Idiocracy

Dude…wait….what?

CASINO ROYALE–Who the hell is against Daniel Craig being Bond? He’s awesome and he’s going to be awesome in this movie. I can’t wait. It could very well be the best Bond since Mr. Connery left the series.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION–Once again, I can’t wait. This is another mockumentary by Christopher Guest and his team of miscreants. I love them all. This time they skewer Hollywood and how just a tiny bit of buzz can make even the worst movie seem like an Oscar contender.

Awesome.

Now…there’s this movie. And it’s about some faggy smart guy (Luke Wilson) and he thinks he’s, like, the smartest guy in the world.

Ok. I can’t write like that for very long. I just can’t be that stupid.

Joe Bowers is a loser. He sits on his ass all day long in a dead end job in a military library. He’s average in every possible way. As an experiment, the top brass decide to freeze him and a hooker that they pick up named Rita (Maya Rudolph). They plan on waking them up in a year to see what the effects of this long-term freezing are. Unfortunately, the guys in charge of the secret experiment get taken away, the base gets torn down and the pods that Joe and Rita are in get lost in the shuffle…for 500 years.

When they wake up they find a world that is full of idiots. People can hardly form complete sentences, much less actually run a government. They’re so stupid and lazy that they have toilets hidden in their chairs. And the word “toilet” brings out gales of laughter in them. Hitchcock forbid you should actually fart in front of them. And the biggest hit tv show is called “Ow! My Balls!”

A friend of mine compared this movie to Dr. Strangelove and said that it was one of the most brilliant satires ever made. I can’t really say that, but I do think it’s pretty damn good. My main complaints are that there’s not a lot of subtlety at all and that it kind of runs out of steam in the last half hour. But the first complaint may be invalid, because I think that’s probably the point of the movie: subtlety is dead. If you do something that kind of goes under the radar, it won’t be picked up. So Mike Judge has put everything right there on the screen in big, blinking letters. Everything has a corporate sponser. The President is a wrestler. Joe’s lawyer, Frito (Dax Shepard, who I always thought was a long-lost Wilson brother), is one of the stupidest people around.

One awesome thing about Mike is that he keeps his friends around. Keep an eye out for Office Space alums Stephen Root, David Herman and Greg Pitts. Also watch for Justin Long and Thomas Hayden Church.

In a world where art is being dumbed down as much as possible, it’s no wonder that a movie like Idiocracy gets buried under a ton of crap just like Joe and Rita’s boxes. It’s a slap in the face to the corporations that are trying to keep us as dumb as possible. And Fox, the company that “released” Idiocracy, is one of the worst offenders. (One of the funniest scenes is the Fox News segment. Fucking brilliant.)

Well, I say, “Fuck Fox.” They have kept us down for the last time. The Alamo Drafthouse is the only theatre in Mike Judge’s own hometown that is still showing this movie. In fact, they were one of the only theatres to ever show it here! Fox pulled the movie from a major market because they were scared that people would actually get the joke and possibly stop buying their shit. (Which is stupid. No one’s going to stop seeing Fox films because of this movie. And, unfortunately, no one is going to stop watching Fox “News” because of it.)

I didn’t love this movie, but I thought it was fitfully brilliant. I’ll buy it just to piss Fox off. Which sounds really stupid, but I bet that, if this movie becomes this year’s Office Space, it’s going to be a problem for Fox.