Idiocracy Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I've noticed that when I talk about writer-director Mike Judge with various non-film-geek friends and acquaintances, I usually have to explain who he is -- even here in Austin, his hometown. And depending on the type of person, different types of projects trigger recognition. The high-tech crowd gets excited over Office Space, of course, but it's surprising how many of them can quote Idiocracy lines at me too. ("It's what plants crave!") Nearly everyone nods in recognition if I bring up Beavis and Butt-Head, although I do believe my mom winced a bit until I mentioned King of the Hill as well. And now that Judge has made what may be his most traditionally commercial comedy to date, Extract, I wonder if I'll have to explain who he is to fewer people. I hope so.

Certainly more people are aware of Extract than Judge's previous film, Idiocracy, which Fox slipped into a handful of theaters with virtually no publicity of any kind. Miramax is giving Extract plenty of publicity for its September 4 wide release, and Judge agreed to do some interviews. I was fortunate enough to get to sit down with him for a little while and chat about past and future projects as well as Extract. (The above photo is from the Austin red-carpet event later that evening.)

Following a packed advance screening of Extract, the new comedy by Mike Judge, in Dallas, Texas last night, the writer / filmmaker / animator was asked about his previous effort, Idiocracy. He admitted his disappointment that the film was so little publicized for its limited theatrical release three years ago: "When it opened in, like eight cities, someone told me that you couldn't look it up on Moviefone under its title," he related. "[The studio] didn't even want to pay the eight bucks or whatever to get a listing, so you had to search for 'Untitled Mike Judge Film' to find out where it was playing." Our own Jette Kernion wrote about the lack of publicity at the time.

Fortunately, Judge noted that Idiocracy has sold well on DVD, and Extract should be much easier to find when it opens on Friday, September 4. If I describe it as Judge's best work so far, it's not because he's "grown up" or "become more mature"; the film features some of his darkest comedy yet. Extract is very much a part of the Mike Judge Universe, where decent men enjoy working for a living but dream of escaping some day (Jason Bateman), where good women sometimes go bad (Kristen Wiig, Mila Kunis), and where most everyone is good-hearted but dumber than a pet rock (Ben Affleck, J.K. Simmons, Clifton Collins, Jr.). In other words, Extract is another funny, unpredictable comedy featuring recognizable, everyday people, like the guy who's sleeping on your couch right now, drinking two-liter bottles of Pepsi and watching TV all day.

More tidbits from the Q&A after the jump.

In spite of the some rather negative early reviews, I plan on plunking down my cash to see Land of the Lost this weekend. It's a silly move, but I can't help myself; I blame my addiction to Danny McBride. Plus, I wasn't around for the original series, so it's not like Ferrell can mess up any childhood memories. But it did get me thinking; sci-fi and comedy are two genres that usually work pretty well together, right? So what does any movie geek do in this situation? That's right, we make a list. So now I present in no particular order, my top ten sci-fi comedies:

1. Hellboy
So technically, maybe not a pure sci-fi flick (it has gadgets...does that count?). But you definitely can't argue with funny; and it made for a nice departure for those of us tired of seeing our heroes 'brood' all the time.

2. Innerspace
Most people I know hate this movie; and to be fair, it hasn't aged well. The F/X are a little creaky, and Meg Ryan is downright annoying, but when I saw this film as a kid it was the height of hilarity -- score one for nostalgia.

3. Idiocracy
How could you not love Mike Judge's vision of a dystopic future where the #1 rated TV show is Ow! My Balls!

4. Ghostbusters
When it comes to sci-fi comedy, Ghostbusters is the granddaddy. To this day I consider it one of the funniest films ever made; and thanks to Bill Murray, I grew up to be the smart-a** that my family and friends know and love.

5. Sleeper
Woody Allen and sci-fi probably aren't two things that most people think would work well together. But Allen transplanted his nebbish New Yorker into the future, and still managed to make jokes about sex and health food stores.

After the jump; the final five...

Here's a movie that's getting stranger and stranger the more details we get -- and I'm loving it. First, Mike Judge's Extract was simply a movie that "explores what it's like to be the boss when everything seems to be shifting around you." Then it became about a guy who owns an industrial flower-extract plant and has to deal with workplace issues and a cheating wife. Now, it turns out that one of the "workplace issues" is an employee who loses a body part in a freak accident, and that the wife is cheating on the protagonist with a gigolo. Awesome.

Jason Bateman plays the factory owner -- that, we already knew. We also knew that the amazing Kristen Wiig is playing the wife, and Mila Kunis another employee. The new info is that Clifton Collins, Jr. has joined the cast as the maiming victim, and Ben Affleck as an ambulance-chasing lawyer who, I'd imagine, wants to milk Bateman's character for all he's worth. No word on who's playing the gigolo.

