Idiocracy: An Insider Speaks!
9/6/2006 4:00:00 PM
A fine, fine individual with some inside knowledge of the Idiocracy situation wrote us today. They asked to remain anonymous, but here's their email and their take on the situation. It should be noted, however, that those of us chiding the studio for their release (or lack thereof) of the film aren't necessarily making the case that this is some kind of brilliant, perfect film -- it's clear from everything even its fans have written that Idiocracy has many, many flaws. It's simply that the piss-poor dumping strategy Fox has followed suggests not that they have no faith in the film (although I'm sure they don't), but that they want to see it die a quick death. That's what bothers me...
But without further ado...
So, I worked on the advertising for this movie for over a year at one of the biggest trailer houses in LA...I got to see it get cut from a little over an hour and a half down to its current, what, 70 minutes? I'll admit I haven't seen the final cut in theaters, but I saw what they were working with about 3 times.
We kept going through different story lines for the trailer, starting with humanity's de-evolution, trying a planet of the apes style "he's just in the future as the smartest guy on earth", and explaining the army experiment to its fullest. Once this story was out of the way we got into all the fat, stupid, balls jokes, usually accompanied to the song "Dah-dah-dah." The trailers never really tested, and neither did the different cuts of the movie, and execs live by testing. It is worth noting, however, that the studio was trying to make it work, even if they did push the relase date back over and over again.
Basically, the studio didn't think the larger population would find it funny because it makes fun of them so mercilessly. "Look how stupid you white-trash hicks are, shooting out babies so quick! Look at the stupid things you think are funny and entertaining and important!" Yeah, it’s prety good satire. But at the same time, the people are stupid, but almost not stupid enough. Luke Wilson gets to hear the line "You can read? What are you, a faggot?" But it’s just some fat guy acting a little slow. Though if anyone ever watches daytime courtroom shows, check out Dog-Eat-Dog, then compare it to the judge in the film. It’s more scary than anything else. And Starbucks as a place where you can get blowjobs is pretty great, assuming it’s still in there.
People at the office thought it was Mike Judge's own private little joke. "I'm going to make a movie about how stupid people are, then get those people to pay to see it."
Basically it seems like one of those movies that was just better on paper. But in reality, making a movie about stupid people makes for some pretty stupid jokes. For everyone who defends Judge's genius, Office Space is an incredibly smart comedy, and even Beavis and Butt-head have their moments, but this one suffers a little too much from loving its premise and not offering much more than variations on the people are stupid joke. So depending on how much you enjoy one note jokes, that might be how much you enjoy the movie.
Personally, I'll just say that no director is perfect, and this is one of those cases. You gotta love the guy for trying, but he just didn't pull it off.
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Worst Moviegoing Experiences: Misadventures of a Rightwing Film Geek
9/6/2006 1:00:00 PM
Victor Morton, aka The Rightwing Film Geek, is one of the best film writers out there. Notice that I don’t say “online” anywhere in that sentence – that’s because Victor could easily give most pro print critics a run for their money as well. And while Victor’s politics don’t exactly match mine – or most Nerve readers’, I suspect – even some of his political rantings are worth reading, as they’re often (though not always) very cogently argued…
Anyway, I digress. Here, Victor relates one rather unfortunate, and unfortunately hilarious, incident that occurred to him a few years ago, and then muses on some of the difficulties of being a film-buff with beliefs diametrically opposed to his fellow cineastes.
 | | Extremism in the defense of Lars Von Trier is no vice. |
The worst filmgoing experience I have ever had was actually a moment of profound personal embarrassment. An opening weekend midnight screening of HIGH FIDELITY was packed to the rafters and the only seat I could easily find was the very back row, right against the wall. A woman was sitting next to me and her boyfriend was on her other side. It was kind of cold in the theater and so, since I had on only a polo shirt and shorts, I stuck both my arms inside my shirt to keep warmer. In addition, my shorts were just a little bit tight around the waist and so (under my shirt) I stuck my fingers in between the shorts' waistband and my waist, just about nail-deep, to relieve the pressure some. Now my description makes it clear I was doing nothing untoward. But to someone with imperfect knowledge, like, say...someone sitting immediately next to you in a dark theater...it could easily look like...something else.
