a return ticket to loserville. sweet!

summer break is great. until you fall into the inevitable mindnumbing monotony of too much free time. gotta learn to mix it up a bit so later i'm gonna drag myself out of the house in the wee hours of the a.m. and travel across singapore to the far reaches of jurong to catch harry potter and the goblet of fire @ the omni. i've prepared my little tote bag of bottled water, panadol, barf bag and lotsa tissues. whoopee.

no big agenda on this new year's day so i spent the rainy afternoon indoors with napolean dynamite. and what an afternoon indeed. heard heaps about it early last year when this humble quirky movie started to accumalate a considerable following, propelling it to a kind of cult stardom. jon heder is napolean dynamite, king geek amongst resident oddballs of a small town in idaho, and alienated teenager who deals with the trials and tribulations of life and high school with his little, outlandish ways. seriously, it's trippy. with a tight red afro, beady blank stares, outrageous lies, bizarre convictions, distorted drawings, napolean is both weird and appealing. you may cringe at his antics but you might just find yourself compelled to watch what he'll do or say next. the setting and tone of the movie are effective too... a town in the american heartlands that looks like it's stuck in a liminal space between rural wasteland and suburbia hell. taking it all in, one feels rather trapped in a time-less warp.

i've never seen a movie with so many losers. it got a little painful at a point not because the characters were bordering on spazz but because you start to wonder about the dweebs you've met before and that little dweeb in you. the interesting thing about napolean as a character is that he is at once outlandish and yet familiar. i swear he's a celluloid reincarnation of someone i knew once... someone beyond my understanding (from college no less!). it's an excellent satirical take on life at the epitome of its mediocrity and it strangeness. anyway, the weird can be wonderful sometimes and in my opinion, it's worth a watch. if not for anything else, then for its deadpan, whitebread jokes.