Reviews

I know I'm writing this review over 10 years too late, but the fact that my family still loves to watch this movie years after it came out is a testament to how funny we still find it.

People who don't get this movie have probably never spent time in a rural, Western town. If you have, you appreciate how dead-on this movie is in depicting the absurdities and banality of life in such a town.

Also, people claim the movie borrows from movies like Rushmore, but if you want to see the original Napoleon, you really need to watch a little-known short film made by the Mormon church from 1977 called "The Phone Call." Hess took Napoleon's character, and a few other details, almost directly from this film. The film stars Mark McClure, the older brother in Back to the Future and Jimmy Olsen in the Christopher Reeve Superman films, and you can find it on YouTube. Once you watch it, you'll have a better appreciation for Napoleon. (For the record, there are a few Mormon jokes, like Napoleon's "Ricks College" t-shirt; Ricks was the name of the BYU-Idaho campus in Rexburg, ID before it changed its name.)

Again, not everyone will get the movie. And that's OK. It's more "slice of life" than punchline humor. It's not meant to appeal to everyone, but for anyone who ever spent a summer in rural Idaho (or Utah, Wyoming, etc.), you'll fall off your seat laughing.

My husband and I pulled up Wilfred on demand, per a friend's recommendation about how it was the funniest thing he had seen in years. However, we both could hardly wait for it to be over. We kept asking, "How much longer is this?" It boasts a well-regarded main actor in Wood and manages to get many of the popular sit-com regulars to make appearances (Ed Woods, Rashida Jones, etc.), but I thought it was simply 27 minutes of the most puerile drivel I had seen in years. It wasn't cutting edge; it wasn't witty. The writers clearly intended the jokes to make you laugh and exclaim, "They didn't just say that, did they?!" But instead they just fell flat and were completely unshocking.

I couldn't agree more with throwaway50000. He summed up my complete sense of anticlimax from watching this show. This is *not* the next Modern Family or Arrested Development or even Malcolm in the Middle. This show is just insipid.

It seems the people who really enjoyed this flick as an example of noir are folks who focus a lot more on cinematography and film-making than the average viewer. (I don't know if the helicopter shots, for instance, were ground-breaking.) However, I can say that as simply a casual viewer who enjoys a good noir film, this one missed the mark. Is it noir or sappy romance? I felt like the director couldn't decide. The main actors seemed too baby-faced to carry off noir, imho, since the hardened characters in noir plots usually need to be a little bit more mature to have gained their worldly experiences. When compared with films like "Double Indemnity" and "Touch of Evil," "They Live by Night" just can't hold its own. Unless you're a total noir buff, I'd skip this one. There's even an old Nancy Davis (Reagan) film called "Shadow on the Wall" that few people have seen that I liked better than this one, fwiw.

I saw this movie in the theaters when it came out. There was nothing terrifying or suspenseful about it to me, and I am someone who likes genuinely suspenseful movies. (Note: I do not like the gratuitous fake-blood-using horror flicks that just come off as laughable, but rather truly suspenseful films that keep you hooked and feeling "freaked out" and guessing throughout the film.) This movie promised to be a classic suspense film, not a bloody horror show, but it was actually neither. The only suspense in it was waiting for something interesting to happen. By the time the ending credits rolled, I realized nothing interesting would happen. My husband and I both looked at each other and said, "This is it?" If you want a more mind-bending, suspense thriller, I suggest Identity, starring John Cusack or any classic Hitchcock thriller. Even at his worst, Hitchcock had great cinematography and an artistry to his work unparalleled by the likes of Blair Witch.