I got pelted with poop for praising Mike Judge's last movie, the largely direct-to-DVD Idiocracy, the first time I wrote about this project, but I stand by comments. It would have been easy for Judge to do Office Space 2, but it's been gratifying to watch him go in some even more offbeat directions instead.

By: Jette Kernion (original publish date: September 02, 2006)

(With the Cine-staff off on a late-July mini-vacation, we thought it'd be fun to bring you some of our favorite pieces from years past. Enjoy!)

The latest film from Mike Judge, Idiocracy, is not at all the unfunny flop that you might expect from its very limited release this weekend. I saw the film in a full theater in South Austin, with an audience that laughed frequently and appeared to be quite entertained by it. Afterwards, I watched Austin Movie Show gather people's reactions, and I didn't hear a single negative remark.

Idiocracy's plot, although slim and occasionally propped up by voice-over narration, holds up better than that of Judge's previous feature, Office Space. Military slacker Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) and hooker Rita (Maya Rudolph) sign up for a top-secret experiment to be frozen in suspended animation for a year. Due to a mix-up with the officer in charge (whom I believe but can't confirm is one of the Bobs from Office Space), they aren't thawed out for 500 years. In the interim, the intelligence of American society has been decreasing -- we've become a nation of total nitwits who sit around watching TV shows like Ow! My Balls!, and movies consisting of a naked ass farting for two hours (called, appropriately enough, Ass). When it's discovered that Bauers has the highest IQ in the country, he's appointed to a Cabinet post and expected to solve, well, everything.

Mike Judge made a lot of friends and Fox made a lot of enemies when Judge's last live-action feature, Idiocracy, was dumped into a couple of theaters (it made a whopping $438,000) and then ushered to DVD. Those who saw it (myself among them) raved, making the movie a minor cult hit, but it certainly got a lot less exposure than anything from the creator of Office Space should have.

Judge will attempt to remedy that with his next movie, which will be called Extract, and which its distributor (Miramax) will hopefully actually distribute. Jason Bateman, rightly adored by everyone, is attached to star. Variety, which broke the story, provides only a very cryptic plot description: "Extract explores what it's like to be the boss when everything seems to be shifting around you." No word on what the protagonist is the boss of or exactly what is shifting around him.

What can I say? It's hard to be anything less than enthusiastic about something in which both Judge and Bateman are prominently involved, even if I did miss the boat on Office Space when it first came out. I do hope that Bateman will still have time for that Arrested Development movie we've been sort-of promised. The thought of that actually happening makes me cry happy tears.

Just like last Tuesday, it's some pretty slim pickins, new disc-wise, but there's a small handful of interesting flicks that just might deserve a spot somewhere in your Netflix queue.

Bandidas -- This barely-released comedy western doesn't really sound all that hot ... but the leads are Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz, so us guys know what we're in for. Sounds a bit like Bad Girls (only this time the jokes are intentional), but with Sam Shepard,Steve Zahn and Dwight Yoakam on board, it sounds just colorful enough to warrant a rental. Weirdly enough, the flick was co-written by Luc Besson (The Fifth Element) and Robert Mark Kamen (The Karate Kid). Extras include a leading ladies' audio commentary, a featurette and a trailer.

Conversations with Other Women -- One of my very favorite movies of last year. Aaron Eckhart and the seriously awesome Helena Bonham Carter star as a boy and a girl who 'meet cute' at a wedding ... only it sure seems like they once knew each other long ago. Features a split-screen technique that's clever to some and annoying to others, but I think it's one of the most realistically romantic movies I've seen in a long time. Extras include a whole bunch of featurettes.

Crank -- If you liked Running Scared, you'll probably like Crank. If you have no interest whatsoever in action movies that take the laws of physics and twist them into bizarrely tasty pretzels, you will not like Crank. It's about a (rapidly) dying hitman who aims to get one last afternoon of high-end revenge out of his system. Imagine the classic noir D.O.A. did 140 lines of cocaine, and that's Crank. Extras include an audio commentary, some featurettes, a few interviews and a "family friendly audio option," which only partially makes sense because Crank has a lot more "adult material" than just salty language.

Idiocracy -- One of 2006's most overlooked little winners, this one comes from Mike Judge, creator of the insta-cult classic Office Space. Luke Wilson plays an exceedingly average schmo who gets frozen and wakes up 1,000 years later ... as the smartest man on Earth. Not all the jokes fly and the flick feels fairly scattershot from time to time, but there's some really quick-witted and clever stuff in there as well. Judge also does the relatively impossible by making Dax Shepard funny. Befitting the manner in which Fox totally abandoned the film, the DVD extras are limited to a few deleted scenes.

The Illusionist -- It's fun to hear film critics debate the quality of The Illusionist over the similarly-themed The Prestige, but I thought both of 'em were very well-made and eminently watchable. This one (the smaller one) stars Paul Giamatti as a police inspector who aims to expose a turn-of-the-century magician -- but finds the task more than a little difficult. Edward Norton stars, and he's backed up by folks like Jessica Biel and a wonderfully evil Rufus Sewell. Extras include a director's commentary and two featurettes.

The Night Listener -- Still haven't managed to catch up with this one, but it stars Robin Williams as a radio personality who gets involved in the life of a dying kid. No, it's not Patch Adams 2. Toni Collette and Rory Culkin co-star. Extras include a featurette and one deleted scene.

Coming next week: Brothers of the Head, Employee of the Month, Gridiron Gang, The Protector and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.

The New York Times tells us what happens when bad word of mouth hits before the movie does. It kills it pretty much dead. Sony Pictures ran into this with their latest dead-in-the-water film, All The King's Men. The film opened this past weekend at seventh place with only $3.8 million in ticket sales, and a cast that most studios would kill for: Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Anthony Hopkins, Patricia Clarkson, Mark Ruffalo, and James Gandolfini. That has to smart; you'd expect to get at least four or five good movies out of those cast members, and instead Sony is left holding the bag on a real clunker.

The problem, as the article states, is that once a studio announces that a film is being pushed back, it is basically announcing that "this sucker ain't done yet, we're putting it back in the oven and hoping for the best!" That kills any sort of forward momentum the film has, makes people scratch their heads and wonder what the heck the problem is, and almost always gives rise to a rumor somewhere that something has gone terribly wrong. It's bad enough when a studio doesn't hold any press screenings, like the recent Snakes on a Plane, but even worse when they reschedule anything for a year later. Just look at what happened to Mike Judge's Idiocracy. Shelving it made the movie even dumber.

Central Texas bloggers are, for once, all talking about the same thing: Idiocracy. Austin, Dallas and Houston were three of the seven cities in which the Mike Judge movie opened last Friday, and local film bloggers grabbed the rare opportunity to write about a movie before the New Yorkers could. In addition to the film itself, alot of bloggers are also writing about how disgusted they are with Twentieth Century Fox's limited release and non-publicity accompanying the release. Here are a few reactions from Austin and Dallas film bloggers:

• Austin Movie Blog: Sarah Lindner calls Idiocracy "not half-bad." She notes, "The main thing that bothered me, though, is that you can tell the movie is unloved. While I liked Idiocracy's inventive vision of the future, the film looks cheap and rushed, especially some special effects."
• Dumb Distraction: Micah quotes his wife: "Funnier than Beerfest." He speculates on the reasons for the limited release: "When did a little thing like bad taste prevent a studio from releasing a film?" He also experiences some very Idiocracy-like moments on the drive home.
• Matt Dentler's Blog: Matt thinks Idiocracy is definitely flawed, and that the jokes get old after a while. However, he observes that the opening sequence is "so clever it could exist as its own short film (or could be virally sent around the Web or YouTube as a guerilla marketing campaign)."

More news on a different filmmaker currently in Austin: Blake at Cinema Strikes Back alerts us to a local news clip about Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino's segment of Grind House. You can see Tarantino and Kurt Russell quite clearly over at the Texas Chili Parlor, but not that kickass car.

The latest film from Mike Judge, Idiocracy, is not at all the unfunny flop that you might expect from its very limited release this weekend. I saw the film in a full theater in South Austin, with an audience that laughed frequently and appeared to be quite entertained by it. Afterwards, I watched Austin Movie Show gather people's reactions, and I didn't hear a single negative remark.

Idiocracy's plot, although slim and occasionally propped up by voice-over narration, holds up better than that of Judge's previous feature, Office Space. Military slacker Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) and hooker Rita (Maya Rudolph) sign up for a top-secret experiment to be frozen in suspended animation for a year. Due to a mix-up with the officer in charge (whom I believe but can't confirm is one of the Bobs from Office Space), they aren't thawed out for 500 years. In the interim, the intelligence of American society has been decreasing -- we've become a nation of total nitwits who sit around watching TV shows like Ow! My Balls!, and movies consisting of a naked ass farting for two hours (called, appropriately enough, Ass). When it's discovered that Bauers has the highest IQ in the country, he's appointed to a Cabinet post and expected to solve, well, everything.