By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Idiocracy (2004-2006) ***
Fox dumped Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s savage, often very funny satire of media and mediocrity over the weekend, with little notice and no advance screenings. After catching it on Saturday with an audience of five (and I seemed to be the only English speaker in the room), I was pleased to run across three other moviegoers over the holiday who had seen it and were buzzing about its brazen “Planet Butt-head” mix of stupid characters behaving in numbingly stupid ways. Luke Wilson plays very ordinary Army private Joe Bowers who’s conscripted into a cryogenics experiment that should last a year, but lasts until The Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505. He wakes to a world of relentless crudity, but of Kafkaesque familiarity and repetition, with a fistful of familiar brand names, transformed into gaudier (truthier?) versions of their current incarnations: Fox News is read by naked bodybuilders, FuddRuckers has transformed into ButtFuckers (where a kiddy birthday party can be seen under the sign) and Starbucks has become a chain of handjob parlors. (They love their “vente lattes” with “full release.”) TV watchers are addicted to The Masturbation Channel. The most popular series if “Ow, My Balls,” which consists of the star getting repeatedly kicked in the crotch. A talking Carl Jr’s’ vending machine obscenely tongue-lashes its users. Anyone who can finish a sentence—Bowers, basically—is mocked for “sounding faggy.” (Knowledge=Weakness.) A vista that seems to be vaster and more polluted than Mexico City has on its horizon a CostCo that’s larger than Mexico City. Yes, the vulgarity goes all the way to the White House, where the failed country is run by President Camacho, a machinegun-wielding man in flag-emblazoned tights, part Apollo Creed, part Rick James. I could go on—there’s a provocation at every turn, despite the choppy editing and aural wallpapering of the movie with a dull voiceover—but I’ll leave it at this: Mike Judge’s angry, insistent voice, and his willingness to take a premise into absurdity, still come through loud and clear. (So does his contempt for where a fellow Texas is taking our culture.) You have to ponder whether anyone in read the script, most notably in the product placement offices of the above-named corporations. 84m. [Also check out my favorite perspective from another writer, over at Matt Dentler’s Austin-centric-rific pad.]
I never even heard of it until last week. It’s not playing in my city either. Office Space is a classic… I will see this on DVD, I guess.