THE NAPOLEON EXPLOSION: Did anybody else love NAPOLEON DYNAMITE as much as I did?

It's one of those oddball first movies from a young director that, despite all odds, gets made and then gets relatively big.

Here's the story: Napoleon -- the offbeat, awkward kid in your high school math class who drew centaurs in his notebook -- struggles to make connections in a small town in Idaho. The movie meanders through explorations of his family relationships, his friendships, his social currency, and his foray into romance. The whole deal coalesces around his friend Pedro's run for class president. I found the movie charming, hilarious, memorable, and inspirational. It's one of those rare movies that I'll buy on DVD and watch in bits and pieces for some time to come.

And lately I've been reading interviews -- with Jon Heder, who plays the title character, and with Jared Hess (yep) who wrote and directed -- that have charmed me even more and reminded me that good art is often made mostly for the artist, and any good or bad that happens beyond that is luck, timing, and not particularly important.

A little more than a year ago, I took a look at the Paris Hilton phenomenon, and created a presentation that suited my current line of work: PARIS HILTON RULES -- WHAT TEEN MARKETERS CAN LEARN FROM A DRUNKEN HEIRESS. I'm thinking I should apply that same prism to the Napoleon craze. There's a lot of elemental stuff in the movie and its popularity, stuff that might serve as a handy reminder to marketers about the preciousness, irony, and purity that constitute today's teen zeitgeist.

I was talking to a guy in a cab a few weeks ago, a guy who happens to sell high school class rings. We were swapping stories about how we ended up doing what we do (I help brands communicate more effectively with American teens). Both of us, if you believe what we said to each other, found something special and important about staying connected to the teen years, and had managed to blend our generally free market capitalist occupations with this conceit. It's a balancing act, holding this lifestage as sacred while using a commercial viewfinder to analyze it. And yet when something manages to tap into the zeitgeist, to make us stand still long enough to nod, tear up, and laugh like hell, the commerce almost seems an afterthought, more like a celebration than an exploitation. That's how it's supposed to work.