Cinematical

I'd been looking forward to seeing Mike Judge's latest film Idiocracy for some time, perhaps especially because I live in Austin, where the film was shot. I'm not wild about the film's star, Luke Wilson, but costar Dax Shepherd was the best part of Zathura, and besides, I do like Judge's style of humor. (I once worked in a high-tech office where I created an departmental intranet site with an Office Space theme. Those "TPS reports" jokes never got old.)

So you can imagine I was disappointed when Erik reported a couple of weeks ago that Fox had postponed the film indefinitely. Fortunately, this week's Austin Chronicle has some news confirming the "limited release," which isn't the usual NYC-and-LA routine. Starting next Friday, Sept. 1, Idiocracy will play in Austin, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, and LA. For once, Texans get to see a movie before New Yorkers. Does this mean that we're going to be very lucky and unearth a hidden comedy classic before the rest of the country, or really sorry to suffer through a clunker? We'll find out next weekend. In the meantime, I can't find a single trailer, promotional Web page, or photos for the film beyond some blurred images of the poster and those two stills that everyone on the Web keeps using over and over.