Napoleon Dynamite

A high-school geek (Jon Heder) stumbles through life in a haze of his own slack-jawed stupidity and obnoxiousness. Husband-and-wife filmmakers Jared and Jerusha Hess (both wrote; he directed) have composed a snotty hate letter to their hometown of Preston, Idaho, portraying the whole town as a bunch of rubes stuck in the 1970s whose cumulative IQ hardly goes into triple digits. (The movie’s college-smartass condescension made it a hit at the Sundance Film Festival, but it’s unlikely to win the Hesses any friends back home.) It’s a one-joke movie as sluggish and witless as its antihero, nasty and unpleasant to the point of being downright repulsive. Heder seems perversely bored, unable to hold his eyes open; was that a conscious acting choice, or was he simply reading his lines off the floor?