Scene It? and Napoleon Dynamite

Karsten and I went over to ‘s place last night to play Scene It? — and won, that lucky bastard. 😉 No, he obviously knows his movies — credit where credit is due — but he did get a couple of lucky rolls of the dice, too. And Karsten was the least lucky, dice-wise. After the game, we read through many of the questions and became increasingly frustrated with how easy that game is for a bunch of film buffs like the three of us. Too easy. I want an obscure film edition of the game with real challenge, like “name three directors who’ve made Dogme 95 films.” Now that would be a fun game. 🙂

Anyway, afterwards, we watched Napoleon Dynamite, about which I’d been hearing glowing praise. I was expecting something really offbeat and excellent. It was offbeat, but I think it fell pretty short of excellent.

Thing is, I love quirky. I’m a big fan of quirky. True Stories is, after all, one of my favorite films. Napoleon Dynamite was quirky, but I dunno, it just didn’t have it all together, and I didn’t find it as funny as it could have been. It borrowed heavily from True Stories, significantly from Jim Jarmusch (especially Stranger Than Paradise), Ghost World, and postmodern cartoons like “Beavis & Butthead” and “South Park” (in fact, Karsten made an interesting comment that he thought this film would’ve worked better as an animation, and while I agree that that would have satisfying, I also think that approaching this film as an animation made into live-action may be key to appreciating it), but in the end, it just didn’t have the witty spark that each of those do.

It’s not without its merits, though, and I hope Jared Hess keeps at it. I think he’s onto something cool; I just want to see him take it further.