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Fox buries a new movie from Beavis & Butt-head creator Mike Judge, a self-avowed social conservative. Is his vision of dumbed-out AmeriKwa a little to close to the bone for jewish execs? Is this another example of jews foregoing profit for politics? Then why produce the movie in the first place? Judge for yourself, but in any case you can bet Judge’s movie is funny, and you can also bet that he sticks to safe white objects for his sharpest ridicule.

Following is a collection of some decent commentary on “Idiocracy” and the politics behind its delay and lack of promotion.

MIKE JUDGE’S “IDIOCRACY” IS OUT – IF YOU CAN FIND IT

The Marching Morons

I’ll probably have to wait until it finally comes out on DVD, but I have got to see Mike Judge’s new movie Idiocracy:

When soldier Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson) wakes up 500 years in the future, the result of a botched hibernation experiment, he finds the country hopelessly dense and incapable of solving the most basic problems . . .

Most everyone in 2505 is a mouth-breathing lout, barely capable of forming a sentence. They’ve elected as president the guy who seems cool to them, a loudmouthed porn-star wrestler (unfailingly funny Terry Crews, the dad from “Everybody Hates Chris”). They pass their days consuming, defecating, fornicating and gawking at anything that goes boom. Then consuming some more. And because they don’t know any better, they’ve let themselves be co-opted by corporate marketers, taking brands (“Frito”) for names and wearing disposable clothes covered with ads.

This sounds like Futurama meets Beavis and Butthead. The obvious question: How the hell does the hero tell he’s in the future?

Judge is the cinema genius who gave us Office Space — instantly making him both the patron saint and poet laureate of downtrodden corporate cubicle geeks like yours truly. It only adds to the instant personal appeal of his new flick that the plot appears to be loosely based on a short story by Cyril M. Kornbluth, a notoriously dyspeptic and misanthropic science fiction writer from the 1950s.

To call Kornbluth a Social Darwinist would be much too kind — his view of his fellow humans was more like a technician studying a cage full of diseased lab rats than a sociologist trying to justify economic class distinctions. Kornbluth firmly believed that humanity was, as he put it, polluting its own gene pool by allowing “defective” members of the species to reproduce. Over time, he said, this would lead to the progressive retardation of the masses and the eventual collapse of what we quaintly like to call civilization.

It is hard — very hard — to look at the modern Republican Party and not suspect Kornbluth may have had a point.

If his genetic theories make Kornbluth sound like an out-and-out Nazi, he certainly never went to any great lengths to dispel the impression. In his dystopian future, the world is secretly ruled by a tiny elite of geniuses (perpetuated through a strict eugenic breeding program) who work nonstop to develop high-tech tools that are powerful yet simple — so simple even complete idiots can use them. Somewhat like Microsoft Office, in other words.

In the end, Kornbluth’s time traveler persuades the smarties to solve their population problem by conning the morons into boarding space ships to emigrate to Venus — and then ejecting them out the airlocks into space. Borrowing a page from Hitler’s playbook, the organizers of this astral genocide even mail phony postcards to the remaining morons back on earth — “Havin a wunderful time, wish u wer heer.”

Needless to say, it doesn’t get more politically incorrect than that. It might seem to make Kornbluth a natural for a slot on the Pioneer Fund’s board of directors, or a co-author for Charles Murray’s next book — that is, if Cyril hadn’t died at the relatively tender age of 34 in 1958 (owing, natch, to a genetic defect that led to chronic hypertension.)

But Kornbluth, at least as far as I can tell, was no racist. He hated everyone — without regard to race, creed, color or national origin. And he hated stupid people most of all, which I imagine would have made the Cheney presidency almost unendurable for him. He also was blessed with a sharp intellect, a biting wit, and a gift for the English language — which probably explains why hardly anybody has heard of him today. If he was alive, he’d probably be in Guantanamo by now (or running the Justice Department).

Judge, not wanting to be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood on the same rail as Mel Gibson, appears to have tossed the more openly fascistic elements of Kornbluth’s tale, in order to concentrate on the rather obvious satirical possibilities of a future in which the most popular television show is called Ow! My Balls! (think Jackass with a lobotomy) and the president is a professional wrestler turned porn star.

