism developed over time. Or maybe, I'm just reading too much into his character.There's no mistaking the fact that Napoleon, Deb and Pedro are outsiders. During the school dance, there's a moment in which the three characters are in the foreground watching everybody else on the dance floor. At first the shot seems trivial. But after another viewing, the moment really seemed to illustrate their isolation from everyone else. I could very well have been one of them. It was oddly touching.Yet this movie is no downer. After all, the characters don't ultimately fail at all. By staying true to their originality and always being themselves, they have their victorious moments. And the more invested you are in the characters, the more pleasing their victories become. My problem when first viewing this film is that I was expecting the laughs, as you would a normal comedy. But this comedy is anything but normal. As I viewed it the 2nd and 3rd times with a different perspective, it became much more humorous, touching and satisfying. I've seen the loser-becomes-a-winner story done before but never quite like this. There's nothing apologetic or sentimental about NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, which makes it all the more charming. When the "Promise" song starts to play during that last tether-ball scene, I actually get a little choked-up. I don't know why, and it's probably best not to analyze...let's just say I love this film!I'm not going to advise people to watch the film again if they absolutely hated it the first time. But if someday out of nowhere you think of a moment from this film and it makes you smile, I say give NAPOLEON DYNAMITE another try!Movie Review: Can be funny and touching...
Summary: 5 Stars
Napoleon Dynamite is a loser who goes to high school and is treated fairly well considering how much of a loser he is. He wears t-shirts tucked into perfectly-fit jeans, the bottoms of which are tucked into snowboots, which is interesting considering not a flake of snow falls in the entire film, although he is from Idaho, where perhaps snow is something that if it's not falling outside, it's falling in your mind. His one friend is Pedro, the only Latin-American student in a school filled with blonde-haired, blue-eyed wunderkinds.
Actually the people who makeup the school, and the surrounding town, are quite fascinating. They're not gorgeous, or classically beautiful, but grotesque. That is; they could be beautiful, or at least considered attractive, but there's an element of ugliness to them, some sort of black smudge on the colorful canvas. Napoleon is emblematic of this in that he is grotesque himself; his hair is curly and uncontrollable, his clothes are almost purposefully unattractive, his slouch and his half-closed eyes make him look as unalert as a rock. So is everyone around him; unalert to the qualities that make them grotesque (although that is essentially what being grotesque is; you have to not know you are).
Enough about grotesqueries! Pedro decides to run for class president to bring balance to the darkness that is the other candidate, the plucky Summer. She is the "most popular girl" in school, and is surely a lock to win. The futility of Pedro's chances of winning lend a pity to his character that we might feel for Napoleon if he wasn't so blatantly unconcerned with his own popularity. Pedro has no idea what to say in his pre-election speech; but Napoleon says, either out of exasperation or genuine concern, "Tell them if they vote for you then all their wildest dreams will come true." Hmm. Sounds like a throwaway line at first, but Pedro delivers it at the end of a speech that is sure to lose him the election. It makes you wonder why he really cares about winning the election, especially since he seemed to understand how futile it all was. To make things even more hopeless, after his speech, he must deliver a skit. A skit? Pedro has no clue, and he's even less animated than Napoleon.
Then comes one of the most touching scenes I have ever seen. Napoleon gives a dance-mix tape to the guy running the PA, goes on stage, and dances to "Canned Heat." Then you realize that underneath that facade of unawareness and passivity is a genuine friend. He basically lays his life on the line if you think about it; for how would the entire school treat him afterwards if they took it the wrong way? He could barely set foot in that High School if it failed, his life would be made miserable day after day. But it works! They roar with applause; and Pedro becomes class president.
Amazingly all ends meet, in a movie without a punchline. What happens to Napoleon now though? I assume he keeps going down his own path, where he'll stumble into greatness, whether he knows it or not.
Movie Review: Wow!
Summary: 5 Stars
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE is a hard movie to describe. It's sort of a teen comedy, but it's not the average teen comedy (especially one produced in part by MTV). There aren't many side-splitting one-liners or over-the-top-gross out gags, here. The foulest word in the film is either "freaking" or "crap". The only physical violence in the movie is done by high school bullies or a local martial arts master. There isn't any sex (heck there's hardly any sexual innuendo). The movie doesn't even really have a point.
Yet, NAPOLEON DYNAMITE works and works exceedingly well. It's a hillarious movie filled with some of the most memorable characters I've seen on screen in at least two years. The characters are quirky and filled with all kinds of foibles. Yet, bizarre as they appear, they are so realistic it's uncanny. Who doesn't know somebody like Uncle Rico? Had my maternal grandmother lived long enough, I bet she would have spent her weekends riding an ATV. Anybody else know somebody who thinks selling "tupperware" is a "real job"? The characters in NAPOLEON DYNAMITE are people sliced out of the real-life heart of America.
The story of the movie kind of resolves around a high school kid Napoleon Dynamite. He has a 32 year-old brother, Kip, who sits around at home talking to girls on the internet 4-6 hours a day. The brothers live with their Grandma, who sneaks out to do extreme sports with her friends. Grandma gets hurt 4-wheeling on some sand dunes and Uncle Rico is sent into to help the brothers. Rico still lives in 1982, just before the big high school football game when the coach didn't put him in and they lost. There's a girl at school named Deb who runs her own photography studio who has a major crush on Napoleon, though he doesn't figure it out for the longest time. Napoleon's best friend is a recent immigrant student named Pedro. Pedro decides he wants to run for class president and the rest of the movie kind of revolves around Pedro's campaign and what Napoleon does to help his friend.
The actors in NAPOLEON DYNAMITE are pretty-much no names (Haylie Duff, sister to Hillary is perhaps the biggest name). Yet, they give Oscar-caliber peformances (if the Academy only looked at comedy), and I'm not using hyperbole. Jon Heder, Tina Majorino, Aaron Ruell, Jon Gries, and Efren Ramirez are all excellent in their roles. In lesser skilled actors, their roles could have been spoofy, cheesy, or over-the-top. Instead, they grind their characters in reality.
The movie has a lot of great scenes and lines and is destined to become one of the most quoted movies of all time (right up there with THE PRINCESS BRIDE, TOMMY BOY, and STAR WARS). The movie also boasts a delightful soundtrack that includes everything from "Time After Time" to the "A-Team Theme" to "I Want Candy". As quirky as the film is, it contains some strong messages about the importance of family, sticking by your friends, following your dreams, and being the person God created you to be. All of that and chicken talons, too. One of the best films of 2004.