Genre: comedy, comedy

Napoleon Dynamite

Directed by Jared Hess

Written by Jared Hess

and Jerusha Hess

Starring Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez

Classification: PG

Rating: **½

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story

Directed and written

by Rawson Marshall Thurber

Starring Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and Christine Taylor

Classification: PG

Rating: **

The movies' continuing fascination with nerds, geeks, dweebs and dufusses represents a substantial strain of doubt in America's win-win culture. The nerd word first appeared in the positive-thinking fifties, in Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo (1950), where it described a comically angry little humanoid creature. Newsweek cited nerd in 1951 as slang meaning a social misfit.

Since Ivan Reitman's Animal House (1978), films about bands of non-rugged individualists triumphing over conformists has been one of Hollywood's favourite comic fairy tales.

Napoleon Dynamite, director and co-writer Jared Hess's debut feature, is a distinctly indie-film take on the theme. The movie, which was acquired by Fox Searchlight for $3-million (U.S.) on the first weekend of the Sundance festival this year, has nerd chic. It takes its deadpan style and arch comic timing from Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums), and its angry edge with the insufferably mediocrity of American suburbia of Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse.

Like a lot of high-school boys, Napoleon (inhabited by the extremely impressive Jon Heder) walks as though he carries a lot of tension in the pelvic area. He has bug-like aviator glasses, an unruly mop of orange curls, and is in a more or less perpetual state of wounded outrage.

Preston, Idaho, the director's home town, appears to be a place where a few prefab houses were dropped at random by airplanes onto the flat landscape. Napoleon lives in one with his grandmother (Sandy Martin) and older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), who is in his thirties and more of a nerd than Napoleon. His social life consists almost entirely of Internet chat rooms. The town seems filed with the dumb, deluded and easily confused.

Napoleon's sleazy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) comes to live with them when their grandmother has an accident on her all-terrain vehicle. Rico's a former high-school football player, who sells plastic food containers and breast-enlargement creams door to door.

At school, Napoleon befriends a dour new Mexican student named Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and a shy girl named Deb (Tina Majorino). Together they lead a nerd insurrection, running Pedro for president at the school, and giving Napoleon a chance to shine in a dancing finale.

Love even comes to Kip, who earns a visit from his on-line friend, LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery), from Detroit. Like Napoleon, he discovers that black culture may save Idaho.

This ridicule of people on the borderline of poverty, intellectual disability and opportunity isn't charitable, but Hess can also be extremely funny. Napoleon shows his sweet-talking gifts when he sits down with a girl in the cafeteria, looks at her milk carton and tries this ice-breaker: "I see you're drinking 1 per cent. Is that because you think you're fat?" There are also memorable comic images, such as Napoleon taking an election button from a popular student and throwing it down the hallway in disgust before turning and running away.

Hess makes a virtue out of minimalism with an artless shooting style but an impressive attention to painfully dowdy visual detail: Napoleon's wolf motif T-shirts and his fascination with medieval armour and swords, the uncle's Joe Namath hairdo, the orange and brown late-seventies interiors.

He's a talented director though his attitude toward his subject reflects a troubling, familiar, paradox: Everyone cheers for the underdog; no one really wants to be one.

Nerds of a different stripe take the court in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, based on the time-honoured high-school humiliation game where big strong boys make little weak boys cry so phys-ed teachers can weed out their sports teams. Dodgeball, written and directed by former advertising director Rawson Marshall Thurber, aims low and occasionally hits in its parody of the misfit sports genre.

This is the fourth Ben Stiller comedy this year (is he saving to buy his own studio?), which may be too much. He plays preening gymnasium owner White Goodman, who is determined to ruin a humble rival's business. Stiller, wearing a blond puffy wig and a Fu Manchu mustache, offers his most outlandish and strident turn since Zoolander. For the anti-Stiller contingent, there's the compensation of seeing him get hit repeatedly in the mug by flying red balls.

Dodgeball also features Stiller's wife, Christine Taylor (A Very Brady Sequel), as a lawyer, caught between two gyms and two men. She arrives to offer the foreclosure papers to Average Joe's, where she becomes enamoured with Peter (Vince Vaughn).

Average Joe's membership consists of a few unathletic types hanging out to avoid loneliness, who don't pay their dues. Peter's only way to save the gym is to raise $50,000 by winning a Las Vegas dodgeball championship, leading to a showdown with his rivals.

Much of Dodgeball feels competent but lazy. The nerds are barely distinguishable, except for one who thinks he's a pirate and says arghh a lot to no humorous effect. To boost the team's chances, and the movie's obscenity quotient, the team discovers an ancient dodgeball coach, Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn in a wheelchair with long hair), who agrees to train them by throwing wrenches at their groins.

After the sloppy first hour, the movie picks up as a TV-sports parody. The big game is broadcast on ESPN 8 (If it's almost a sport, we've got it here), with Jason Bateman providing some funny moments as a clueless TV colour commentator. There's also a very funny cameo by five-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, offering backhanded support for Peter's decision to give up. As a whole, though, Dodgeball feels far too smug about its underachievement to be a persuasive nerd movie: This is more a film by Hollywood frat boys slumming for some quick summer money.