Redux Review

Ok, after last night’s rant, I finally pinned down exactly what’s wrong with Napoleon Dynamite. The movie is marketed as a movie “by outsiders for outsiders” when really it’s a movie “by popular kids for popular kids who think they aren’t popular.” The movie shows us these strange, weirdo geeks and the odd things they do without any explanation or any insight into their personalities. This movie pays these characters the same sort of notice that the “cool people” in high school pays to the outcasts: You see them, but you don’t know them. You don’t even want to. It simply plays up the two-dimensional stereotype of high school losers

It’s almost as if some high school guidance counselor asked a cheerleader and her jock guy friends to make a movie about the losers they pick on. They show what they see, what they think makes them funny, but they never get to know them, and neither do we.