Mike Judge's second live-action feature film came out on DVD this last Tuesday. Idiocracy with Luke Wilson, Dax Shepard and Maya Rudolph. What's that you say? You hadn't even heard about it? Perhaps that's because after shelving it for a year, 20th Century Fox buried it with a release on a handful of screens and no promotion. They purposefully put it out to pasture. So certainly you must be thinking that the movie must be pretty crappy for Fox to so unceremoniously dump it, right? Well, I picked up my copy today and watched it end to end and I can tell you that the movie isn't bad. Is it fall-down hilarious? No, it isn't that either. Instead it's the kind of satire that starts with you laughing and ends with you feeling sick to your stomach.
You see, about two thirds the way into the movie it becomes evident, at least superficially, why Fox buried this film. Nearly an hour in we're treated to a vision of what Fox News will look like in about 498 years: all exploding graphics and inarticulate pituitary retards reporting a narrow, slanted and jingoistic version of the news. (I know, I know, how can you tell it's any different from right now?) The anchors are replaced by a shirtless bodybuilder and a gargantuan-breasted vixen throwing it to a live reporter who says things like "and they knew he was all guilty and shit." On the surface it would appear that maligning Fox News while your film is being released by 20th Century Fox, both part of the same company, might not be such a good idea. It is possible that Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox, News Corp. and Sean Hannity's balls, may have had a problem with Mike Judge portraying his beloved news network in such a way. But I think that's an oversimplification.
Idiocracy has some very funny parts, and it is listed as a comedy, or at least as a satire. But what I found was that it's actually a horror film. It's the extrapolated worst case scenario consequences of a disposable culture. Picture the current film Children of Men re-imagined as a comedy and you'd pretty much have it. Rather than the meek inheriting the earth, it's the contents of your average Wal Mart inheriting the earth. And it starts out funny, but as the movie's timeline progresses and the concepts become more feasible the laughter slowly turns to a sour sadness. There's a real rushed feeling to parts of the movie, which leads me to believe that as the studio was seeing the dailies they pushed to just get it out the door. It wasn't because the movie was bad, but because while straddling the line of funny and profoundly depressing it went over the edge a few times, including *SPOILER ALERT* at the end, where things aren't so much resolved as just finished.
So I highly recommend this movie for the peek into Mike Judge's darker comic sensibilities as well as a cautionary tale. Because if anything, this isn't a comedic look into what things may be like in 500 years. It's more likely the way things almost certainly might look in 75 years. Why would I say something like that?
Oh.... I don't know.
No comments:
Post a Comment