Readers may find it unusual for us to delve so deeply into the past; by and large we intend to keep our criticism current. After all, we make no claim to being the Internet's premier source of clinomania.blogspot historicsm, but rather its premier source of contemporary criticism. But our office only recently received its screener copy of "Napoleon Dynamite." Embarrassing, we know, to take on a text without studying its informing sources, so hopefully now we can add to and illuminate our previous ruminations on this subject. Furthermore, this journey into yesteryear may provide readers with inspiration to do their own explorations and re-examinations of posts gone by from Jack.
In any case, by and large we agree with Jack's fury at someone hating "Napoleon Dynamite." Note here that we have not read Mr. Denby's review. This is for the entirely sound reason that we never read movie reviews except in retrospect, and frankly don't understand the point of providing a plot summary and pre-fabricated opinion on the day of a movie's release, unless it's to provide hapless daters with a "take" they can regurgitate to their escort in the hopes of facilitating dry-humping. As a result, we almost never read New Yorker movie reviews, because by the time we see the damn films, our New Yorker is pee-stained and on the bathroom floor.
But to proceed - it was a fine and entertaining work, and Jack, who of all people should be wary of the dangers of extraneous exposition, is quite right to point out that it does away with such nonsense.
But one wonders, and invites readers to wonder: how much of the laughter you will hear if you see this movie at a theater, and you will hear quite a bit, comes from the fact that the type of folks at Lammele and Landmark Cinemas and the like enjoy laughing at poor and ignorant people. Indeed, several bursts of laughter came only from the fact that poor people eat shitty food and have shitty jobs and live in shitty places (we mean shitty both figuratively and literally). Also, people seem to have too much of a hard-on for silly dance routines - the same jerks who were cackling away at Summer's skit are the folks who name their trivia team "Sometimes I Doubt Your Committment to Sparkle Motion" when they turn up at Peet's Candy Store.
How does this relate to Jack, you may ask? PROPOSED: Jack has many vices and flaws, which he is all too happy to enumerate himself. But he has the fine and unusual trait, by and large, of not taking delight in the misfortunes of others. And his enjoyment of cultural offerings is a pure one, interested only in what legitimate emotions and perceptions are inspired, and not what sort of social status he can grant himself by laughing at appropriate moments, and what backwards school administrators he's retroactively punishing by guffawing at a movie in which they are skewered.
Readers as always are invited to prepare papers on this subject for the Clinomania Conference, to be held July 31 in Tokyo.
