If you've watched the trailer embedded below, you can tell that Idiocracy owes a little to Sleeper, but it owes even more to C. M. Kornbluth's famous short story "The Marching Morons." I remember that at an Aggiecon twenty-five or so years ago, Howard Waldrop asked at some panel or other if anyone had read the story. He then added that we were living it. If he thought that then, I wonder what he thinks now. The trailer tells you all you need to know about the plot. Luke Wilson takes part in a sleep experiment that goes wrong. He's not to bright in his own world, but in the future, he's the smartest man on the planet. So naturally he has to save the world. It's not as easy as you might think, since he's given only a week in which to do it.
What the trailer doesn't tell you is that Maya Rudolph is also part of the sleep experiment, and she wakes up when Wilson does. She was a hooker in her own time, and she takes up her profession again after a short while. Naturally, however, she and Wilson have to get together because they are, after all, the two smartest people in the world.
This movie is not for everyone. The comedy is broad. Exaggeration is the word of the day. The acting isn't necessarily bad, but it's no better than it has to be for this kind of movie. The humor doesn't always work. Considering all that, however, I had a fine time watching it. It's been running on cable recently, and if you haven't seen it, you might give it a try. You can always switch to Downton Abbey or whatever the current equivalent is if you hate it.
7 comments:
I'd rather watch "Idiocracy" (which, despite its rather broad humor, tries to say something) than "Downton Abbey" any day of the week. Anyway, not to politicize things too much, but when you listen to some of the word salads erupting from the mouths of supposedly serious, well-funded presidential candidates these days (and the way their supporters just lap up the nonsense), you can't help but think we're already living in Idiocracy times!
I think we're there, all right.
These days, the politicians in Idiocracy seem smarter than most of the people we have in Congress today.
We're there all right. That said, I don't like the Wilson brothers and thought this was too stupid to watch.
But then, your mileage may vary.
Signed,
Downton Abbey voter
I can't watch "Downton Abbey"--I tried, but it just seemed so much like a lukewarm retread of "Upstairs, Downstairs" but with such anachronistic class attitudes that it almost seemed like a parody.
I'm simply put off by the degree that it doesn't credit Kornbluth, but otherwise it's a reasonably good Mike Judge version of the material in question. Texas leads the way in ripping off "Morons"...even as, as Deb notes, DOWNTON seems to have led the way in ripping off U/D. And became the highest rated series in PBS history by some distance.
On the radio as I was driving around doing health errands for Alice today, I listened to a discussion of what a thoroughgoing bastard Woodrow Wilson was, and it didn't even touch on the half of it. And he managed to win against Debs and Roosevelt and (admittedly not too tough) incumbent Taft. Yeah, we're in dire straits. And always have been.
The late, great Angela Carter used to fume about how PBS (that's PUBLIC Broadcasting) had turned into little more than a purveyor of British costume dramas that reinforced the late-Victorian British class system. But at least the costumes were (are) pretty...
Post a Comment