Unfortunately, it appears Judge’s script still didn’t make him any friends among the morons at 20th Century Fox, who appear to be doing their level best to bury Idiocracy alive. It’s only showing in about 100 theatres in eight cities (Philadelphia, alas, isn’t one of them) with no trailers, no ads, no web site, no nothing.

Clearly, the studio understands how offensive a movie about a world filled with slack-jawed morons could be to a contemporary American audience — not to mention the top executives at Newscorp. Also not to mention the White House, the RNC, the Pentagon, the American Enterprise Institute, the major Wall Street investment banks, Ivy League universities and all the other places where the morons of today like to congregate and pretend they’re the genetically superior elite.

In other words, this ain’t no Snakes on a Plane — i.e. a deliberately engineered cult classic. If Idiocracy is going to find an audience, it’s going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: through guerrilla warfare. When the DVD comes out, I’ll be waiting, AK-47 in hand.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/entertainment/cst-ftr-idio06.html
http://billmon.org/

IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=reviewsNews&storyID=2006-09-06T075735Z_01_N06403407_RTRIDST_0_REVIEW-FILM-IDIOCRACY-DC.XML

Idiocracy
Directed by Mike Judge

I’d love to tell you all about this movie, how it’s a delightful comic romp or a disastrous misfire or an unexpected aphrodisiac (I’d particularly love to say the last one). But I can’t. Why? Because, shockingly, confusingly, frustratingly, Mike Judge’s new movie, “Idiocracy” is not playing in New York City.

As we covered at length earlier this week, Judge’s “Idiocracy” has been quietly dumped on 125 screens in just seven markets including Los Angeles, Toronto, and Chicago, but not, unfortunately, the Big Apple. In comparison, “Office Space”‘s “quiet” release in 1999 started on more than 1700 screens — though the advertising budget was almost certainly comparable to this go-around, which is to say, zilch. The lack of awareness for the movie, despite the influence of the Internet, is shockingly low: I’ve encountered several “Office Space” devotees who responded with a blank stare when I mentioned that Judge had another movie out.

The film follows Luke Wilson as an average guy who travels to a future where society has become so stupid that he is now the smartest man on earth. In a world where the top news stories are Katie Couric’s legs on the nightly news and Paris Hilton getting busted for drunk driving because she was “hungry” for an In ‘N’ Out Burger, how could Fox think this movie is anything less than the most prophetic vision of the future since “Sleeper?”

Ironically, Judge, once bitten by Fox after their botched “Office Space” release, remarked in interviews for years that he was hesitant to dip his toe back in the live action movie pool before developing “Idiocracy.” Incredibly, his film’s release has been botched even worse this time. The great equalizer, DVD, turned “Office Space” into a cult phenomenon, and I have no doubt it will do so again.

Why hide Mike Judge’s Idiocracy?
Sep. 3, 2006. 10:10 AM
GEOFF PEVERE

Starring Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard, Terry Alan Crews. Written and directed by Mike Judge. 83 minutes.

I watched Idiocracy, Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge’s second movie (his first was 1999’s cubicle-based cult comedy Office Space) while sitting entirely alone in a huge multiplex theatre somewhere near the 401. And as much as I liked the movie, which has been sitting unreleased for nearly a year and bears the signs of having been edited by hands other than the filmmaker’s, I also felt kind of sad for it.

Unambitious enlisted man Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson) is volunteered for a military program designed to preserve soldiers in their prime for use in future unpopular wars. The trick is to hibernate them, but the program goes wonky when the scientist who designed it gets busted for pimping. Consequently, the hibernees are forgotten about and literally tossed out with the trash. This results in Joe — along with Rita (Maya Rudolph), a hooker who happened to be the only worthy female the Armed Forces could find — waking up five centuries from now in a world so dumb the president is former wrestler, law degrees can be bought at Costco, crops are watered with sports drinks, cops accidentally shoot airliners out of the sky and the most popular TV show is a testicle-crushing reality show called Ow! My Balls!

Idiocracy, which has been dumped — like Joe himself — in only a few theatres without any press screenings, is a funny movie about epidemic stupidity that may have fallen prey precisely to the condition it’s trying to warn us about. Which is to wonder: was it too smart for its own good?

