Camacho’s teleprompter is more persuasive than Obama’s
President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho utters those inspiring words in Idiocracy. But when the camera panned down to show them scrolling across a teleprompter, I ’bout died.
What the heck — I’ve done Mary Poppins and bad cartoons this week.
I remembered Idiocracy as being a mildly funny, one-joke movie. But I rewatched it with Uncle B last night, and…I dunno. Maybe I was just in the mood for it. Or maybe it seems a lot truer four years later.
Idiocracy is a 2006 film from Mike Judge (King of the Hill, Beavis and Butt-Head, Office Space) and it’s a real blunt instrument of a comedy.
A dude and a hooker are locked into high tech pods and put into chemical hibernation in an Army experiment that is supposed to last a year. Instead, they lie forgotten until the pods are accidentally opened five hundred years later. For five centuries, dumb people have been breeding like bunnies, until dumb people are all that’s left.
That’s the joke, and he manages to spin a whole movie out of it. But it’s a better movie than I remembered. I didn’t realize until second time through how many clever sight gags are going on in the background.
There’s some mystery surrounding its release. Fox owned it, and didn’t advertise it at all. Didn’t release a trailer. Didn’t pre-screen it for the critics. Released it in a fraction of the usual number of theaters. Basically sat on it until the DVD. Nobody’s quite sure why.
It is savagely nasty about several actual corporations, including Fox itself (the most popular program of 2505 is a Fox offering called “Ow, My Balls!”), Starbucks (which vends handjobs instead of coffee) and Carl’s Jr. (whose new motto is “Fuck You! I’m Eating!”). But Fox has certainly allowed many of its programs to poke fun of it in the past, so I dunno what the deal is.
The scary part? We watched it on a commercial channel and the ads seamlessly blended into the movie, so dumb were they.
July 14, 2010 — 10:48 pm
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