 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Dark Knight Matched the Hype 1st day Record |
| Idiocracy is Pure Genius August 8, 2008 |
| I did not see Idiocracy until three years after it premiered. That is because I never heard of the movie. I am quite disappointed in the film distributor, Fox, because the marketing campaign was non-existent. The film was dumped in theatres during one of the slowest movie attending weekends of the year, in only a handful of screens, with no theatrical trailer or television commercials and only a single opening-day newspaper. Fox botched the release of another Mike Judge film, "Office Space." But in comparison to Idiocracy, Fox gave the Office Space a decent release in 1999, putting it out into almost 1,750 theatres. The film simply wasn’t embraced by audiences until its premiere on cable and DVD. Since then, “Office Space” has rightfully found a cult audience, with its dead-on characterizations and wish-fulfillment fantasies of practically everyone who has ever worked in that type of environment. So the question is, why didn’t “Idiocracy” get any kind of chance to sink or swim on its own merits? Why was this hidden away from the press, and kept away from most of the major East Coast metropolitan cities? Elementary, my dear Watson... the film is just too savage in its brutal skewering of modern society for mass consumption. While a movie like “Talladega Nights” might tap the audience it targets with a velvet glove, “Idiocracy” hacks away at both the smart and the dumb with a comedic machete. |
| Film Plot The synopsis of the film is pretty simple, yet genius. The two videos summarize the film plot (for those of you future people). A narrator explains the decay of natural selection, the concept of unintelligent people enthusiastically out-breeding intelligent people, creating a society irreversibly dysfunctional. Demographic superiority favours those least likely to advance society. Consequently, the children of the educated élites are drowned in a sea of sexually promiscuous, illiterate, alcoholic, proletarian peers. In 2005, Army librarian Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), the military's "most average" soldier, and Rita (Maya Rudolph), a prostitute terrified of her pimp, Upgrayedd (pronounced: up•grade, two D's for a double-dose of pimping), are guinea pigs in a secret, year-long, military hibernation project. They are sealed into their hibernation chambers, to be awakened a year later, but the experiment is forgotten when the officer in charge (Michael McCafferty) is arrested for his own prostitution ring. The military base is demolished, and a Fuddruckers (eventually devolving into Buttfuckers) is built on the site. Five hundred years in the future, Joe's and Rita's hibernation chambers are jarred open in the 'Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505', reviving both of them. Joe crashes into the apartment of Frito Pendejo (Dax Shepard), a typical, idiot citizen of the U.S. future, with an apartment full of junk food and a prominent, giant television that is covered with adverts. His name, Frito Pendejo is a haphazard combination of a product mascot (Frito Bandito) and pendejo (pubic hair), the Spanish slang word insult. Joe is disoriented: in brief conversation Frito insults Joe's "more advanced" manner of speaking as "faggy"; in hospital, slacker Dr Lexus, MD (Justin Long), diagnoses him as simply "'tarded" and "fucked up". Dr Lexus panics on discovering that Joe has no barcode- tattoo on his left wrist, and so cannot be scanned for automatic debit payment from his bank account. With all that, Joe finally grasps that 500 years have passed since the Army put him in stasis. He is disturbed by the sights of the collapsing world, and flees the hospital, only to be arrested at a Carl's Jr. junk food vending booth for not paying his hospital bill and for not having a barcode tattoo. At trial, Joe's public defence lawyer ("Attornee at Law") is Frito Pendejo, Esq., who stupidly helps convict him. Joe is imprisoned; a poorly- designed I.D.-tattoo machine re-names Joe as "Not Sure" and barcode-tattoos him as such. During a mandatory (and very simple) I.Q. test, Joe grasps just how stupid humanity has become. Easily escaping his dim gaolers, Joe returns to Frito's apartment, asking him if a time machine exists to help him return to the past, to 2005. Frito claims there is one, but agrees to help only after Joe promises him billions of dollars in interest on a bank account that Joe will open in the past on his return. En route to the time machine, Joe and Frito find Rita. She does not know that she's been asleep for 500 years until Joe tells her, even so, she thinks Upgrayedd will find her. Frito leads them to a city-sized Costco, where Joe is re-arrested when he accidentally scans his barcode; instead of prison, Joe is delivered to the White House. President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews) has seen Joe's I.Q. test (scoring him a most-intelligent-man-in-the-world) and recruits him as Secretary of the Interior to correct the United States' food and crop shortages, dust bowl, crippled economy, mountains of garbage, and related matters. The other cabinet members are lampoons of contemporary politicians — nepotism, corporate-loyalty-corruption, over-emphasis on sex appeal in political media coverage. Joe learns that water has been replaced with Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator, a drink advertised as "rich in electrolytes", for virtually every purpose, including crop irrigation. Water is only used in toilets. Over time, the electrolytes in Brawndo accumulated in the soil, killed the crops, and caused the food shortage. After Joe reintroduces watering crops, the Brawndo Corporation's stock is worthless, causing great unemployment without visibly improving the crop situation. The angry populace riot, and Joe is sentenced to a day of "rehabilitation", an execution disguised as a public demolition derby, billed as "Monday Night Rehabilitation". Meanwhile, Rita discovers that Joe's reintroduction of watering the soil has made crops sprout in the fields. To save Joe (and with Frito Pendejo in tow), she bribes a television cameraman to show the thriving crops to the world, however, before reaching the crop field, they are distracted by a sale at a Starbucks chain brothel franchise. It is only after Frito and the cameraman quarrel and fight that he (Frito) remembers his duty, and films the crop sprouts. President Camacho sees the thriving new plants, on the stadium's big-screen televisions, and grants Joe a pardon just as he is to be incinerated with a flame thrower. At the celebration, Joe decides to stay and help repair American civilization; President Camacho names him Vice President of America. He also learns that the "Time Masheen" is just an amusement park history ride, wherein Charlie Chaplin was leader of the Nazi party who used dinosaurs to wage war on the world, and the U.N. are called "Un", having "Un-Nazied the world forever". Joe serves a short term as Vice President, then is elected President at the end of the Camacho Administration. Joe and Rita marry and have the world's three-smartest children, while Frito Pendejo also marries eight wives, fathering thirty-two of the world's stupidest children, echoing the introduction to the Idiocracy. Large Corporation Portrayal Many large corporations were mocked in a minor theme of the large company's role in the US. But the film was the target of civil suits by several large corporations who were unhappy with the way they were being satirized in the film, and the lawsuit helped the studio lose confidence in the film, even though this all happened after the film was greenlit. Costco was portrayed as being larger than a city, however, the greeter wanted to express that Costco was still personal. The video to the right shows how the greeter was successful in "sharing the Costco love." Costco got off easy in comparison to Fudruckers, Starbucks and Fox News (although the parent company of Fox News was the distributor of the film). Fudruckers name evolved to Butt and a word that rhymes with the current ending. Starbucks became a store that was similar to an illegal massage parlor. And Fox News merged with the Masturbation Channel to become, "Fox News and Masturbation Channel" which was better known as the 'bation channel. I was actually a bit surprised that the film did not take any cheap shots at Wal-Mart. In my opinion, they should have changed Costco with Wal-Mart. Maybe Mike Judge has an issue with Costco, who knows. So why was Idiocracy dumped? Perhaps because it taps a growing anti-corporate mood in the nation; perhaps because it expertly satirises the jingoistic self-absorption that now passes for public culture. Or perhaps because more people are sick of the modern America that Fox energetically helped to build than the Fox corporation itself is ready to admit. |