Judge’s low-rent cross between Planet of the Apes and Rip Van Winkle is a movie about all-American idiocy that’s brimming with ideas that project our current state of cultural devolution into an all-too-frighteningly credible future. It’s a world where all clothing bears brand advertising, the most popular movie is a 90-minute shot of a flatulent posterior called Ass, and anyone who speaks anything resembling proper grammar is immediately labeled a “fag.” [as niggers call their thoughtful brothers “acting white.” You see how the natural thing to do, sans jew pressure, would be to identify the discoloring of America as the main source of the IQ drop, but as that is politically impossible, Judge goes the prole-mocking route.]

Immediately conscripted by the White House, the rather dull-witted Joe is discovered to be the smartest man in the world and assigned the post of Secretary of the Interior. His job is problem solving, but its greatest challenge simply involves trying to get his double-digit IQ colleagues in cabinet to understand what the hell he’s talking about withoutsounding too much like a fag in the process.

Even in its current, apparently truncated state — the movie’s rhythm is choppy and wonky, and the frequent passages of voiceover narration suggest some clumsy attempts at post-production duct-taping — Idiocracy is a potently scruffy dystopian satire. It understands that the greatest threat to democracy isn’t terrorism, but unchecked consumption (one fleetingly funny visual gag depicts a TV chair with a feeding tube and toilet seat attached) and it is unsparing in its implication of everyone in the coming great dumbing down.

But that might also be its own undoing: when you charge everybody from Starbucks (offering a “Full Body Latte” in 2505) and Hollywood with obliterating the neurons of the most powerful nation in the world, you run the risk of playing to empty houses in vast multiplexes on the city’s fringe.

So I wonder: did the present beat Idiocracy to the future?

‘Idiocracy’ — not half bad

By Sarah Lindner | Friday, September 1, 2006, 01:10 PM

Three things to establish right up front:

1) I love Mike Judge. “Beavis and Butt-head” and “King of the Hill” are among my favorite things on this earth, and I’m pretty fond of “Office Space.”

2) “Idiocracy” will not rank with those works.

3) Still, there is absolutely no reason (and I just held myself back from writing that in all caps) that Fox should have hidden this little movie away like it was Suri Cruise.

I checked out “Idiocracy” this morning at the early, early show at Barton Creek Square (the movie did not screen in advance for critics, so we were not able to review for today’s Life & Movies section in the Statesman). There were about 10 people in the theater, which I found pretty impressive for 10:05 a.m. on a weekday. And many of those people laughed out loud during the movie.

“Idiocracy” is uneven, but it is very, very funny in places. You’re probably familiar with the premise: Luke Wilson plays an average guy who becomes the subject of a government hibernation experiment. He wakes up 500 years in the future and discovers that he is the smartest man in a dumbed-down world.

Like Peter Gibbons in “Office Space,” Wilson’s character, Joe, is trapped in a world ruled by the inept where nothing makes sense or works right. The problems go a little deeper than TPS sheets, though. At a hospital, for example, the lobby is strewn with trash and filled with slot machines. Patients line up to be diagnosed by a machine attended by a guy who mixes up which sensors go in your mouth and which ones go … somewhere else. And all of this costs billions of dollars.

The way that “Office Space” tapped in to our universal loathing of workplace nonsense, “Idiocracy” touches the raw nerve of how much, well, idiocy we have to deal with on a daily basis. Judge imagines a society where every interaction is like your absolute worst experiences with bad service or shabby manners (everything is loud, vulgar and sexualized in the future — we’re a nation of K-Feds) [that would be Kevin Federline – Britney Spears’s husband – in general terms, a wigger. But a wigger is nothing but an imitation of the real thing – a nigger. So, just like Judge and his bosses, this very likely jewish Lindner avoids the essence of the problem: the jew-produced niggerization of America].

Wilson’s character is a bit underdeveloped but he projects a sweet, everyman quality as the rest of the cast revels in playing dumb. The movie represents a new pinnacle in achievement for blank stares. Dax Shepard, who was such a nice surprise in “Zathura,” is a hoot as Joe’s dim lawyer, and Terry Crews is funny as the president, who punctuates his speeches with machine-gun fire.

