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Beyond the Lens
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The Ignominy of Idiocracy
In terms of how his latest film has been handled by 20th Century Fox, writer-director-animator Mike Judge might well paraphrase the title of its fictional reality show: Ow, my balls!
Friday, September 8, 2006 at 2:50 PM
By Brent Simon
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Barry King/WireImage.com
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Manhandled filmmaker Judge
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In February of 1999, 20th Century Fox released Beavis and Butt-head creator Mike Judge’s live action directorial debut, the workplace comedy Office Space, in relative cloak-and-dagger fashion, surprising since the feature film spin-off of his animated hit, the willfully warped road trip Beavis and Butt-head Do America, had rung up considerable critical praise and over $60 million for Paramount just over two years earlier. Office Space only grossed $10 million in theaters, but went on to sell literally millions of DVDs. Its dead-on satire of droning corporate culture struck a zeitgeist nerve, and the movie became a word-of-mouth cult hit for those in the comedic know, undeniably paving the way for the Emmy-winning American remake of The Office.
Still, that botched release is nothing compared with the treatment of Judge’s latest film, the futuristic comedy I>Idiocracy, also released by Fox. With apologies to Yogi Berra, it could be characterized as déjà vu all over again — if only it achieved even the ignoble, air-quote heights of Office Space’s discharge.
Idiocracy was shepherded out to 130 theaters last week in an unpublicized, cover-of-night, seven-city dump worthy of a presidential excursion to Baghdad — a release so quiet that I still haven’t seen a single poster of the film and even some of its stars knew nothing of its release. (Still making press rounds for his starring role in Accepted, Justin Long, who has a cameo in Idiocracy, seemed much more jazzed to talk about the latter, and said he was looking forward to seeing it.) No TV ads, no radio ads, nothing. Murder victims have been dumped less deviously than this.
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20th Century Fox
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A self-fulfilling prophecy
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Moviefone, meanwhile, still listed Idiocracy several days into its release as the “Untitled Mike Judge Comedy” on its electronic listings, and currently has no images for the movie, as well as a plot synopsis that flat-out misidentifies the setting and repeatedly misspells the name of its central character. With this sort of serialized brownout, one would expect Idiocracy to be a giant, steaming pile of Gigli, right? Thing is, it’s not. In fact, it’s actually pretty funny.
The film commences with a brief cold open that posits our hypotheses regarding evolution have been somewhat misguided, and that over time humankind’s own development and gene pool has rewarded those who simply reproduce the most instead of the smartest and fittest. From there, the story centers on Joe Bauer’s (Luke Wilson), a soldier who’s used to skating by stepping out of the way. Chosen for a special scientific experiment because of this very aimlessness, Joe is put into a hibernation pod for a year in order to test a military program that will allow them to freeze and store the best soldiers for when they are needed the most.
Unable to find a suitably shiftless and pedestrian female candidate within their ranks to test alongside Joe, the military turns to the private sector, and recruits a prostitute named Rita (Maya Rudolph). When the military brass in charge of the experiment gets caught up in a drug and corruption sting, Joe and Rita are forgotten, and awaken a few centuries later.
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Jim Spellman/WireImage.com
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Solid at the box office
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They find a world where 500 years of base pursuits, laziness, veritable inbreeding and the general lack of any rigorous intellectual application have combined to produce a slack-jawed society nearly incapable of solving even the most rudimentary problems of sanitation. Great trash heaps abound, people relieve themselves in toilet easy chairs, and the few taller buildings that haven’t collapsed are tied together with massive cables. The top celebrity in the nation is the star of a reality show called Ow, my Balls!, and the number one movie (and winner of eight Oscars, mind you) is simply called Ass, and features 90 minutes of bare-butted flatulence. Those that do “read” peruse magazines like Hot Naked Chicks & World Report.
Everyone speaks in a mashed-up dialect of hillbilly, Valley Girl and unchecked impulse (“Like, man, I like sex…”), and evinces the logic and processing of a stoner attempting to retrace his footsteps and explain the events of his day. In this environment, Joe is the smartest man alive. Derided for his “faggy talk,” Joe is picked up for not having an identifying tattoo, and his lawyer Frito (Dax Shepard) does him no favors. Joe talks his way out of prison once, and reunites with Rita, but in trying to make his way to a time machine located in the cavernous depths of a city-sized Costco, eventually gets picked up and sent to Washington, D.C.
