I try my hand at movie reviews

I don't know what the problem is... I'm trying to conjure up some anger about something... you know, to fuel my writing. I'm reading about Terry Schiavo. I'm reading about Bush visiting Europe and making nice with Germany and France. I'm reading about Michael Jackson's trial. I'm reading about mudslides in Cali, bird flu, Ward Churchill (who now admits he's not really Native American)... and I just can't seem to generate any ire. I think Teddy Kennedy needs to "belly up to the bar" of the national media more often because that man can certainly flare my anger. What happened to John Kerry? He was great at it. He may as well have worn a target on his shirt. How about Barbara Boxer? Don't we need a congressional hearing on something, anything so that these blowhards have a venue? The straight pin of my prose is without the balloon of their stupidity! I wallow in the quicksand of a non-election year! Woe is me.

Maybe I'm going to have to work on my humorous writing. Maybe satire...No, I'm not smart enough to write satire. Satire's hard. Maybe I should start reviewing movies.

I watched Napoleon Dynamite the other day. The acting was first rate. The lead character, Napoleon lives with his grandmother and his brother, Kip. Kip is 32 and spends a substantial portion of his life online looking for his soulmate in chat rooms. Grandma spends less than five minutes on screen, in which time she crashes her four wheeler in the dunes and must be hospitalized. Napoleon is a high school student with an unbearable attitude. He's the biggest geek you've ever seen... unless you knew me in high school. (Psycho babble warning...) He's clearly covering up his feelings of inadequacy with a gruff exterior, an aggressive tone and hiding inside the fantasy world of his drawings. It's all rather pointless until he befriends two other outcasts, a girl named Debbie and a boy named Pedro and together they succeed, against all odds to get Pedro elected student body president. I'd say it's the feel good hit of the winter... but that's really pushing it way too far. It is however, quite quotable. If you like the word "freakin", can conjure up some hostility and have the ability to never make eye contact you can do a pretty good Napoleon impression. All in all, it's good clean fun. Look for the llama, Rex Kwan Do, raw egg refreshment and the FFA milk cow judging contest. And probably a sequel.