This Kiwi take on Napoleon Dynamite will either leave you beaming or give you hives. I itched a bit at first, but the movie eventually won me over. The film follows a romance between two social misfits living in New Zealand: a freckled waif (Loren Horsley) who tries to laugh herself into other people’s conversations and a video-game clerk (Jemaine Clement) who compensates for his own insecurities with an aggressive weirdness. Writer-director Taika Waititi forces the quirkiness at times, but the movie gradually reveals how these two offset each other’s faults – he drags her into the spotlight, while she gives him enough confidence to drop his act.