But — and you knew this was coming — there are problems. The occasional voiceover narration seems tacked on to try to smooth some narrative problems. It’s annoying and not at all helpful. Maya Rudolph’s character — a hooker who’s frozen along with Joe and also wakes up in the future — is borderline disastrous. She’s written as a stereotype and she adds nothing to the plot. The plot doesn’t meander as much as “Office Space’s,” but the pacing could have been punched up.

The main thing that bothered me, though, is that you can tell the movie is unloved. While I liked “Idiocracy’s” inventive vision of the future, the film looks cheap and rushed, especially some special effects. I have a feeling that Judge could have done a lot more with a bigger budget.

I keep coming back to the question of why the studio isn’t even trying to promote the movie. Even a little money spent on marketing could have made it a niche hit.

If you’re a Judge fan, “Idiocracy” is worth checking out. It won’t wow you, but it won’t break your heart, either, and you’ll get some good laughs. I hope there’s at least a little bit of vindication out there for Judge and this movie.

Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment |
Comments

By soleil

September 5, 2006 09:36 AM | Link to this

this movie is funneeee………america is getting dumber, i know ‘cuz i is a teecher….

i laffed my bootay off

By soleil

September 5, 2006 09:33 AM | Link to this

i rarely laugh outloud at movies……i expected this to be a pathetic attempt at comedy…..i was pleasantly surprised and laughed out loud often…..mike judge has provided a cleaver concept of the direction of america…..the editing is rough, but the movie works……it is funny………..think this will go the way of “office space” one of my favorite flicks……..my son worked crew on idiocracy……

By Talking Books Warehouse

September 2, 2006 02:44 PM | Link to this

Hey, if you want to see the interior of the Talking Books Warehouse (the big building over on Shoal Creek between 38th and 45th) go check out this film. A small part of it was filmed there. The green things on the shelves are the boxes the Talking Books come in (they are cassette tapes.)

By austinmoviefan

September 2, 2006 01:20 PM | Link to this

I think it will find a following on video just as Office Space did. My husband and I saw it last night at Regal Gateway, and as the reviewer said there were many laugh-out-loud moments. It was not too long and though there were a lot of sexually-suggestive references, I did not find it vulgar at all. Judge’s big mistake I believe is in his honesty. There are so many jabs at big corporate names in this movie, the studio was probably just afraid to offend all the fat cats!! See it Austin!!!

By Austinite

September 1, 2006 11:09 PM | Link to this

I was involved with the making of this movie, and even sat in on some of the filming. It is definitely no “Office Space”, but is very funny and undeserving of the mistreatment it has received by TCF. You will see more of Stephen Root than you ever wanted to, Luke Wilson gets pelted with hotdogs and milkshakes in a mobile jail cell, and Judge’s vision of futuristic buildings and public services designed and run by moron’s is very creative. You won’t raise your IQ seeing this flick, but it will tickle your funnybone plenty. Now, if you think Idiocracy’ is juvenile, just wait to you see the movie of the future!
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http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/austinmovies/entries/2006/09/01/idiocracy_not_half_bad_1.html

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Idiocracy (cont.) [John Derbyshire]
This is getting interesting. Apparently the terror of human differences that characterizes our society has now advanced to the point where to say that

—-Some persons are smarter than others,

and

—-Smart people, net-net, don’t have as many babies as stupid people,

so that

—-The world of the future might have no smart people in it, only stupid people (this is the premiss of Idiocracy),

is tantamount to declaring oneself a Nazi. Stop this movie!

Fox studios are doing their best. But why did they commission Idiocracy in the first place? Mike Judge is not renowned as a creator of happy-clappy sugar-coated comedies built around plotlines from the Acceptable Ideas chapter of the liberal playbook. Beavis and Butt-Head; Office Space; King of the Hill; Hel-lo?

I can’t come up with any explanation other than that the Fox suits are seriously stupid. Which means that the Marching Morons world postulated in Idiocracy may already be upon us.

