Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

NAPOLEON DYNAMITE

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

Issue Date: June 18 - 24, 2004
Back to the Movies table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group