Tuesday, March 27, 2007

See this film...




I accidentally saw this film and found it to be a delightfully biting satire. It is a film by Mike Judge (Office Space) and he skewers the entire breakfast buffet from the land of the vulgarians in a pleasantly savage manner. Be careful not to mistake this film for what it is satirizing...This would be easy to do and some of the material is extremely vulgar and painful to watch. But it has to be done this way in order to be effective, so bear with it, and you will be rewarded. There are some very funny and hilariously satirical bits in this film...I have been ranting against pop culture for years, and Mr. Judge has come along and skewered it on film for me. Thank you, sir...

"...A perfectly cast Luke Wilson stars as a quintessential everyman who hibernates for centuries and wakes up in a society so degraded by insipid popular culture, crass consumerism, and rampant anti-intellectualism that he qualifies as the smartest man in the world. Corporations cater even more unashamedly to the primal needs of the lowest common denominator—Starbucks now traffics in handjobs as well as lattes—and the English language has devolved into a hilarious patois of hillbilly, Ebonics, and slang.

Idiocracy's dumb-ass dystopia suggests a world designed by Britney Spears and Kevin Federline, a world where the entire populace skirts the fine line separating mildly retarded from really fucking stupid, and where anyone displaying any sign of intelligence is derided as a fag. Working on a sprawling canvas, Judge fills the screen with visual jokes, throwaway gags, and incisive commentary on the ubiquity of advertising—for instance, with the presidential-cabinet member who works paid plugs for Carl's Jr. into everyday conversations. Like so much superior science fiction, Idiocracy uses a fantastical future to comment on a present in which Paris Hilton is infinitely more famous than Nobel laureates. There's a good chance that Judge's smartly lowbrow Idiocracy will be mistaken for what it's satirizing, but good satire always runs the risk—to borrow a phrase from a poster-boy for the reverse meritocracy—of being misunderestimated..."