Napoleon Dynamite

Pros: It's funny
Cons: It's choppy

I firmly believe that we all have an inner nerd. Not only that, but an inner nerd itching to become an outer nerd, waiting, biding its time until the day it gets to claim its rightful place as predominant personality trait. I call it the dynamic ...

Pros: funny, unusual, soundtrack, characters
Cons: a few unrealistic moments, slow-moving, Napoleon's affect

Writer/director Jared Hess sets Napoleon Dynamite in his hometown of Preston, Idaho with a mixture of tenderness and mockery. I expected Napoleon Dynamite to be dark, disturbing, and somewhat depressing, but it’s almost uplifting... in ...

Pros: Fun opening title sequence. Excellent young actors. Characters both quirky and painfully real.
Cons: A confused plot, a false ending, and a mean streak a mile wide.

If Napoleon Dynamite wasn’t such a commercial hit, I would probably leave it alone. The debut feature of director/writer Jared Hess, it shows wit, invention, and good taste in indie films: it’s desperately obvious that Hess conceived his ...

Pros: It's a comedy you will eventually watch.
Cons: Some of the jokes are not that funny.

When Napoleon Dynamite was initially released in 2004 I was one of the few who did not go to the theater to watch it. Truth be told, I never planned on watching it, based upon the trailers and reviews by amateur and professional film critics. It ...

Pros: Sidesplitting fun.
Cons: Stereotypes, Pointless, disconcerting time setting.

Speaking as the last person in the free world to have discovered this movie, I’m ranking it at the top of my “Must See Again” list of 2005. It’s got everything I need in a comedy: physical humor, very quotable and of course, a Liger. We first ...

Pros: Plenty of funny moments
Cons: Slow at points and slightly uneven

Sometimes quirkiness in movies for the sake of quirkiness fails (most John Waters films come to mind) and other times it works wonderfully like in Rushmore. When I first saw the preview for Napoleon Dynamite I had the feeling that the film was ...

Pros: Jon Heder is convincing
Cons: Most of the rest of the film is not

Napoleon Dynamite is the ultimate nerd. Napoleon (Jon Heder) has no friends among his peers at the Idaho high school he attends. Napoleon chooses to march to his own drummer, and the price he pays is alienation and ridicule.. He knows about farming, but ...

Pros: Strong performance from Jon Heder, shockingly accurate portrayal of rural Nerddom.
Cons: Thin plot, some weak supporting characters, the uncomfortableness of watching someone that profoundly Nerdy.

The other night my wife and I went and saw “Napoleon Dynamite.” It was her pick, and the choices were basically either this or “Sky Captain.” We ended up at “Napoleon” because of some commercials we had seen, and some word of mouth from trusted ...

Pros: Direction, story, John Heder, soundtrack
Cons: You will blame me if you don't like it

Want to see a different movie? One that is fun , authentic, ordinary and special all at the same time? If you want a film that captures the essence of independent film-making, then this is your movie. If you start to watch it and don’t get it, find ...

Pros: Bursts of hilarity. Fully original.
Cons: Hit or miss humor.

Napoleon Dynamite is not a typical movie, so if you go in with typical expectations, you'll be flustered and flabbergasted. It's a true indie film, made on a shoestring budget with no noteworthy actors, effects, or cinematography, which ...

Pros: Put Jon Heder on the map for other roles where he would shine
Cons: not funny at all, over-done jokes that grow tiresome, that it became popular

Napoleon Dynamite came out in the summer of 2004, an independent film without much fan-fair. It seemed to catch on with its viewers quickly though, surviving on the success of its word-of-mouth. This translated into a great profit margin in ...

Pros: A funny look at life for those on the edge of high-school society.
Cons: Too true for too many.

Napoleon Dynamite is one of those movies that people are either going to love or hate. It’s pretty different. My hunch is that the dividing plumb-line is going to be the matter of structure: people tied to structure for the sake of security will hate ...

Pros: Most.
Cons: No plot, really.

Napoleon Dynamite is a rare comedy because it exhibits it's comedy not through punch lines and gross-outs, but instead through the character of it's... characters. Napoleon Dynamite himself, the 'protagonist', has to be one of the most memorable ...

Pros: Great humor for anyone who's ever felt like a loser.
Cons: There is no in between, you either love it or hate it.

Thousands of us have been there. We've been American teenagers struggling to find our way through high school wanting nothing more than a few friends and to avoid ridicule. Literally thousands of us have been categorized as nerds...and some of us now ...

Pros: acting, story, comic moments
Cons: comedy won't be to everyone's liking

Films set in high school years generally fall into one of two categories. They either depict the partying life of those ever-so-popular and have the outsiders who try to crack it treated with disdain. The other side of the coin shows the outsiders as ...