Where's the Waterloo For This Napoleon?

I watched Napoleon Dynamite about two weeks ago, and the bitter, caustic taste still hangs fresh in my mouth.

For those of you not hip enough to know already, Napoleon Dynamite is about a character of the same name. Who is a nerd.

That's it. Seriously.

The movie, and the people who love it, don't even try to argue this fact. But the supposed allure of the movie is.......

That's right. There is none. I know many people who loved this film, and none of them were able to tell me what made it so great other than:

"Come on, man. It's funny!"
"Why do you say that? It's repetitive. It's just the same jokes over and over."
"Yeah, but I mean.....whatever. I thought it was funny."

Now I am a fan of subtle, repetitious humor; I still laugh every time a watch the Family Guy episode where Peter falls down and hurts his leg.

"Ssss....aaaahhhh....ssss....aaaahhhh....ssss....aaaahhhh..
..ssss....aaaahhhh....ssss....aaaahhhh....ssss....aaaahhhh....ssss....aaaahhhh."

Funny, right? But imagine that joke going on for 90 minutes. That's kind of what Napoleon Dynamite is. A joke that is funny the first time, but is told over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, ad nauseum, so that it becomes horrendous.

And the joke isn't even that funny the first time you hear it. From what I could tell, the whole 'joke' of the movie is that this guy is a dork, and the whole town lives 17 years in the past. Yuk yuk yuk. Maybe I didn't get it. But I think I did. I think I just get tired of something like that fast.

The premise would have been funny if it was a recurring SNL skit, or if Napoleon was a character on a TV show.

How does this pass for a film? How did this script past so many levels of people that they actually gave someone money to make it? The way I imagined it was that there were three guys sitting in a room, just bullshitting.

Mark: "Imagine a movie about, like, the dorkiest kid you can, and then put him in some middle of nowhere place still stuck in '81, and he like has one of those old Trapper Keepers with the ugly 1992 3D geometric shapes on it."
Steve: "Holy shit, remember those! And then, like, he has one of those old retro shirts on, that says, like, Sullivan County Track and Field Meet 1978."
Mark: "Ha ha ha! Dude, and he lives in a house with, like, that old wooden paneling, and shag carpet."
Steve: "Pppppphhhh! And then, then the kid......."

(2 hours later)

Mark: "...and like, you set him up with the blackest girl ever, with the earrings with her name in 'em and shit!"
Steve: "HAHAHAHA! Oh fuck.....oh man....this will be the funniest movie!"
Ben: "Guys, come on. This isn't a movie. I mean, what the hell is going to happen in it? You can't have a movie with just nerdy jokes for an hour and a half."

(uncomfortable silence)

Steve: "Like, seriously, don't bring this kid to my house anymore."
Mark: "Fuck, Ben. You are such a fag."

I honestly think that if you found this funny, then your imagination has been so brutalized by TV that you can sit and watch a flock of geese waddle around, eat grass, and shit, and would be perfectly content with your day.

I, on the other hand, want my 90 minutes back.