I ended up seeing this more or less by accident: but whoo boy, what a nice surprise.

As a much younger man I used to review movies for a living. I even used to review music videos for chump change during the tumultuous poverty of my youth. Consequently, in the course of my life I have spent as much time as most people I know watching films and video. Though my familiarity with modern pop culture took a bit of a hit when I decided it was mostly schlock and decided to withdraw, I still dip my feet in once in a while. To place my opinion of this new movie in some context, I�m first going to list the movies that I would recommend to anyone, anytime, just so you can get an idea of what my standards are.

Films I always recommend without qualification: The Bride of Frankenstein; The Man Who Would Be King; Tender Mercies; The Bridge Over the River Kwai; Fishing With Ghandi; Trains, Planes and Automobiles; My Dinner with Andre; The Good, The Bad and The Ugly; Never Say Never Again; Le Femme Nikita; The Magnificent Seven; Trainspotting; Harold and Maude; Crumb; 2001 A Space Odyssey; Alien; Aliens; Jaws; Memento; Caddyshack; Au Revoir, Les Enfants; Babbette�s Feast; The Dirty Dozen; A Clockwork Orange; Robocop; Manon of the Spring (trilogy); Lonesome Dove & Band of Brothers (TV); and the list definitely goes on and on if I give it more thought.

But let's add to the top-of-the-toppers list: Napoleon Dynamite. This is a great movie, and it's PG, for goodness sakes. You can bring your school-age kids, and the more intelligent they are the more they'll like it. Bravo.

I�m not all that far removed from teenage life, because of my continual contact with the teenage species. And my memory is really not that bad. Therefore, I think I can say with some authority that this movie recalls the teenage experience more authentically than any other film of the past couple decades.

As opposed to the Hollywood notion that every character is in a process of development toward some plot-friendly ideal, so that every doofy kid eventually becomes 'cool,' in reality the dorks have always remained dorks. I know - I was one of them. Probably still am. The psycho-philosophical veneer that most films try to paint onto the high school experience is a joke. Dorks remain dorks. You really don't give the dorks credit for rising above their station if you just keep artificially promoting them on the social scale.

Napoleon Dynamite (the kid�s real name) is Everyman - er, Everyteen - circa 16-17 years old, living the classic American high school experience boiled down as only a rural setting can do.

Reflect on how it really was: It was a time of anger; not angst. Of boredom so deep that you did not sit around and mull over the boredom, but instead the boredom permeated your every waking moment regardless of how much excitement you might be experiencing at any given time.

It was a time when the idiots among your contemporaries were not merely idiotic characters or clowns waiting to be taught a lesson: They were really idiots through and through - unapologetically, unreflectively, no-lessons-to-be-taught but just total dumbasses in whom the genes of stupidity dwelt so deeply that life experience promised no possible chance of evolution to a higher state.

It was a time when the doofuses were not merely incompletely evolved selves, but beings whose every living moment exemplified deeper and deeper exemplifications of sheer doofosity.

The true high school dorks did not evolve, per se, they just continued on in their dorkiness and occasionally did something interesting. They (we) were the ones who in any given situation could characterize the experience by evoking the exclamation, "ghhod!" and running out of the room for no reason whatsoever. They made some dorky comment to a jock or other higher being, got their head banged against the locker, and then continued right on in the same dorky behavior. That's what made them dorks. They did not learn or change, they just kept being idiots.

Napoleon Dynamite captures the essence of high school, white trash life in full blossom. It's the life many of us have led, regardless of ethnicity or socioeconomic background. The lead character is unbelievably realistic and will remind you what your teenage existence was actually like. The plot is quirky to the point of total weirdness and believability. Go see this movie.

In the interest of creating a scale for rating films, let�s go by dollar value. For the previous film, Wicker Park, I'd say you would have to pay me $25 to watch that movie again. For the movie Napoleon Dynamite, I'd pay $10 to watch this movie.