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About LinkBacksIdiocracy wasn't very good.
It was great.
Fact.
Quit talkin all 'tarded.
Idiocracy wasn't very good.
It was great.
Fact.
Quit talkin all 'tarded.
Last edited by Umlaut; August 24, 2009 at 12:59 PM. Reason: it's got electrolytes.
Was actually surprised that at the Mike Judge Q and A following the screening I went to, not a single Office Space question was asked, yet about a dozen Idiocracy questions were asked.
Personally, I thought Idiocracy was very often hilarious, yet, as a movie, it was awkwardly paced and edited. Felt like a studio exec had a go at editing it, and slapped on lazy narration to keep the story moving. But there was plenty of funny underneath the pour editing (kind of like Run Ronnie Run actually).
Great is not hyperbolic enough. It was one of the best comedies in years. Not only that, it was as good a satire as The Daily Show on its best night. It perfectly captured the modern zeitgeist. It heightened the current moment's absurdities, but they remained intact structurally. The America of idiocracy is the America of today, only not hyperbolic.Originally Posted by Umlaut
You could say...it's the new sincerity.
Garrett Gonzalez Morris (born February 1, 1937) is an American comedian and actor from New Orleans, Louisiana. He was part of the original cast of the sketch comedy program Saturday Night Live, appearing from 1975 to 1980
For the British flautist, see Gareth Morris.
I disagree. For me, point of view of Idiocracy completely obscured the comedy. It was like a combination platter of repellent ideas. Things used to be better nostalgia and extreme nihilism. Watching it, it was like having a conversation with someone where their opinion is 'well you and me, we're reasonable but all these other people are dumb rubes'. It was Todd Solondz-like in its contempt for everyone. That obscured the comedy for me and put me not in the mood to laugh at any of the things I might have found funny in a different movie.
I think I might have mentioned this around here before, but the original script (which is very easy to find online) is extremely close to what eventually was released. The only changes are joke alterations, i.e. a sports stadium with FIRE!!! on the marquee instead of a theater playing ASS. All the sci-fi narration (which some people point to as an indicator of recutting) was in there from the beginning.
For what it's worth, I side with the "perfect movie" camp. I also recommend reading the script to pour over all the golden details.
What Nihilism (what do you mean when you use this word)? And what sense of nostalgia? One of the dominant facets of American culture has become pride in anti-intellectualism. There were always stupid people, but they weren't paraded around in the past like they were now. There was no Internet, no reality TV, no VH1, for morons to display their stupidity on. Not only that, but that stupidity is exploited for political and monitory gain on a scale and in ways never seen before simply because the means never existed. Things weren't better in the past. This part of it just wasn't around. And all the comedy was rooted in how stupid everything is, which is also its POV.
Also, did anyone notice that there was a guy in the ER who was unable to get his shirt over his head? That's why he was there!
Anyone who doesn't laugh like an idiot at every scene with President Camacho is dead inside...
Hey, check me out. I'm a ghost.
Can we at least agree that the *idea* of the movie is a little funnier than the movie itself? When someone describes it to you, it certainly sounds brilliant and hilarious, but watching the movie I didn't actually find myself laughing all that much. And, Keith, it's not because I didn't get it. Everyone gets it. We're surrounded by idiots, I know, but that in and of itself isn't uproariously funny. Satire's a tricky thing; it can be right on the nose and still not generate laughs.
i think anyone who didn't like idiocracy is low on electrolytes.
"This is not the Beach Boys. It can't be. Why? No beach songs! I thought it was some kind of joke. All 'Pet Sounds' offers is the opportunity to hear Brian Wilson whine for forty minutes, backed by elevator music. There's barely any Mike Love on the album at all."
I thought some of the set peices in that movie were really well done, but others were left to be desired.
Garrett Gonzalez Morris (born February 1, 1937) is an American comedian and actor from New Orleans, Louisiana. He was part of the original cast of the sketch comedy program Saturday Night Live, appearing from 1975 to 1980
For the British flautist, see Gareth Morris.
i dunno 'bout this best comedy evar talk. it is way better as a satire than it is as a straight up comedy. that being said, it has some great scenes.
i like the (subconscious?) way you guys are pulling it on the critical seesaw, though, with this being a borderline "important" film. the more clamor you make about it being the greatest thing, the more people will probably see it, and then the idiots will... magically stop being idiots? or think about being idiots? i don't know how it's supposed to play out but the more people who see it, the better. probably.
beavis and butthead, some of king of the hill and office space/idiocracy give mike judge a lifetime pass for benefit of the doubt in my book.
We've gone on this tangent about the wrong movie for this thread. So I will finish my thoughts on Idiocracy with this post. I know people like it and in person I'd enjoy arguing its merits but on the board, I feel like we are off-topic and annoying or something. This might be long, so feel free to ignore it.
