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January 12, 2007

Laughing With Or Laughing At?

I rented two movies this week. The first was essentially about the second, and wasn't terribly kind about it. I enjoyed both.

I have no idea how this Idiocracy movie snuck beneath my radar. That is, how did I not know about an allegorical sci-fi parody from Mike Judge starring Luke Wilson? That's like putting ranch dressing on bacon cheese fries. It's almost too much. And yet, were it not for a rather overdone Slate article showing up in my RSS feeds as well as a commercial on ESPN Wednesday night, I might have missed it entirely.

Luckily, advertising really works on me, and I hustled my little behind down to the Hollywood Video so that I might rent this product STAT! If anything, we might even blame the overall tepid levels of media/ advertising overexposure in the greater C@L area (yes, I did just complain that I'd like more advertising in my life). But that's for another day. The important thing is that I found Idiocracy and watched it.

I really enjoyed Idiocracy. It's essentially the Sleeper/Futurama joke with a twist: in the consumerist dystopia of the future in Idiocracy, people aren't just wacky and zany variations on current archetypes -- they're just really really dumb. That's the joke. Because it seems like less educated have more kids than uptight well-educated people, Idiocracy posits, the world will eventually be overrun with the semi-literate/ fast-food-and-beer-swilling spawn of the Great American Unwashed. Thus our protagonist from the present awakens in a world where he is officially the smartest person alive.

Never mind the awkwardness in re: "Ummm, so is this movie trying to convince me that only the educated should reproduce" or that it imagines the world as the United States and nothing else. It's a goofy sci-fi comedy! We'll forgive its semi-uncomfortable politics because we like sci-fi comedies and we wish there were more of them! And this one is even delightfully low-end; the sets are straight out of old Doctor Who episodes -- save for an exterior shot that I will argue must have happened along the 183 construction in Northwest Austin.

Idiocracy has the usual volley of corporate jokes (the city-sized Costco, the water fountains that serve Gatorade), though with a little more of an edge than you'd expect. That is, in the future, Starbucks is a brothel. So is H&R Block. I suppose we're supposed to assume that all marketing is inevitably headed to porn? And the jokes about the Violence Network and the "Aw, My Balls" show seemed a little too self-referential from the guy who gave us Beavis and Butt-head (ditto for The Masturbation Network). And while the pro wrestler president was a bit too obvious, it still worked (especially the bit from The House Of Representin).

The joke that I thought would get boring actually didn't. That is, I thought the whole "people are dumb and don't understand what the hell Luke Wilson is saying and thus just keep flashing him confused looks" thing would get boring. Instead, it actually got better as the movie went on. I feel like I've already ruined too much, but I will say that I was laughing more at the end than I was in the first couple minutes.

Despite the occasionally awkward preachiness in re: we should all get off our asses and make something out of lives (yawn), Idiocracy treated me proper. And it almost made me feel guilty about the other movie I rented this week. Almost.

Jackass 2 is actually pretty nasty. My main disappointment with the Borat movie was that, unlike the South Park and Jackass movies, it didn't up the ante on its TV show. That is, Borat the movie wasn't appreciably crazier than Borat the HBO sketch. South Park and Jackass (the first one) both extended the already sketchy borders of their respective TV franchises. That's part of what made them so good. The other part was that they used lots of swear words (South Park) and had football in the groin (Jackass).

Jackass 2 doesn't just have football in the groin, it has GIGANTIC OVERSIZED FECES-COATED FOOTBALL IN THE GROIN. At times, it was so vile as to be almost unwatchable. It really makes you wonder what it takes to shock people these days. A leech on your eye? A gigantic fishhook through your cheek, and then a hop in the ocean with a bunch of sharks? Six separate anaconda bites on your arm? Feces and gratuitous male nudity abound. In a YouTube world, is this what it takes for these guys to retain their titles as The Craziest Dudes On The Planet? I'm actually shocked that none of them have been seriously hurt in all this quite yet. It's got to be coming.

All that said, I sat there and enjoyed it, grunting and giggling in a style not unlike Idiocracy's dumb-ass denizens of the future. What can I say? Much like advertising, slapstick works on me, especially when people are actually getting hurt. This joke isn't old for me yet, and I would definitely watch another Jackass movie if they made one (and no one dies in the process; for some reason, that would make me feel guilty). But hey, if there was a Violence Network, I'd probably watch that as well. So I'm not a very good sample. But at least Mike Judge can take some solace from the fact that I haven't yet managed to have ten kids.

Posted by thatkid at January 12, 2007 7:19 PM under Stuff To Buy

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