I thought only food could be treif, not, say, Reform Jews? It's a great word, though.

That's an even more polarizing movie than Fahrenheit 9/11, it's kind of nice to see someone who's merely ambivalent about it. I enjoyed it myself. You might have been less annoyed by it if you had seen it before a year of hearing it quoted all over the goddamn place....

Though I'd hardly call it a great movie, I'll admit I liked it, in part because Napoleon, unlike the kids in Welcome to the Dollhouse, was totally unsympathetic. The whole Mormon subtext, which totally went over my head until somebody explained it to me, is interesting to.

The lasting impact it's had on me is that I now find it impossible to say quesadilla correctly.

I knew the writer/actor was a practicing Mormon, but I didn't see the subtext in the film, unless there's a scene where someone has a year's worth of canned goods that I missed. Explain?

Can't find it now, but I read a thread somewhere - maybe imdb - where Mormons posters were discussing whether Napoleon was implicitly supposed to be LDS, and they were citing things like that he always said things like "Gosh" instead of actually cussing and that at one point he wears a Mormon junior college sweatshirt.

(ok, just found this which explains a few other points: "The film also displays many quirky references to Mormon popular culture. Napoleon uses the word flip instead of the more common expletive fuck. He wears a t-shirt for Ricks College, the former junior college located in Rexburg, Idaho now known as BYU Idaho. In the DVD extras, there is an interview with Jon Heder in which he jokes that perhaps Napoleon and Deb may be joined "for time and all eternity"—a reference to the Mormon belief in "eternal marriage" performed in LDS temples. The principal's reference to "Juarez"—where he assumes Pedro is from—is a reference to Colonia Juarez, a Mormon colony in Mexico founded to evade U.S. polygamy laws in the nineteenth century. The large block of cheese is familiar to most Mormons, who are freqently admonished to keep supplies of food sufficient to live for years in preparation for the "latter days.")

Of course, I think there's no explicit reference to Napoleon's religion since, in light of the fact that he's pretty unlikeable, it might rub people the wrong way. I think the filmmaker was obviously drawing off his personal experiences in a way not all movies do, so it's natural things like this might creep in, too, perhaps even at a subconscious level. But I still get the feeling that there's a part of the movie that a Mormon might pick up on that goes over the head of the rest of us.

This is probably one of the few things in life that has made tater tots less appealing to me.

Napoleon Dynamite did nothing for me. I remember D and I tried to see it two nights in a row but were rebuffed the first and saw Garden State instead. Needless to say, I was especially disappointed seeing those two next to each other.