Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

This movie took my school by storm. I saw nothing that appealed to me, but even as someone whose reaction to hype is to become more determined to avoid it until it goes away, the power and longevity of the hype was starting to wear me down, until a peer whose opinion I respected told me “watching it will take 20 points off your IQ”. So I decided it had nothing for me, and eventually the hype went away. The cult stayed, but they got quieter.

By now, the main evidence this movie was popular is the occasional Vote for Pedro reference drifting by like a tumbleweed. Perhaps that means it wasn’t as formative as some other movies I could have included this month, but when I think of movies my generation loved, this is at the top, even if it never sold me.

After watching the movie:

In small-town Idaho, dorky high schooler Napoleon Dynamite lives with his grandmother Carlinda and his even dorkier older brother Kip. Napoleon doesn’t fit in well at school, spending his time doodling “mythical creatures” like the liger and playing tetherball by himself. When Carlinda gets hurt in a quadbike accident, she calls her middle-aged son Rico to take care of the boys while she recovers. Kip lives in a van and sells anything he can out of it, trying to earn enough money to go back in time and fix his failed football career or at least his much more recently failed relationship, and convinces Kip to work with him as Kip is trying to put together the money to bring his internet girlfriend LaFawnda to town. As a bold but isolated student, Napoleon befriends Juarez transfer student Pedro and shy photographer Deb. With the school dance coming up, Pedro asks popular girl Summer Wheatly to be his date, and when she dismisses him, asks Deb. Napoleon tries to convince another popular classmate, Trisha, to go to the dance with him, but she only accepts because Uncle Rico talked her mother into forcing her to while making his sales pitch, and abandons him immediately once they arrive. When Pedro decides to run for class president, Napoleon volunteers as his campaign manager and swears to win the election for him, but they’re up against Summer, the most popular girl in school.

Napoleon grated on me so much for the first half of the movie. He has an affect to him like he’s a character from a popular comedy sketch that was never meant to carry a story longer than two minutes. I can see that someone would be amused by his manner of being, but I doubt there are many outside of teenagers, people who first saw the movie as teenagers, and people watching under chemical influence. Apparently this is expanded from a short film, but even that seems like more substance than he was made for. So much of this movie is just barely-connected comedy sketches (which mostly did not entertain me) that it would make so much sense if he came from something smaller.

This does fall into the category of movies where once the comedy setups slow down and the plot heats up it becomes less insufferable. Once we’ve moved away from “Napoleon is Weird and we should laugh at him” to “weird kid makes friends in his own offbeat way” it becomes kind of watchable, though not my favorite example of the type.

There’s a weird timeless look to this movie. I suppose a lot of it is being set in a small, lower income, rural town, it’s going to lag behind fashion and technology. And on top of that, a lot of the characters, especially the Dynamite family, seem to have “bad fashion sense” as a comedy trait. Even Kip’s obsession with the internet feels more at home in the 80s than the 2000s because everyone else basically acts like they know computers exist but don’t see one often. So it’s a bit jarring when Rico buys something from eBay. Looking at the background characters I guess this could be contemporary.

I’m glad I’ve seen this movie so I never have to wonder again if I ought to. The charming plot of the second half is not nearly charming enough to outweigh the anticomedy of the first half. Maybe I would’ve enjoyed it more back in its day when I was Napoleon’s age, but I don’t think I would’ve liked it that much more.