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Drawing on such great flakes as W.C. Fields, Preston Sturges, and John Waters, a rarefied strain of cinema strives for utter nonsense. When it succeeds, it can be excruciatingly funny, like Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket, or merely excruciating, like Trent Harris’s immortal Rubin and Ed. If this mini-genre were a facial expression, it would be slack-jawed and vacant-eyed and with a suggestion of something dark, twisted, and knowing deep within. Not unlike the title hero of Jared Hess’s feature debut, which maintains its pure idiot savant inspiration with only occasional lapses into self-conscious inanity. Napoleon (Jon Heder) is a nerd who undergoes the requisite hazing at his backwater Idaho high school, but all that seems negligible in the context of his absurd and unwholesome personal universe, which includes his minute, mustachio’d 31-year-old brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), who spends his time in a cyber chat room with unseen love LaFawnduh; his oddly Clintonesque Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who sells plastic dishware while seeking a time machine to return him to 1982 and the day his high-school football team lost the state championship with Rico on the bench; and his pal Pedro (Efren Ramirez), who has a killer bike and is the only kid in school with a moustache. Give it a kick in one direction or another and Napoleon Dynamite would fall into the darkness of David Lynch or the crudity of the Farrelly Brothers. As it is, it’s one of a kind, and kind of a masterpiece. (89 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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