So, I promised a few words on Napoleon Dynamite, and here they are.

I wonder if you have ever been on one of those amusement park rides where you sit in a harness (scroll down to where it says “Free Fall”) attached to the side of a tall tower, strapped in like an institutionalized madman, and are lifted one, two, perhaps three hundred feet into the air. When you reach the top of the tower there is a suspenseful pause where you gaze out over the field of Ferris-wheels and roller coasters like a queen surveying her kingdom, before gravity is allowed to do its thing and you are thrust like an egg to the ground, shooting downwards with thrilling speed.

The free fall is swift and over very quickly. The slow rising part of the ride, the part where you are being carried upward on the way to being flung down again, takes up most of the actual ride time. And to be sure this rising is enjoyable in itself. Your view of the park expands in ever widening circles, people diminish to toy-soldier scale, a mild and pleasurable vertigo bubbles in your belly as you mount. But of course the whole point of the journey, the reason for your rising in the first place, lives in those last few exhilarating and all too fleeting seconds when you are diving downwards like a bullet.

After all that, I have to confess that I have never been on one of these rides (although I would love to, because I find the experience of being flung about fast and furious like a rag doll in flight very enjoyable. I like feeling dizzy, light-headed, fleet. It’s why I like roller coasters, gyroscopes, swinging very high and fast, and spinning about on roller-chairs until I’m very nearly ill.)

I bring it up because watching Napoleon Dynamite is something akin to being on a free-fall ride like that. The eponymous movie follows a gangly, orange-fro’d anti-hero with an overbite, a penchant for outrageous self-aggrandizing lies, and a kind of dazzlingly self-centered eccentricity that is at once awkward, endearing, and irritating. Most of the actual time you spend watching the movie, collecting and savoring its small moments of intense weirdness, you are in that first half of the ride, inching ever higher up the side of the tower. Every time Napoleon licks his thick lips and blurts “GOSH,” or “YESSSSSS,” or “Flippin’ SWEET!”, every time he bats furiously at the tether-ball in the schoolyard, every entirely un-ironic unicorn that appears on a t-shirt or notebook cover, that’s you ascending another few feet up into the air, in preparation for the eventual plummet.

Napoleon Dynamite is breathtakingly random and weird (so determinedly quirky, in fact, that I was a bit taken aback to find, from time to time, my mouth literally hanging open in pleasantly stunned disbelief). It contains – to name the least of its oddities – a pet llama, a time machine, and a contest in which Napoleon and his best friend Pedro win medals for their expert knowledge of cows.

But there really isn’t much of a plot holding the film together, because despite appearances, it’s not actually about the triumph of dorkdom over coolness. Yeah, Napoleon gets beat up and teased, but under Jared Hess’s direction Jon Heder plays his character as oblivious – or perhaps impervious – to the emotional damage you’d think he would experience. The film is actually quite tiring to watch sometimes because the acting is achingly deadpan (perhaps to counterbalance the strangeness of the dialogue and events in the film, everyone’s delivery is understated to the point of being poker-faced).

And then, about 80 minutes into the movie, there is a transcendent sequence lasting perhaps three minutes which by itself justifies and illuminates the entire rest of the film. It makes everything leading up to that moment worthwhile, the way the drop validates the ascent in the amusement park ride. When you get there, your strange and sometimes exhausting journey is rewarded, because you now have the immense and hilarious pleasure of watching Napoleon doing something (I won’t tell you what) that somehow manages to be supremely dorky and completely fabulous at the same time – and you are in free fall. Or at least, I was.

This wasn’t a profound film, or a particularly compassionate one — but man, those three minutes were fun.

P.S. If you see this, you should know that there is an epilogue after the credits that is “flippin’ SWEET!”