reesesWeb

I was tempted to write something about how I've been a slacker with updates lately, but it occurred to me that that type of entry is so common there should be a flyweight reference. Like DTDs or Schemata, we'd have a common url like http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/REC-blog-20050330/ that people could refer to in their own blogs. Of course, the page rank for this URL would instantly make it the most popular page on the web.

Now, I've turned this into a blog entry about blogging, which could be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/REC-metablog-20050330/, so let's wrap that up tout de suite.

What I really wanted to talk about, to avoid further http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/REC-blog-20050330/, was Napoleon Dynamite.

My hairstylist committed two offenses against me this weekend. One, she gave me russian prisoner hair, and two, she recommended watching this movie.

Never, ever, ever see this film. It's so bad, it saved "Anchorman" from being the worst thing I saw last weekend. (As apologia for mentioning Anchorman, we watched a lot of movies last weekend, raiding Blockbuster and VOD because Kat was recovering from oral surgery and needed something to do while lying on the couch other than reading or talking. Accordingly, we lowered our standards to "well, if we get enough movies, we can turn any of them off if they stink.")

The hairstylist recommended Napoleon Dynamite because I had mentioned that I liked Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, which is actually a funny movie.

Napoleon Dynamite is not a funny movie.

I might have been prejudiced because I remember a kid in school who bore a number of the same attributes as ND. He had exactly the same hair, although I can't remember if he wore glasses. He didn't make eye contact at all, or even come close to it, during his rare conversations with other people. He couldn't draw for crap, but he thought his drawing skillz were mad, and as a result, he perpetrated many god-awful drawings on people around him. In fact, one such godawful drawing of me befouls one of our high school yearbooks. The one difference is that the kid from my school was slow, while I think ND's problem was behavioral and not physiological.

So while ND, I hope, was a sort of caricature comprising annoying traits culled from numerous people the creator knew, I knew one person who was pretty much right there.

But that's not enough to make a movie truly awful. If other characters had compensated, or anything actually happened beyond little wes andersonaster touches such as the appearance of LaFawnda or the dance segment to make the movie worth watching, I would have had a much different take on things.

A lot of people really liked this movie, some liking it enough to watch it more than once, or even admit to liking it in movie reviews or blog entries. It made me wonder if I was missing something, like when people talk about Finnegan's Wake being one of the great works of "english" literature. Was it that one initial person said it was great because of Irony and other things that are known by our generation to be inherently good, and everyone else parroted it despite the fact that they thought it was bad, but hey, this guy said it was good because of Irony?

Reading the positive reviews, a few threads stand out in common. There seems to be a prevalent opinion that the nerdiness or geekiness or whatever is intentional, and the words "defiant" and "on his own terms" are used with some regularity in this context.

I'm not sure if the characters in this film really exercised this level of control over their destinies. People are pretty dumb and pretty lazy, and we end up where we are usually as the result of a series of poorly informed decisions, usually based on sloth or greed. If the kid actually had any artistic ability, the argument could be made that his status as an outsider-by-choice might actually be plausible, as it was with Eric Stoltz's character in Some Kind of Wonderful. As it is, he's just a dork who thinks he draws so well he's "pretty much the best at it." Yes, it's funny that he said that given how bad the pictures, especially the portrait, are, but it hardly redeems the hour and a half spent watching the film.

But the movie isn't about a bad artist. For that, we have Basquiat. It's a movie about waiting for something to happen, and then when something happened, it made me think,"Umm, that was it?" Maybe I've been milkfed (mmm, milkfed) enough that I expect the classical narrative structure, but that structure defines the difference between a short film and a feature-length film.

This would be a great 20-minute film. Cut Rex-Kwan-Do, cut the grandmother and uncle, cut all the stupid filler, and I think it would actually work. Cram 20 minutes of wit into an hour and a half, and it doesn't. I would actually watch a Dynamite Edit and have a completely different impression of the movie.

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