10 Successful Low Budget Films (That Weren't As Good As You Think)

By Gavin Bard /

2. Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

Remember all those words ago about how people who get super mad when somebody points out Clerks wasn't perfect do so because they confuse a movie's "quotability" with its quality? Now, imagine that same issue but instead of witty dialogue you have barely coherent memetic pablum that can easily be turned into a shirt in Hot Topic's "Viciously Beaten Dead Horses" section. Voila! You are now imagining the reason Napoleon Dynamite wasn't a good movie at all. Not only did it unleash Jon Heder on the world, but it made an entire generation of people think that saying "gosh" in a funny voice is a perfectly acceptable substitute for a punchline. At least Jon Heder is doing a pretty good job as the Philadelphia Eagle's quarterback now though. Good for him. Napolean Dynamite is a movie about poorly written characters saying nothing interesting for an hour and then a reminder that Jamiroquai existed. It is actually more catchphrase than movie. Sometimes it's nice to imagine that this is the version of Gummo made in the Darkest Timeline by a Wes Anderson robot clone and painstakingly marketed towards people who think The Big Bang Theory is the pinnacle of sitcom humor.