Mike Judge is not, in fact, a Nazi. He is a Reaganite conservative. But hey, isn’t that, like, the same thing? Duh? Hngh-hngh-hngh.
Posted at 9:57 AM

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZmJkNzcyNTJiZmY4NWQ0OWZkNzRkODQzMTI1YWZjM2E=

It might be because I walked in expecting a trainwreck, an unreleasable mess, that I ended up liking it so much. My expectations were lowered pretty far. It also might be that I had just seen the WICKER MAN remake before I walked into this theater. I have no idea how the film would have played to me if I had been overexposed to it, but I found myself gut-laughing at least a dozen times during IDIOCRACY.
That begs the question. Why? Why did Fox dump it? Why did they dump it with no fanfare at all? No advertising? If it wasn’t for the Austin Chronicle, I wouldn’t have even known about it and I was watching this project pretty closely!

It’s not that they choose to only release really, really good movies. My friend Rav made the point that they just put out JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE, who even my little brother and his friends, high school boys and girls in the target age range, thought was godawful crap.

http://www.aintitcool.com/tb_display.cgi?id=24374#1266693

Mishandled Movies: Idiocracy Isn’t The First
By Josh Tyler: 2006-09-01

Mike Judge’s new movie Idiocracy opens this weekend, with absolutely no support from 20th Century Fox, the studio that owns it. Fox is dropping it in 130 theaters with only a week’s notice, without a single movie trailer, and without even bothering to issue an official poster for it. They’re in effect, killing it. People won’t see a movie they don’t know exists. If Idiocracy succeeds it’ll be nothing short of a minor miracle.

Were it a piece of crap, Fox’s treatment might be understandable. But it isn’t. Idiocracy, like Office Space before it is another piece of satirical brilliance from Judge. The guy’s a genius, and Fox either doesn’t understand what they have on their hands or absolutely understands and find themselves utterly afraid of it.

Whatever their reasons for taking a great big dump on a fantastic, hilarious, destined for cult-stardom film, Idiocracy and Mike Judge are being tossed in the trash. It’s not like this hasn’t happened before. Idiocracy isn’t the first great film to suffer destruction at the hands of its own studio. It’s not even the first one in the past few years. With Idiocracy being set up to fail, now’s a good time to look back at some other recent works of genius that ended up in a dumpster after being completely mishandled by a studio. Some of them made their way back out again and achieved cult success on video, others remain unseen, and completely unappreciated. Sometimes Hollywood really sucks.

Below (2002) – Whenever anyone asks me to point them to a good movie they might have missed, the first word out of my mouth is Below. Written and directed by David Twohy, the guy behind the cult-hit science fiction movie Pitch Black, Below tells the story of supernatural happenings aboard a World War II submarine. It’s not just brilliant, clausterphobic storytelling, it’s genuinely terrifying. In fact, it may be one of the best horror movies of the past ten years. But Bob and Harvey Weinstein run Dimension Films ran it into the ground by releasing it without advertising, and without fanfare. The movie came and went from theaters in October of 2002 before anyone had a chance to realize it was there. It grossed a pitiful $605,000 before ending its extremely short theatrical run. On DVD a few fans caught on to it, but the movie never really caught on enough to be called a cult hit. It’s hard for a movie to become a hit of any kind unless someone sees it.

Equilibrium (2002) – Alright, I think this one’s pretty overrated, but even if I don’t like it it’s gained a huge cult following since it’s release in December 2002. Once again, Dimension/Miramax was the offending studio. Despite heavy support from internet opinion makers, the movie arrived on the heels of a half-hearted marketing campaign, opened at #20, and disappeared from American theaters before the geek crowd got mobilized enough to see it. It’s since gained a following on DVD, enough to allow director Kurt Wimmer a shot at another movie. That movie was Ultraviolet… perhaps cult success isn’t always a good thing.

Donnie Darko (2001) – Nearly everyone knows Donnie Darko now, but when it was first theatrically released in October of 2001, it came and went with barely a whisper. The few critics who saw it (including me) gave it rave reviews, but the film was almost universally ignored until it hit DVD and audiences figured out what they’d missed. Again, it suffered from an invisible, nearly non-existent marketing campaign from New Market Films. Though in their defense it may not have been out of malice, but merely impotence. Still, the film was virtually ignored at first. Later, as audiences discovered it in their homes it gained enough popularity to merit a second theatrical release, this time in the form of an inferior director’s cut redo by director Richard Kelly, flush with too much money. Now when you ask someone why they’re wearing that stupid man suit, there’s a good chance they’ll know what the hell you’re talking about.

