True, tru. But I agree with Poor Yorick, and that’s part of why I loved the movie. How many more Pygmalion updates do teens need? Aren’t they insecure enough as it is without Hollywood telling them they need a makeover, mind and body, to gain acceptance?
It’s such a nice, sweet movie, but I can understand new viewers thinking it’ll move heaven and earth based on its mass hipster appeal (the worst are the idiot teens who watch it and mock Napoleon).
Once it was on at a video store and the scene with the Happy Hands Club came on (to the song “Love is a River” or whatever), and before people started laughing there was a genuine (albeit brief) moment when they all looked up and you could tell they thought it was sorta beautiful.
I saw this movie the weekend it came out in the theatre, August 2004, when no one was really aware of it. I thought it was great. Kind of like opening your old yearbooks from junior high and thinking “oh my god, were we all really that pathetic” laugh at yourself kind of funny.
However, I do agree that it got too popular and too may people ran around quoting it 24-7. If I had seen it after the hype I probably would have thought “what’s so funny that eveyone has to repeat it 10,000 times.”
Probably comparable for me was the “red stapler” guy from Office Space. I was one of the last people on earth to see this film so after hearing everyone and their brother do “red stapler” jokes (ha ha), when I eventually saw the film I thought “that’s not that funny.”
It struck me as being a deliberate attempt to make a cult film. Cult films are like being cool. You can’t be cool by trying to be cool. You can’t make a cult film by trying to make a cult film.
This argument is flawed to begin with, since many critics in major urban centers on the east coast have loved ND.
I think that some of the “getting” the movie is growing up somewhere like Preston, Idaho (I grew up not far from there.) There are a whole bunch of rural Idaho/Utah-esque mannerisms/settings/situations that people with a similar cultural background might appreciate more.
My impressions are based solely on showing the film to friends and students in other, more urban parts of the country and getting feedback that the movie was stupid and/or incomprehensible. Virtually all of my Utah/Idaho friends and family love it with a passion.
I went to high school in small-town Texas. I knew every single one of those characters as real people. I even saw a bit of myself in there… mostly the parts of myself I wish I could forget. Mostly in Napoleon – he’s incredibly frustrated with real life so he either gripes at everyone around him or immerses himself in a fantasy world where he’s really actually awfully skilled, it’s just nobody appreciates him. With a better computer and internet connection he’d be playing Everquest all day.
The movie had me squirming the entire time much the way that watching a video of myself back in high school would have made me squirm. Especially considering how much I hated high school even when I was there (then again, who doesn’t?) and how much I hated living in a tiny tiny town full of tiny tiny minds. There was no escape, nothing to do even in the ‘big city’ nearby except go to the mall (and how many times can you do that without getting bored, even at fifteen?), nowhere to go except your own brain. And as Terry Pratchett says*,
So all at once I look at Napoleon and have sympathy for him as well as a sense of shame and loathing. This is why I didn’t like the movie. I suppose the film itself can be seen in one of two ways – either from the geek’s perspective or the opposite. I hesitate to say ‘bully’… it’s so EASY to be nasty sometimes. Some people seem to invite it.
I’m thinking quoting Terry Pratchett must establish my bona fides as a definite geek.*
**Especially in a footnote.
He doesn’t have those skills… “Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills. You know, like nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills…”