In the middle of the movie, the scene where Rob goes to the bar with the intent of picking up Marie De Salle, the boyfriend turns to me and says (not yelling, but not in a movie-theater whisper either), "Would you STOP that?" Confused, I said, "What? I'm just cold." It then dawned on me what he might have been thinking. I issued a euphemistic denial and repeated that I was only feeling cold. Nothing was said after that, but my face was the approximate hue of the richest marinara sauce you ever ate and the approximate temperature of Washington in August. I was so embarrassed and self-conscious that the rest of the movie could have been the missing reels from the end of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and my mind would still have been somewhere else. I made a point of sitting through the credits to cut down the chances of seeing the pair outside.
 | | "You, in the back. Yeah, you. Don't think I can't see what you're doing..." |
Most of my bad film-going experiences have involved bad reactions from other audience members. When I saw RUSSIAN ARK in commercial release in Washington, someone made his political opinions known after the credits started to run. He yelled at the screen (or it felt like a yell in the little shoebox art-house with a capacity of maybe 80 people) "Hooray for empire. Fuck Bush. What a disgusting movie." Yes, there is a human being walking the face of the Earth, wasting perfectly good oxygen (and I doubt he's the only one) who can see a movie about the aristocratic splendor of traditional monarchy and think of ... Dubya.
But I expect nothing on that front from DC art-house audiences. Or from the Toronto Film Festival audience who applauded in the middle of THE FOG OF WAR at Robert McNamara's retarded "please love me, leftists" line "if we can't persuade nations of similar values of the rightness of our cause, we'd better re-examine our reasoning." Of course, Errol Morris thoughtfully provided a few seconds of dead space at that point. [Editor’s confession: We applauded too. It’s a great line.]
That sort of "lone Red Sox supporter in Yankee Stadium" moment is just par for the course for a conservative film geek. Which is why my most-depressing filmgoing experience ever came from a very different audience. When I was in grad school, I was psyched for the chance to see DAY OF WRATH in a theater, at a campus screening. Now, I'm a complete Dreyer fanboy, and while he did make a couple of lighter films early in his pre-PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC career, he wasn't one for inserting comic relief into a serious film. And DAY OF WRATH, masterpiece though it is, is a completely humorless, gray, dour movie. There is a scene near the midway point of the movie of Anne and Martin -- the new wife and stepson -- together at the rectory that was intercut with Absalon (the religious patriarch) visiting the deathbed of the witch-torturer. Anne says to Martin something like "I wish him dead," referring to Absalon. Then Dreyer cut back to Absalon crossing the moors on the way home, letting out a shiver and saying something like, "I felt the cold hand of death brush my shoulder." At that line, the audience let out a big laugh.
I was on the point of tears when I reflected on it. Here was a movie where clearly witches, the devil, God and the supernatural are taken deadly seriously and yet the audience was too post-modern, too hip, too knowing to take the possibilities seriously enough, even if only for 100 minutes of a VERY somber movie. Apparently God can't even gain a place as a fictional character about whom you suspend disbelief as though he were a crime-fighting space alien who flies and gains super strength because of our planet's yellow sun. But what makes this moment the ne plus ultra of depressing filmgoing experiences was where this occurred -- Notre Dame. The national icon of Catholic higher education. Where every dorm has its own Sunday Mass. Where academic department have their own priests. The home of Touchdown Jesus, ferchrissakes. I had tears in my eyes for most of the rest of the movie. God is dead. Hip irony has won. The Coen Brothers are masters of the universe.
 | | Hipster central? |
But that very art-house faux-sophistication redeemed a different bad film experience, this one involving print quality. During the flurry of Peter Greenaway releases in 1990-91 after the notoriety of THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE, AND HER LOVER, I saw A ZED AND TWO NAUGHTS (a movie so mannered it makes COOK look like a cinema-verite doc) at an Austin, Texas arthouse. At a certain point, the film jumped so that each image consisted of the bottom half of, say, frame 1000, at the top of the screen with the top half of frame 1001 at the bottom half of the screen. There was a black bar in the middle maybe 10 percent of the screen depth. (I hope that makes it clear what we were seeing.) I decided relatively quickly that it wasn't intentional. I entertained the thought that maybe it wasn't a mistake, but this film, even more than COOK, THE DRAUGHTSMAN'S CONTRACT or DROWNING BY NUMBERS consisted of frame after frame of stunningly composed still lifes. It just didn't strike me that Greenaway, unlike say an Andy Kauffman, would split the image in half bass-ackwards that way. But since I was hating the movie anyway, I decided to have some fun and see if anyone else noticed the emperor's clothes. It took at least 5 minutes before anyone piped up.
