Napoleon Dynamite

My cousin's wife recently painted this masterpiece and sent it to us, I guess she is pretty bored since she tore her ACL recently. We got a good laugh out of it, anyhow, and I realized it had been forever since I had seen Napoleon Dynamite, which came out in 2004. This quirky tale of alienated teens focuses on Napoleon, played by Jon Heder, who wants to help his unpopular friend Pedro claim the student body presidency over a popular bully, and assert some kind of identity for himself in the process.

This film was made in 22 days on an extremely low budget, and Heder was only paid $1000 for his lead role, though the movie unexpectedly went on to earn $40 million. Fox was so surprised by the acclaim the movie received at festivals and limited releases, that hey went back and filmed a wedding scene epilogue to insert into the film for the general release. This single scene cost half of the movie's entire previous budget.

Among such memorable catchphrases as"gimme your tots" "shut up, Tina" and "vote for Pedro", the movie also inspired a generation of nerds to dance like pop stars, and was my own introduction to the kick-ass tiger-lion hybrid, the Liger. The iconic scene were a farmer shoots a cow right in front of a school bus of children is based on a true occurrence -when the director was young he witnessed this very tableau on the way home from school.