Lotus666
06-08-09, 09:39 PM
Another Nick Zbu Classic Review from 2005...
What exactly is a cult movie?
Bluntly, it's a movie that sucked when it opened and gained a following over time thanks to either a revival showing of it or thanks to the wonder of home video and good word of mouth. The fans of cult movies are usually enamored of it because it breaks one rule of current Hollywood movies because there is no grand marketing scheme, no push to see it. The viewer feels as if they found it by pure chance and part of the love of the movie is the fact that in finding it, the viewer feels they have lucked upon something that they could never have found inside the Hollywood System. Plus most movies considered cult have a sense of humor that reflects reality in a way that Hollywood can not touch: there's a connect there that breaks the fictional world that all Hollywood movies seem to exist in and portray as normal American life.
But enough examples of hyperreality and postmodernistic thought. Napoleon Dynamite blows ass. The movie tries to be a cult classic without being a cult classic and fails miserably at being anything. There are no real jokes, no real comic timing, just eccentric characters that do nothing but exist in sequences while referencing 1982 and conning anybody that it's funny because they don't get it. But the movie itself just isn't funny or even amusing. The title character himself is a walking non sequitur without acting skills and.....
You know, there's nothing here to review. A review is impossible because it's nothing but a threadbare plot with no punchline or humorous events that just happens with an occasional 1982 fashion, song, or reference. Okay, this would be funny....but it's just not. It's a waste of time to anybody who really knows what alternative humor is in today's world. One imagines Napoleon Dynamite tries to copycat Cartoon Network's Adult Swim and just can't manage it because they're not that insane and able to translate pure absurdism into a realistic frame of reference. Or rather, they can't find the humor in their own premise and expect the audience to by their own volation. And that is the lowest form of laziness: making a movie designed not be accepted by the Hollywood Norm so they call it cult when there's really nothing going for it. They believe in the ad hoc argument that everything that isn't Hollywood is Cult which is not true. There is Hollywood, Cult, and complete shit that nobody would watch and often ends up going out of print, forgotten like Jobriath, and nobody mourns it even when some avant garde asshole artist brings it up to sound cool and it still flops.
Napoleon Dynamite is the third. This isn't a movie, it's a sign that American Cinema is in the midst of change from bland mindless entertainment to personalized and in-joke entertainment, and that change is going to produce a lot of crap. This is that crap.
RATING: Don't bother!
What exactly is a cult movie?
Bluntly, it's a movie that sucked when it opened and gained a following over time thanks to either a revival showing of it or thanks to the wonder of home video and good word of mouth. The fans of cult movies are usually enamored of it because it breaks one rule of current Hollywood movies because there is no grand marketing scheme, no push to see it. The viewer feels as if they found it by pure chance and part of the love of the movie is the fact that in finding it, the viewer feels they have lucked upon something that they could never have found inside the Hollywood System. Plus most movies considered cult have a sense of humor that reflects reality in a way that Hollywood can not touch: there's a connect there that breaks the fictional world that all Hollywood movies seem to exist in and portray as normal American life.
But enough examples of hyperreality and postmodernistic thought. Napoleon Dynamite blows ass. The movie tries to be a cult classic without being a cult classic and fails miserably at being anything. There are no real jokes, no real comic timing, just eccentric characters that do nothing but exist in sequences while referencing 1982 and conning anybody that it's funny because they don't get it. But the movie itself just isn't funny or even amusing. The title character himself is a walking non sequitur without acting skills and.....
You know, there's nothing here to review. A review is impossible because it's nothing but a threadbare plot with no punchline or humorous events that just happens with an occasional 1982 fashion, song, or reference. Okay, this would be funny....but it's just not. It's a waste of time to anybody who really knows what alternative humor is in today's world. One imagines Napoleon Dynamite tries to copycat Cartoon Network's Adult Swim and just can't manage it because they're not that insane and able to translate pure absurdism into a realistic frame of reference. Or rather, they can't find the humor in their own premise and expect the audience to by their own volation. And that is the lowest form of laziness: making a movie designed not be accepted by the Hollywood Norm so they call it cult when there's really nothing going for it. They believe in the ad hoc argument that everything that isn't Hollywood is Cult which is not true. There is Hollywood, Cult, and complete shit that nobody would watch and often ends up going out of print, forgotten like Jobriath, and nobody mourns it even when some avant garde asshole artist brings it up to sound cool and it still flops.
Napoleon Dynamite is the third. This isn't a movie, it's a sign that American Cinema is in the midst of change from bland mindless entertainment to personalized and in-joke entertainment, and that change is going to produce a lot of crap. This is that crap.
RATING: Don't bother!