Previous Worst Moviegoing Experiences:
-A Good Reason for an International Incident
- Meet the Times Square Crowd. Plus, Sly’s Biggest Fan
- Miami %$*&#!
- ”Like Some Sort of Small Machine
- Hollow Man, No Pants
- Life Imitates Art?
- Men at Work
- Confessions of a Movie Theater Employee
- Introducing Mrs. Inconsiderate Cell Phone Lady
- A Hollywood History Lesson Gets Out of Control
- Mousy academic type takes matters into own hands, falls on face
- Befuddled tot likes Windu, suspicious of Amidala
- ”She Rode a Horse…”
- Screaming Baby + Scorsese Movie = Trouble
Got a terrible, terrifying, or hilarious moviegoing experience to share? Send it to us at screengrab@nerve.com
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Hero of the Week: Rupert Everett
9/6/2006 12:01:00 PM
“Sharon [Stone] watched lazily, leaning back so that the camera could get right in. After icing her nipples, the hairdresser blow-dried them with his hairdryer.
“The conversation turned to sex. ‘You know what I say when I'm fucking a guy?’ said Sharon.
‘I say, stop. Look at me.’ I looked at her. ‘Now. Talk to me.’ ‘Talk to you?’ I asked, incredulous. ‘Communicate,’ she said. ‘What? While we're - . ‘And now… go in and out real slow.’ ‘Oh my God, now I know why I'm gay.’”
- The great Rupert Everett dishes on “life with the divas” (Sharon Stone, Julia Roberts, Madonna, and more). Nobody – nobody -- is spared.
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Gigi Wuz Robbed
9/6/2006 11:00:00 AM
The AFI’s got another list, but this time they could only muster up 25 films for their selection of the greatest movie musicals. Singin’ in the Rain was tops, followed closely by West Side Story, The Wizard of Oz (which for some reason I never think of as a musical) and The Sound of Music. The big news, I guess, is that the great Vincente Minnelli didn’t have any in the Top Five, although An American in Paris and Meet Me in St. Louis scored at 9 and 10, respectively. And, uh, Grease came in at Number 20. Make of that what you will.
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Morning Deal Report: Seattle Casting News, Viacom Turmoil, and Flicks on iTunes
9/6/2006 10:00:00 AM
- Susan Sarandon and Chris Evans are set to join the cast of Battle in Seattle, the Charlize Theron-starring drama set during the Seattle WTO riots, about “ a pregnant woman innocently caught up in the troubles who ends up losing her baby and seeing both sides of the story.” The film is being written and directed by actor Stuart Townsend, Theron’s real-life mate. The final indignity: It’s being shot in Vancouver.
- Viacom, already dealing with the fallout from the whole Tom Cruise dismissal, as well as recent shakeups at Paramount, fired its President and CEO Tom Freston replacing him with Philippe Dauman. For the best analysis of what this means to the movie biz, check out Dave Poland’s thoughts here.
- Emilio Estevez’s drama about the RFK assassination, Bobby, has premiered at Venice, and the buzz seems to be okay. Oh, and Lindsay Lohan also has high hopes for it.
- Is it possible Werner Herzog’s new feature Rescue Dawn won’t make its premiere date in Toronto? We know some serious film geeks who will be very disappointed if it doesn't…
- So, when exactly will we get those long-promised iTunes movie downloads? Cinematical speculates about it here.
- Could Death Wish be the most copied film in cinema history? Its director, Michael Winner, seems to think so.
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Back When "You're Fired" Really Meant Something...
9/5/2006 1:00:00 PM
Thanks to Empire Magazine for reminding us of Arnie's great one-liner at the finale of the climactic action scene in True Lies, only one in the magazine's surprisingly astute round-up of The Top Ten Crazy Action Sequences. (Don't worry...the flaming knees scene from Ong-Bak is also there, as is the no-parachute skydive from Point Break.)
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Video of the Day: “The Landlord’s Daughter” from The Wicker Man
9/5/2006 12:01:00 PM
Whatever one may think of the Hollywood remake of The Wicker Man, it probably could have used some more of the strangeness of the original. This clip from Robin Hardy’s 1973 classic gives you a good idea of just how spectacularly bizarre that film was, even for its day.
