Just added Idiocracy to my Netflix queue…
When Mike Judge’s highly anticipated futuristic satire “Idiocracy” opened and promptly closed in a few cities last fall (it never played Washington), the blogosphere lit up. Did Twentieth Century Fox, the film’s distributor, intentionally dump the movie? Did it have a hand in what most considered the film’s chief flaws (a distracting narration, gratuitous expository sequences)? Put simply, did Fox do to “Idiocracy” what it had done to Judge’s 1999 comedy “Office Space,” and was the new movie eligible for similar cult status?
We may never know precisely who did what to whom and why (although a hilarious sendup of Fox News in the movie may not have helped). What we do know is that “Idiocracy” appears on DVD today, and once again it seems that Judge, best known for TV shows “Beavis and Butt-head” and “King of the Hill,” has gotten the fuzzy end of Fox’s lollipop. Like “Borat’s” dark twin, “Idiocracy” indicts American culture with a combination of scathing humor and barely concealed rage, as Judge projects what the country will look like 500 years from now. His dystopian vision includes avalanches of trash, a U.S. government that has been purchased for corporate sponsorship by a sports drink, and a citizenry that, through demographic reverse Darwinism, has become congenitally fat, lazy, stupid and violent.
Follow-up: the movie was good, but not great. It’s worth a rental.
