I find it hard to believe that I have now seen this movie twice but sure enough I have. This film is so incredibly dry and deadpan that it's not like watching a comedy but more like being stuck in the little backwater western town it takes place in with the dysfunctional family it follows and having to incredulously observe the day to day events of your time spent there. It's been my observation that most small rural towns across Amercia are at least five years behind the times but this film takes that to the extreme and makes this rural Idaho town about 20 years behind the times except for some technological advances like the internet but basically and culturally it's 1984 despite the calender insisting on 2004. Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is your classic high school nerd who lives with even nerdier internet surfing 32 year old brother Kip (Aaron Ruell). They live with their dune buggy riding, would-be llama ranching grandmother (Sandy Martin). In her absence the brothers well-being are overseen by their 40 year old ex-jock uncle Rico (Jon Gries) who hasn't even caught up to the town and lives in a world about 22 years behind the times instead of 20. A new student from Mexico named Pedro Sanchez (Efren Ramirez) is enrolled in the school and proves to be even more nerdier but slight less quirky than Napoleon. Pedro is smitten by the class beauty with the name of amber waves of grain, Summer Wheatly (Haylie Duff) and Napoleon organizes a campaign to elect Pedro as class president with the help of Napoleon's romantic interest Deb (Tina Majorino). Filmmaker Jared Hess had made a short film at BYU called Peluca which starred Heder as a nerd and was set in Hess's hometown of Preston, Idaho. That quirky nine minute film received enough attention that Hess and his wife Jerusha wrote a feature-length screenplay that Hess would direct to become this film. This film may have worked better as say a 24 minute short film, but it works OK enough for me. The MTV crowd embraced it as the winner of Best Movie, Best Musical Performance, (for a dance scene) and Breakthrough Male for Heder's performance as Napoleon Dynamite. But don't let that deter you from seeing it. It has the element of being a cult classic and I will likely someday see it for a third time. I would give it a 7.0 out of 10.
Review of Napoleon Dynamite