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e6253#6253 |
Idiocracy: No, I Will Not Stop…
9/5/2006 11:00:00 AM
Back to Idiocracy. I wish I had more to report. David Poland (the man who runs Movie City News, writes the daily Hot Button Column, posts The Hot Blog, and hosts the weekly Lunch with David), spurred on by my plaintive messageboard jihad, decided to see the film for himself yesterday afternoon. Here’s what he reported back:
“It is not total garbage... But it's no winner either. I suspect that the reality here is that the movie needs a theatrical release to trigger post-release dollars in Home Entertainment and cable, so they did it. To me it is about enough to fill a minor episode of a 22-minute sitcom or animated sitcom. There are laughs, but they are basically on the level of "Oh, My Balls!" -- a recurring gag about stupid people laughing at a guy being hit in the balls. Most of the laughs are sight gags, which are ok, but hardly memorable…
“I don't see any big Fox conspiracy here. Yes, Fox News is still around 500 years into a stupid future, but the joke is soft and the anchors are wrestlers in spandex, so the political sting is minor.
“Not a good movie, but there have been worse released. I think that the problem is that counting every theatrical release expense versus every dollar likely to come in was still a loser, while a DVD release in Judge Nation should be strong regardless. I think it's just that simple.”
 |
After reading that, I speculated (among other things) if maybe the film’s smackdown of franchises had given Fox some butterflies about offending other corporations – trying to get at why this thing got no marketing money at all. Dave responded thusly:
“Well, I think you may be overdramatizing a little. Carl's Jr. gets smacked, but they must have signed on from the start. Gatorade didn't, and he uses an alternative fake liquid. And on and on.
“The only name in the whole film is Luke Wilson and he might have passed on promotion. Dax Sheppard won't sell a ticket.
“I think you have to sell this as ‘from the mind of Mike Judge.’ The movie has been in the can forever and if no one believes in it, this is the kind of release where if it somehow catches fire, they can go into New York and elsewhere in a few weeks. And if not, they save many millions by not going there.
“Personally, I applaud studios when they don't act stupidly because they are used to a certain protocol. But who knows?”
Poland knows his stuff, and I trust him when he says he doesn’t see a conspiracy. But there’s something strange going on here, still. My problem isn’t so much that I sense something nefarious in Fox’s dumping of this film, though I certainly wouldn’t put it past them; it’s just that it doesn’t seem to make any sense. Yes, New York is an expensive market in which to open a movie. But why keep it this far away from practically the entire East Coast, while opening it in places like Los Angeles and Chicago and Toronto?
And why no critics’ screenings? Why no trailers? Heck, it took several days before someone even unearthed a poster for this thing. Search for stills for the film online and you’ll only find two very lame ones, almost deliberately designed to make the film look pathetic. There are reports that ushers at some theatres didn’t even know the movie was playing in their venues. I still maintain that something smells fishy here.
Also, read this profile of Mike Judge, from the June issue of Esquire. Note the part where Judge has to call the studio to get permission to show the writer a trailer for the film. (He never does.)
I’ll say it again: Fishy…
 | | One of the two lame-ass stills from Idiocracy |
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Morning Deal Report: Lou Ye Busted, Carrey & Diaz Re-team, and Playtime Ruined...
9/5/2006 10:00:00 AM
- Director Lou Ye, who provoked a bit of controversy earlier this year when he submitted his film Summer Palace to the Cannes Film Festival (and got in) without getting approval from the Chinese government, received his punishment: He’s been banned from making movies for five years. Pretty disgraceful of the Chinese, frankly – although if they’re willing to grant Michael Bay and McG citizenship, maybe we can rig another one of these controversies to our advantage…
- Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz, who co-starred in The Mask early in their careers, are set to appear in a US remake of the French comedy A Little Game Without Consequence, which will be directed by overworked-foreigner-of-the-moment Gabriele Muccino.
- We’ll have a big Festival roundup later (what with Telluride wrapping up, Venice going strong, and Toronto imminent) but for now, let’s not also forget the awesome Montreal World Film Festival, which bestowed its Grand Prix to two films: Eiji Okuda’s A Long Walk and Carlos Diegues’s The Greatest Love of All.
- You know, I’d laugh at the bit at the end of this Variety story where a skunk gets into the 70mm Telluride special screening of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, but man, seeing Playtime in 70mm is one of those great cinematic happenings every film buff should experience – it’s the film geek equivalent of seeing the Pyramids – and it really sucks to have something like that ruined. That said, Monsieur Tati would have appreciated this sort of surreal occurrence.
- Amy Adams (who stole Junebug) and Emily Blunt (who stole The Devil Wears Prada) have joined the cast of New Zealand director Christine Jeffs’s comedy Sunshine Cleaning, about “a woman who wants to send her eight-year-old son to a private school, and decides to go into business with her unreliable sister in order to earn more money. They form a company doing biohazard removal and crime scene clean up.”