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John Sciuli/WireImage.com
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Co-star Dax Shepard
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It turns out the president (Terry Alan Crews) is a five-time smackdown wrestling champion, and in a speech in front of the House of Representin’, he tasks Joe with coming up with solutions to the nation’s problems, which include awful dust storms and a lack of crops (which has, in the president’s words, negatively impacted “burrito toppings”). At first Joe resists, and merely uses his new appointment as Secretary of the Interior to procure a pardon for Rita and continue his search for said time machine. When he realizes that the country has been watering soil with an omnipresent sports beverage (“It has what plants crave… electrolytes!”) instead of water, though, he tries to affect change.
It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but Judge’s satirical touch — while drawing most of its inspiration from outlandishly crude arenas — is remarkably adroit and complete, and the entire cast (Thomas Hayden Church and Office Space’s Stephen Root and Dave Herman also cameo) is solidly on the same page.
First off, there’s just something perversely right about Luke Wilson — who’s managed to out-bland Edward Burns as a leading man — starring in a movie about the arithmetically affirmed most completely average guy in the world. After all, when Matthew McConaughey, Vince Vaughn, Mark Ruffalo and his older brother Owen (among many others) won’t return a studio’s calls or yield to their rom-com solicitations, his is the name finally bandied about to place opposite Reese Witherspoon, Kate Hudson, Drew Barrymore or other some up-and-coming starlet. Just call him Mr. Stop-Gap. After all, excepting a handful of cameos and his inessential walk-on, boy-toy part in the Charlie’s Angels movies, Luke Wilson’s films have grossed a combined $537 million — or approximately that of Mission: Impossible II’s worldwide gross.
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Ron Gallella/WireImage.com
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Murdoch, with wife Wendy Deng
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Judge also gets great mileage out of some surprisingly effective special effects work. For all the future-thought tidbits and touches on display in sci-fi flicks like Minority Report, Idiocracy is likewise steadfast and, dare I say, amusingly intelligent about the extension of its basic conceit.
So why the hatchet job, Fox? Hollywood is hardly known for falling on its sword when they feel they have a clunker. In fact, more often than not, they usually rush into the breach, promotional guns blazing, in an effort to recoup as much money as they can before word-of-mouth turns on them. And spare me any argument that it’s because someone at Fox other than Rupert Murdoch suddenly decided to be an arbiter of taste and decency.
Granted, Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph are hardly marquee leads, especially in the wake of the former’s box office flameout earlier this summer in the form of My Super Ex-Girlfriend, also released by Fox. Still, Idiocracy is in many ways the perfect back-to-school movie, and even though Beavis and Butt-head has been off television for more than a decade now, Judge is still a respected name among the hipster sly-comedy crowd.
One popular — and certainly not too farfetched — theory is that the proudly lowbrow, R-rated Idiocracy touched a nerve within boardrooms because of how harshly it comes down satirically on some of its corporate players within the movie. Apart from the Costco dig and all sorts of franchising and licensing jokes, delivered in visual scattershot throughout the film, over the years the burger chain Fuddrucker’s has morphed into Buttf*ckers, Starbucks gives hand-jobs with its lattes, and tax refunds (I think from a name company, though I can’t recollect with 100% certainty) can be received in the form of further sexual gratification. “If you don’t smoke Tarrylton’s… f*ck you!” exclaims one leering billboard, while Carl’s Jr. kiosks repeatedly greet customers in similarly crude fashion.
One rumor has Starbucks and-or other companies threatening legal action or, more likely, noncompliance and non-cooperation in future projects with the studio, meaning that this dump of Idiocracy satisfies 20th Century Fox’s contractual obligations while also showing their groveling sensitivity to the thin-skinned interests of fellow corporate citizens (as opposed to the alternative of… I don’t know, all that material somehow slipping by those that greenlit the movie and the legion of well-paid legal vetters that help handle product placement and rights clearances in films?). It’s hard to prove, of course — coincidentally, just like indecency. But Fox ducked calls for comment on this, or even to confirm or discuss the movie’s release strategy, except to say that it came out last week.
That, as much as the bizarrely bullet-riddled commercial corpse of Idiocracy, seems to say something.
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