Office Space (1999) – Yep, another Mike Judge movie. He just keeps getting screwed. 20th Century Fox was again the culprit, though the film got comparably much better treatment than Idiocracy. Still, Fox mishandled its marketing campaign so badly they might as well have not even bothered. They never understood what they had on their hands, which left Office Space stranded. The film did manage to gross $10 million before it completely disappeared but it wasn’t until it hit DVD and video that audiences really caught on to it. Since then it’s found a place as one of the most loved comedies of all time, and sits pretty comfortably on the best ever list of anyone whose ever been held prisoner by an evil cubicle.

http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Mishandled-Movies-Idiocracy-Isn-t-The-First-3315.html

Shying Away From Degeneracy

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By DAN MITCHELL
Published: September 9, 2006

THE new film “Idiocracy” sounds like a sure winner. It was directed by Mike Judge, creator of the animated TV series “Beavis and Butt-head” and “King of the Hill,” and director of the sleeper movie hit “Office Space.” It stars Luke Wilson. It has received good reviews from the few critics who, despite the efforts of 20th Century Fox, have been able to see it.

So why did Fox, after sitting on the movie for two years before releasing it Sept. 1, decide not to market the film, opting instead to open it quietly in only 130 theaters and then quickly send it to video? Judging by the online reaction, there are at least two possible reasons.

The first is that the film is simply too stark a critique of American culture, or even that it is a cautionary tale about low-intelligence dysgenics (essentially, overbreeding among the stupid). The movie depicts a future in which everyone has become so dense and culturally lowbrow that Mr. Wilson’s character — an average guy from the present day who travels by accident hundreds of years forward in time — is a relative genius. Why, asks David Weigel on Reason magazine’s Hit and Run blog (reason.com), do “movies that exploit dumbed-down American culture get wide releases while a comedy making light of that, by the creator of ‘Beavis and Butt-head,’ is getting canned?”

He points to another blogger, Ilkka Kokkarinen, who writes that the implications of the movie’s theme — flatulence jokes aside — “are so immensely serious that it is simply unimaginable that any studio boss would take the slightest chance of becoming the next Mel Gibson over the idea that society of stupid people is worse than a society of smart people.” (sixteenvolts.blogspot.com) Populists — defenders of the little guy — would not stand for it, Mr. Kokkarinen says.

Others theorize that Fox disowned the film because it makes fun not only of Fox News — the studio’s sister division — but also of Starbucks, Fuddruckers and other companies that may advertise with one or more media outlets of Fox’s owner, the News Corporation.

The blog FishBowlLA quotes Luke Thompson, a movie reviewer for E! Online, as saying, “some of the sponsors may well have been unhappy with the way their products are placed, and made some phone calls to higher-ups” (mediabistro.com).

A Fox spokeswoman told The Austin American-Statesman that the studio’s handling of the movie was “an executive decision from the chairman,” and would not elaborate.

Mike Judge’s hillbilly apocalypse
By GREG STACY
Wednesday, September 13, 2006 – 3:00 am

I sat through Mike Judge’s new comedy, Idiocracy, struggling to suppress my laughter. It was an evening screening, just a few days after the film opened, and there were only four people in the entire theater: me, a grim, sixtysomething couple, and a very old man who wandered out after five minutes looking utterly baffled, like he’d come there expecting to see D.W. Griffith’s latest. The film hit me with one hilarious gag after another, but every time I giggled, I honestly felt rude for disturbing the shrine-like quiet of the place. I kept imagining the sixtysomethings peering over their shoulders in the dark, hissing, “Listen, we came here to enjoy a comedy, so will you please knock off all that damn laughing?”

The film follows Joe (Luke Wilson), a career slacker working in a seldom-visited Army library. One day his truly remarkable averageness and lack of family ties get him noticed by his Army bosses, and he, along with a sleazy but winsome hooker named Rita (Saturday Night Live polymorph Maya Rudolph), are selected to take part in a cryogenics experiment that’s supposed to put them to sleep for one year. Of course, things don’t quite work out according to plan, and Joe and Rita are revived in the year 2505, where they discover that humanity has devolved to a truly wretched state.