- Jared Leto has gout. Dude, that is so goth!
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More Idiocracy News…or Lack Thereof
9/4/2006 11:25:28 AM
 | | Whither the beatdown? |
Since today’s a holiday, there won’t be regular posts, but I had to write about this: The Idiocracy situation has been gnawing at me all weekend. Looking over some of the film’s reviews, it’s quite clear that this isn’t the disaster that its unceremonious dumping by Fox would indicate. Most of the reviews seem to be positive, although many of them also suggest that there has clearly been a lot of tampering with this. (There had been reports the studio mandated massive re-shoots.)
So, Fox not only fucks with Judge’s original cut, then it refuses to promote the film (how many of you have seen even a poster for this film, let alone a trailer?) and then dumps it in a handful of theaters, making sure to stay clear of the East Coast, lest it actually get some news coverage. Do you want to know how badly this was dumped? By all accounts, when you called Moviefone in those cities, the voice on the phone didn’t refer to the film as Idiocracy, it referred to it as Untitled Mike Judge Project.
Luckily, it also opened in Los Angeles, which meant that we would get lots of coverage from the major entertainment press about this controversy…right? BZZZZT. Nothing. The LA-based Movie City News website, for example, has nothing. Nor, for that matter, does The Hollywood Reporter. Variety had the decency to run a review (a fairly positive one), but no other coverage. It was up to the guys at Ain’t It Cool News to fight the good fight. And Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere has agreed to write about this, after I sent him an irate letter. (I’m starting to feel like one of those cranks that call into C-Span all the time.)
However, I have to also give major props to Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote a great review of the film, the first five paragraphs of which bear repeating here, and maybe give a sense of why Fox pussied out:
“What does Mike Judge have to do to get a movie released and marketed? He could stop making satires as merciless and spot-on as this one, for one thing. His second film in seven years, "Idiocracy," was completed nearly two years ago and dumped on Friday, reviewless and unmarketed, in six markets not including New York and San Francisco. (Because who could possibly be interested in the long-awaited movie by the director of "Office Space" there?) It's this sort of vote of no-confidence that gets people wondering — just how bad could it be? Which raises the issue of what "bad" means to the studio that unleashed "Date Movie" and "Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties" on an unsuspecting populace.
”Judge has a gift for delivering brutal satire in the trappings of low comedy and for making heroes out of ordinary people whose humanity makes them suspect in a world where every inch of space, including mental, is mediated. The movie would be worth seeing for its skewering of the health system alone — in the future, hospitals will resemble a cross between a chain auto-diagnostic center and a Carl's Jr., powered by Help Me technology — even if its opening thesis on the moment in history (roughly now) that evolution tipped into devolution weren't so clear-eyed.
"Idiocracy" is Judge's pitch-black, bleakly hilarious vision of an American future so bespoiled by rapacious corporations and so dumbed-down by junk culture that the president of the United States is a three-time "Smackdown!" champion and former super porn-star. The movie begins with a comparison of two family trees. A high-IQ couple waits for the perfect time to have a child, a decision they don't take lightly, while elsewhere, in the trailer park, the dim bulbs breed like rabbits. The high-IQ couple waits too long, the husband dies of stress during fertility treatments, and their line stops there. Meanwhile, the moron population explodes.
Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson), however, is not actually a moron. He's an average, unambitious, essentially lazy guy biding his time in the Army until he can collect his pension. It's his perfect averageness (that and his dead parents and no siblings or wife) that make him the perfect candidate for an Army experiment in cryogenics. The idea is to freeze the best soldiers for thawing at a later date, when they're really needed. Joe is chosen as the guinea pig, and because the Army can't find a servicewoman to meet the same criteria, they freeze a hooker named Rita (Maya Rudolph) alongside him.
The experiment is meant to last a year, but in that time the base shuts down, is replaced by a Fuddruckers, and Joe and Rita are forgotten for more than 500 years. Meanwhile, humanity devolves to the point where it can't take care of its basic needs, like dealing with garbage or growing crops, and when Joe and Rita find themselves unearthed during the great garbage avalanche of 2505, they discover to their great surprise that they are the smartest people on Earth.”
Decide for yourselves…
[UPDATE: After more breathless harrassment from yours truly, David Poland is planning on seeing it today. We'll do another post when his thoughts appear.]
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