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90The cast playing these eccentric characters is magnificent...This is definitely one of the most unique comedies you’ll see all year.
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It's charming. It's hilarious. It is perhaps the most beautifully crafted, lovingly rendered portrait of extreme geekitude ever to grace the screen. It's Napoleon Dynamite.
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90Jon Heder in the magnificent Napoleon Dynamite, is one of the most winning movie creations in years.
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83If you're sick of the gross-out gags and sex jokes of contemporary teen comedy, this defiant blast of idiosyncratic individuality just could be your tonic.
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80Thrusts us into a high school senior year like no other.
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80More than a deadpan comedy about oddball losers. This dork has his day, and this story has its touching subtext -- growing pains relieved by unlikely hope.
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80I laughed. And I laughed primarily over Heder's hilarious performance. You ain't seen nothing till you've seen Napoleon attack that tether ball.
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78For older and more reflective viewers, it’s a quirky, fresh slice-of-life more inviting than a tater-tot pyramid.
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75Hess and his terrific cast -- Heder is geek perfection -- make their own kind of deadpan hilarity. You'll laugh till it hurts. Sweet.
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75May not make you laugh out loud - it's too sly and subtle for that - but it will have you smiling every minute, and often grinning widely at its weirded-out charm. Nerdiness will never seem the same.
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75Refreshing for its simplicity and its originality in a marketplace dominated by soulless blockbusters.
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75An inspired dead-end stunt that keeps delivering snarky laughs far longer than it has any right to.
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75There's plenty of humor in the film, but the movie is often a little uncomfortable to watch, and Napoleon is not an easy guy to like. Rooting for him takes effort.
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75While Solondz's world is a hell hole and Anderson's "Rushmore" is a place of high-toned and often poignant whimsy, Napoleon Dynamite's unceasing burlesque creates a world that is pretty much a cartoon--and it's a damn funny cartoon to boot.
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75A diverting and loosely connected series of episodes about the most bizarre screen family of 2004.
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A cult classic-in-the-making.
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70Both Hesses and a surprisingly large number of their very talented cast and crew are graduates of Brigham Young University's film program: Could BYU one day join the esteemed ranks of USC and NYU?
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70This achingly funny film is a string of vignettes with no real plot, so it has periods of pointlessness--come to think of it, it's all pointless. But it has "cult classic" written all over it.
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70Napoleon Dynamite is too low-wattage to be a true nerd anthem, but it's charming in retrospect.
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70An absurdist piece about a rural community of clueless cretins who careen through life like poorly played pinballs, Napoleon Dynamite represents the definition of the comedy of condescension and ridicule.
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70Toward the end the freak-show humor begins to yield diminishing returns, but for most of its length this delivers a steady stream of uncomfortable gut laughs.
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63As slight as the picture is, though, its hero is an indelible creation.
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63With the exception of one truly glorious dance solo, the movie treats its hero - and his equally uncool family - with undisguised disdain.
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63There isn't much Napoleonic grandeur in this Idaho-set high school comedy, which in spite of its most condescending instincts, does have its moments.
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60As long as you don't mind making fun of the afflicted, there are some killer comic moments.
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60Sure, it quickly turns into a one-note exercise in laughing at the yokels, but at least it has a vision.
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60The performances, even those by trained actors like Mr. Ramirez and Ms. Majorino, have the hesitant, blinking opacity that some directors look for in nonprofessional casts. Their awkwardness is charming, and part of the point of the movie, but it also makes for some dull stretches and thwarts your ability to regard the characters with sympathy rather than mere curiosity.
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50A one-note, lightweight, condescending comedy about the rubes of Idaho.
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50It's fairly entertaining--but not the second coming of indie comedy some notices might lead you to expect.
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50So deadpan a film is Napoleon Dynamite, the story and the name of a gangly high school misfit in Preston, Idaho, that I can't say whether it was intended as a character study or a comedy.
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50Has to be enjoyed in spurts. There's no cohesive story, just a series of opportunities for the title character (Jon Heder) to strut his gawky stuff.
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50At the end of Napoleon Dynamite, you're glad the geeks have their day (even Kip's chat-mate turns out be a winner); you're also relieved to be rid of them.
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42Filmmaker Jared Hess (who cowrote the script with his wife, Jerusha Hess) installs Napoleon front and center as a punchline in and of himself -- and as that dispiriting product of narrative defeat, a symbol.
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It's a simple collection of sight gags and pratfalls that mines the overly familiar turf of awkward adolescence without bringing anything truly original to the experience.
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38There is a kind of studied stupidity that sometimes passes as humor, and Jared Hess' Napoleon Dynamite pushes it as far as it can go.
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30If Napoleon Dynamite really is, as reported, a semiautobiographical exercise, it is one of the most astoundingly self-hating such exercises in memory.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 290 out of 368
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Mixed: 14 out of 368
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Negative: 64 out of 368
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MannyC.2
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The movie's decent, that's all.
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