Sunday, January 21, 2007

Dumb New World

Watched Mike Judge's long-delayed Idiocracy last night, and it is hilarious. I always heard that the studio refused to release it because they just didn't think it was all that funny. I'm inclined to think they didn't like it because they felt it mocked the main movie-going audience, which it does, accurately.

Taking a cue from Woody Allen's classic Sleeper, it's about this extremely ordinary doofus, played by Luke Wilson, who -- along with a sleazy prostitute played by Maya Rudolph, doing her best Rosie Perez imitation -- gets cryogenically frozen and doesn't wake up until 500 years in the future. Unfortunately, the world has not grown smarter; evolution has taken a backward turn -- the result, as the movie hilariously explains, of free-breeding morons getting the upper-hand over smart people who wait for "the right time" -- and poor Luke wakes up on a dimwits' dystopia: the world is a stinking garbage heap where everything is broken, nothing works, barren farm fields are irrigated with a sports drink, everyone communicates in the kind of grunts we usually associate with 13-year-old skaters after a triple-feature of Michael Bay movies, and anyone who utters even the most marginally comprehensible phrase is ridiculed for sounding "like a fag."

Luke, whose major goal back in 2005 was to hold on to a useless Army job where he did nothing but watch TV, now finds himself the smartest person in the world, appointed Secretary of the Interior by the President, a former wrestler, and ordered to fix all the problems of the world in one week or die. Maya, eventhough she's making literally billions of dollars as a hooker, agrees to help out.

I hate reviews of good comedies because they always spoil the best parts, and this one has a lot of them, so I'll shut up.

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