At times Anchorman gets by on being so purposefully bad it doesn't need to be that adeptly written or performed, though a considerable amount of it is. Napoleon Dynamite is more original, but it too works by parodying romance conventions: Napoleon has rivals and must defeat them at the climax, thereby saving his best friend and winning the girl. As in Anchorman, Napoleon's combat skills develop fully within the mode of irony, but his triumph sneaks up on you without your even being aware the movie has a plot. The characters' misadventures unspool in a series of first-rate blackout sketches, which play out leisurely but are cut together with the snap a young director could have learned growing up on The Simpsons. And verbally Napoleon Dynamite is the most entertainingly imitable comedy since Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (both in Heder's delivery and in such lines as his announcement to his girl, "I caught you a delicious bass"). It likewise features a melodrama involving nasty popular kids versus ironically heroic Z-list kids, but the melodrama in Romy and Michele is too insistent--like we care. The Hesses finesse it so you get the surge without disrupting the ironic circuitry.

Shaun of the Dead

Last year's Bad Santa starring Billy Bob Thornton went so far with its travesty of holiday movies like Miracle on 34th Street that you could trust the moviemakers hadn't just tacked the unironic redemption on at the end to appeal to the audience. They staggered their way to it honestly. Usually, however, when moviemakers segue from irony to romance it seems as if their irony had been a passing attitude rather than an aesthetic commitment.

In the British movie Shaun of the Dead, the inevitable switch to romance taints the irony that came before like backwash. Shaun is an overaged slacker who loses his girlfriend because he can't outgrow his ambitionless best friend. The two guys like to sit on the couch playing video games and making fart jokes, or to drink and smoke at the pub, and Shaun expects his girl to tag along. Shaun has become a permanently adolescent zombie, but when a viral epidemic causes the dead to rise and feed on the living he becomes a man of action who can take heroic risks, improvise as the desperate situation mutates, feel the importance of the moment and convey his feelings directly. He rescues his girl and defeats his rivals, and by the climax you have only a vague memory that the movie started out with a hyper style keyed to the unidealized view of the hero and with the star Simon Pegg expressing the character's dilemma with superbly timed alternations of attention and distraction (his mental mouse and cursor only randomly connected).