A grimly funny sequence early in the film illustrates humanity’s sorry downfall by chronicling two modern couples: one, a pair of smart, strenuously polite yuppies, spends so long dithering about whether having kids would be a prudent idea that they never get around to actually reproducing, while the other couple is a pair of braying redneck beasts who breed like rabbits that have OD’d on Levitra. By 2525, the hillbillies have inevitably taken over the earth, and the lunky Joe and dippy Rita now find they are the most intelligent humans alive.

The film takes us on a tour of a vividly realized, nightmare America—or “Uhmerica”—where the streets are piled high with mountains of uncollected garbage, astonishingly crass corporate advertising assaults the senses (Fuddruckers has now dropped all pretense and just calls itself Buttfuckers, although it remains a popular spot for kiddie birthday parties), and the most popular show on TV is called Ow! My Balls! You know that snaggle-toothed trog on your block who spends every Saturday camped out in his driveway with his knuckle-dragging buddies, blasting hip-hop [again, the syncopation: not mentioning niggers where nigger is logically unavoidable] at unholy volumes from noon until the cops finally show up at 11 p.m.? Idiocracy’s future America has become nothing but that guy, from sea to oily, polluted sea, and it’s a hilarious, terrifying place, like one of R. Crumb’s cartoons come to grimy life. [Now that’s funny! One of the counts against Simon Sheppard in England is his hosting an R. Crumb cartoon about niggers taking over America.]

Judge’s previous creations, which include Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill and Office Space, have made him many millions of dollars and spawned enough catch phrases to fill a couple of chapters in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations; as you read these very words, thousands of dorks all over America are annoying their co-workers by muttering about Swingline staplers. But even most of Judge’s most devoted fans are unaware that he has a new film in theaters, because Fox is dumping this thing like a radioactive turd, releasing it to but a handful of cities, with no TV or radio ads, no posters, no media press kits . . . basically, the only way you’ll know this movie exists is if you happen to run into Judge somewhere and ask him what he’s been up to lately.

Idiocracy is arguably as good as anything else Judge has done, it stars a bona fide A-lister, and it looks like it cost a bundle; after all, all those grimy, crumbling city streets and little doodlebug cars couldn’t have come cheap. So what gives? Why is Fox treating Judge and his film so shabbily?

With King of the Hill, Judge comes across as that rarest of creatures on the modern American scene: an honest-to-gosh compassionate conservative. Very occasionally the show degenerates into wearisome Republican propaganda, but Hank Hill is generally a quiet and reasonable soul who espouses the kind of folksy values that are fairly hard to fault—hard work is good for you, and all that. Idiocracy is a more vicious beast, and if you didn’t know better, you could easily take it as the work of some angry commie kid. The film relentlessly and savagely attacks corporate America: here, ill-tempered Carl’s Jr. vending machines snarl, “Fuck you, I’m eating!”, Costco stores are the size of Arizona, and Fox News is hosted by a shirtless himbo and a hot chick in a bustier who cheerfully and sexily lie to an endlessly gullible public. Idiocracy all but grabs you by the lapels and screams, “Stop buying all this McCrap and read a fucking book already!” No wonder Fox isn’t getting behind this thing, not while the Rock has a new mind-rotter flooding the multiplexes.

There are a few moments in Idiocracy when some of Judge’s red state prejudices surface (even the otherwise kind-hearted Joe refers harshly to “fags,” for instance), but for most of its running time, the film is so wonderfully shocking and subversive, saying so many blackly comic truths about life in these United States, that you can hardly believe Judge is getting away with it. But then you realize that, thanks to Fox, the film is only reaching the tiniest fraction of its potential audience; it could well be that the only people who saw it last week were me, the two sixtysomethings and the Griffith fan. So just what is Judge getting away with, again?

Of course, Office Space was poorly promoted and tanked on its initial release, and it has since become one of those Spinal Tap-esque “cult” hits, where everybody in America seems to be a member of the cult. (Seriously, just mention the Swingline stapler at your office tomorrow morning, and half the people there will start mumbling about burning down the building.) Assuming Fox bothers to put this movie out on DVD, it seems inevitable that an audience will find it and love it. Idiocracy paints a grim picture of our future, but I’m willing to bet that this smart, angry little comedy’s own future will be a happy one.

http://www.ocweekly.com/film/film/uhmerican-idiot/25826/