Nihilism was totally the wrong word. Nostalgia isn't. There have always been stupid people in America. We don't have accurate records of what people thought in past time periods but its hard to imagine the reactionary bs the country got in like Japanese internment, slavery, constant villification of whatever the new immigrants were, Salem witch trials, etc without arrogant stupidity and people getting angry about wrong things they think are true. I don't think there is anything new about it. The sense that stupidity is new or is getting worse is the nostalgia I mean. There is at least the implication that things didn't used to be like this. And the movie isn't talking about the display of idiots, its talking about idiots.
What I wrongly dubbed nihilism is the sense in that film that everything sucks. I don't call that satire, something like the Simpsons where idiocy is made fun of and exposed, but there is actual heart and characters with dimension. Idiocracy had the point of view of an angry teenager. Everything is the worst it can be because people are dumb slaves to corporations. I get that this is a comedy and there has to be comic exeraggeration, but to subtract all the good things of human behaivor and then point the finger at your characters is lazy and its not biting or smart or great.
All this is just my opinion but a movie with this kind of satire requires one of two things, either a sense that as dumb and horrible as everything is/might be there is still good or a sense of cosmic detachment. Since it had neither, it presented a world where there is no good and yet there was an angry and preachy tone to that presentation. Which is what I meant by repellent ideas.
Lastly I felt like its a movie that gives you one choice in how you enjoy it. You look at these characters and you recognize their stupidity (with its implication that you are above them) and you laugh at them. How is this different from VH1 Reality television? And that way that the film asks you to enjoy it, to put yourself above hillbillies and people on Jerry Springer and pretend that this is mostly what America looks like and that those people are basically animals. Thats where the film turns me off to its comedy. Mike Judge generally makes dark projects but he usually doesn't veer into hateful. I think tweaks to the Luke Wilson character might have changed the tone enough.
Last edited by ericluxury; August 25, 2009 at 8:34 AM.
I watched about half an hour and turned it off. My perspective is closer to Eric Luxury's than anyone else. Once you've absorbed the points that people are stupid and so forth, there didn't seem that much to the movie, and I don't really agree with those points anyway. At best it's a bath of shrill vulgarity.
It's interesting to me how strident the supporters are ("fact," dead inside" etc.). It looked like a pretty well-executed movie, but any movie that takes such a bleak view of humanity/America/whatever and also is full of unpleasant people guffawing like donkeys -- why is it not OK to dislike that, if you also happen to think the ideas it's presenting are a bit shallow? Chacun a son gout.
Hey, I created another thread and didn't even mean to!
Justin Long's scene in this movie is pure perfection. In fact, I'm going to make it a goal to memorize every line of dialogue he has in it.
And all the cabinet meetings are fantastic as well.
I'll agree that the movie doesn't make me laugh constantly, but I always enjoy watching it. I think Judge set the bar extremely high, in a sense, as this is a high minded satire of all things low-brow and our country's championing of them. The two opposite poles at work here are sometimes disorienting, but I always enjoy the ride.
Really, how different is Ass: The Movie from GI Joe?
From what I've heard, Judge was really disappointed in how the film came out and just wanted to get away from it. I don't think he even necessarily blamed the studio (or anyone else), I think he just didn't like the finished product. Making a movie is such a complex and multi-stage process that you sometimes don't see the problems until you get to the end and go, "Oh darn, this sucks. Well, that's that."
I went into the movie knowing it had been put on a shelf and essentially deemed unreleaseable for a time, so I guess I was more morbidly curious than anything else. I came out thinking it was a frequently hilarious mess. Not a well-made movie, but a funny one. That's all. But of course, people A) loving it so much (perhaps more than they otherwise would've due to its rough treatment by its distributors) and B) attaching social significance to it changes the perspective of anyone watching it now (unless they're oblivious to the backstory and the cult status it has achieved). If I hear everyone saying how brilliant and biting and important and genius a movie is, and then I see it, I'm looking at it totally differently than if I go in cold (or go in thinking, "Here's a movie that people who release movies for a living thought they couldn't put out"). I doubt it holds up under those parameters (at least for discerning filmgoers). On a technical level alone it's cheap and ugly and clunky. And Judge isn't the greatest director of actors either -- I get the sense that performances are an afterthought for him. He really lives and dies by his ability to write funny and capture a sense of collective futility that is floating around (in B&B, it's the futility of adolescent rage; in Office Space, the futility of a cubicle job; in Idiocracy, the futility of civilization). Idiocracy was destined to resonate with some and not with others, but it wasn't slick enough or "smart" enough (meaning the humor was crude) to grab the larger audience that would've appreciated it most -- i.e. the Daily Show viewers, Prius drivers, New Yorker readers, etc. That audience, sadly, needs faux sophistication flavoring to swallow their satire, and the humor of Idiocracy was closer to fast food than gourmet.
I don't think this is true at all. I think he usually gets pretty good performances out of his actors. Ron Livingston is really likeable in "Office Space", whereas in everything else I've found him pretty slimy and unappealing. I like how he got Gary Cole to mimic the mannerisms and vocal patterns of the original boss character from his SNL cartoon in creating the character of Lumbergh. His characters are cartoony, sure, but it seems like he respects actors and usually gives them a lot to work with.
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