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Napoleon Dynamite (DVD, 2004)
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A great funky, fun movie from early 2000's. We watched this movie almost ten years ago. We didn't think a lot of it the first time we watched it. But when we decided to watch it again, we starting catching on some of the subtle humor we missed the first time. Lovable characters, happy ending. Watch the wedding scene hidden after the credits come up at the end.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: New
However! Halfway through the film it gets really choppy, like someone's hitting pause and play repeatedly. I tried fast forwarding it to where it may be back to normal, but the rest of the film starting then doesn't work. I barely made sure the disk worked or not yesterday when I actually got the film in the mail early June, so I can't return it now or anything as it'd seem like I was the one who ruined it. I've seen the movie before, so it's okay! I suppose it is it's money worth and I believe I bought one specifically said to be used? I believe so. All in all, it's a really good, entertaining movie! It's just the one I received isn't all that fantastic quality wise.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
The first time you watch Napoleon Dynamite, you may not laugh that much. The surreal Idaho scenery, the story line, the strange editing - and especially the characters - all capture your interest. And you'll find yourself thinking about the film a couple days after you view it. But when you watch it subsequently, the subtle humor and strangeness of the characters will make you laugh out loud. Watch it 10 times - you'll find yourself studying intensely a different character with each viewing. At first, Napoleon was my favorite character - and he's always interesting to watch. Soon, I thought Kip was hilarious, then it was Pedro. Later it became Uncle Rico, then Lyle The Farm Hand. After about 10 viewings, my favorite character now is the creepy high school principal. It's just one of those rare movies where the characters are so subtle and compelling, you'll soon need to watch it again.Read full review
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.Read full review
For the past few years there has been a movement in American film you could call "The New Mormon Cinema." Young Latter-day Saint filmmakers (definitely inspired by the Sundance Film Festival which is held right in their own backyard) have been making inexpensive independent films that are targeted at the Mormon population that stretches in the west from Alberta in Canada down past the Mexican border (the so-called "Mormon Corridor.") Most of these movies have been really bad, cheaply done sit-com influenced "comedies" that have had absolutely no influence on non-Mormon audiences. (With the honorable exeception of Richard Dutcher, the director of good movies like the missionary drama "God's Army" and the thriller "Brigham City.") Things began to change this year with widespread recognition going to the tough-minded World War II drama "Saints and Soldiers" and this twisted little comic masterpiece, "Napoleon Dynamite." Jared and Jerusha Hess are products of Brigham Young University's film school and they made ND with a bunch of their friends. The unspoken assumption of this film is that most of the kids are Mormons. Some critics who misunderstood the movie as "condescending" have no experience with real people like these. I live in rural Utah and I can testify that Hess is only mildly exaggerating. The critics somehow miss the love with which the characters are drawn, just as some Minnesotans weren't too thrilled with the Coen brothers' "Fargo." Napoleon's pathetic older brother Kip has been singled out as particularly unbelievable. But believe me, Kips are a dime a dozen in Idaho (and Utah, too.) Napoleon himself is not so much acted as incarnated by Jon Heder, who would win some sort of Oscar if people could only see he was playing a role, not living it. Napoleon is the real nerd deal, not some idealized John-Hughes-style Hollywood version. You really feel the anguish of his life, even as it provokes guilty belly laughs. The genius of the movie is how the Hesses take the angst of Todd Solondz ("Welcome to the Dollhouse" and "Happiness") and put their triumphantly uniquely Mormon spin on it. Hess is the second Mormon director, after Neil LaBute in "The Shape of Things", to make reference to singer Elvis Costello ("Napoleon Dynamite" is one of Costello's aliases.) The movie Napoleon is as physically unprepossessing as Costello is, until he starts to sing. You see, Mormons are always worrying about what other people think of them, because of their long-time outsider status in American society. This overwhelming self-consciousness can make them feel as awkward and crushed by the culture as Napoleon is. But inside they just know they are as dynamic as the very name "Napoleon Dynamite." The opportunity awaits for them to strut their true stuff. An individual like Napoleon can't be destroyed if he doesn't want to be. There's something eternal in him that will win out. The importance of this thought is why the Hesses avoid the very appearance of sentimentality in their presentation of Napoleon. You have to learn to love him in spite of his monstrous imperfections, because he is human. And you rejoice in Napoleon's final dance, which is five or six of the most joyous minutes in a movie this year. It's also important that Kip and Napoleon redeem themselves by reaching out to others not like them. Kip hilariously to La Fawnduh, and Napoleon to Pedro and Deb. The Hesses are brave enough to make sympathetic jokes about multiculturalism here.Read full review
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