I'm told the movie was greeted at Sundance with lots of laughter, but then Sundance audiences are concerned with being cool, and to sit through this film in depressed silence would not be cool, however urgently it might be appropriate.Peluca made its own waves, winning rave reviews at the 2003 Slamdance Film Festival, a spinoff from Sundance. Napoleon seems to passively invite ridicule, and his attempts to succeed have a studied indifference, as if he is mocking his own efforts. But that film was informed by anger and passion, and the character fought back. Watching 'Napoleon Dynamite,' I was reminded of ' Welcome To The Dollhouse,' Todd Solondz's brilliant 1996 film, starring Heather Matarazzo as an unpopular junior high school girl. His entire prom experience consists of cutting in. He has a crush on a girl named Deb ( Tina Majorino), but his strategy is so inept that it has the indirect result of Deb going to the prom with Pedro. He finally makes a single friend, Pedro ( Efren Ramirez), the school's only Latino, and manages his campaign for class president. Life at high school is daily misery for Napoleon, who is picked on cruelly and routinely. In an age when even the Fuller Brush Man would be greeted with a shotgun (does anyone even remember him?), Rico's product exists in the twilight zone.

Rico is a door-to-door salesman for a herbal breast enlargement potion, a product that exists only for the purpose of demonstrating Rico's cluelessness. It could funny to have a granny on a dune buggy I smile at least at the title of the Troma film 'Rabid Grannies.'īut in this film the accident is essentially an aside, an excuse to explain the arrival on the farm of Napoleon's Uncle Rico ( Jon Gries), a man for whom time has stood still ever since the 1982 high school sports season, when things, he still believes, should have turned out differently. He lives outside of town with his brother Kip ( Aaron Ruell), whose waking life is spent online in chat rooms, and with his grandmother, who is laid up fairly early in a dune buggy accident. He wants us to know he is lonely by choice. He has red hair that must take hours in front of the mirror to look so bad.

Napoleon is tall, ungainly, depressed, and happy to be left alone.

Pedro napoleon dynamite