I took yesterday mostly off of work. My bestest friend who is a girl Julia is visiting our household for a couple days, and so we made Hungarian Goulash and then abducted Mark to see 300, which is awesome.
I’ll have more to say about other things, but I want to put one thing out there. Anyone who sees that movie and doesn’t want to grow a beard is a pussy.
While I’m dishing about movies I watch, here’s another: Idiocracy, by Mike Judge (Office Space), starring Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph. It’s totally great, and totally you’ve never heard of it because Fox Studios and Judge are alleged to have had some kind of feud over the movie’s content.
Fox seems to have tried to bury the film, slashing the post-production budget, giving it a very short/limited release, and failing to market it in any way.
The only reason I can think of for a movie studio to intentionally not try and make money is if there’s beef:
Since the announcement about Idiocracy’s very limited release, Judge has refused all interviews, so it’s impossible to confirm any of this with him. However, I remember hearing him speak to a University of Texas class in February about his future filmmaking plans. He wanted to make inexpensive films that wouldn’t be financed or produced through a studio, citing Christopher Guest’s films as an example of what he’d like to do. He was working on a script but wouldn’t divulge details.
“I’m only going to make a movie again if I own it or have final cut,” Judge told the class, obviously unhappy with the Idiocracy experience.
Anyway, you should check it out, because it’s quite a worthy comedy. The gist of the plot is that Wilson and Rudolph do a little Rip Van Winkle, and 500 years in the future, people have become much dumber. It’s a simple but serviceable setup for the salvos of social satire that follow.
Much like Office Space, the little touches really make the film, such as the quick close-up you get of the future’s money: instead of any “E Pluribus Unum,” it has the words “Haulin’ Ass, Gettin’ Paid.” I loved that so much I took a screen-grab.
The film is peppered with these rather intelligent riffs on stupidity. You can guess why Fox wasn’t thrilled:
