Although I’m not a movie critic, I’m definitely a movie fan. Philo and I joined the Austin Film Society soon after we arrived in Texas, a great organization that oversees Austin Studios. I really like Luke Wilson, and when Mike Judge, the man behind “King of the Hill”, Office Space, and “Beavis & Butthead”, cast Luke as the star of his untitled set-in-the-future movie in Austin, it sounded like a sure thing. But something happened between the completion of the movie and its very odd and scattered release this week.
The movie is now titled Idiocracy, with Luke Wilson playing an army guy named Joe, and Maya Rudolph playing a hooker named Rita. As the most perfectly average people on earth, they’re chosen for an experiment, end up in the future and find out that the current dumbing-down trend has progressed to…. well, if this sounds funny, it is.
Austin movie critic Jette Kernion put out the word at Slackerwood that Idiocracy would be in very limited release this weekend.
Jette, longtime blogger and recent author, reviewed the movie in another of her blogs, Cinematical.
We saw Idiocracy today. Luke is perfect as Joe and Maya Rudolph was fun to watch as Rita [did you know that her mom was the late singer Minnie Riperton?]. The movie is savagely funny. Its targets are practically every current popular form of entertainment, clothing, language, sports & celebrities, along with DINKS, the government and every large corporation in America. Oh, yeah, it also makes fun of Fox news. It’s an R movie for good reasons, and under the humor there is anguish and anger. If you can’t stand either Beavis or Butthead, or didn’t like A Boy and His Dog, this one won’t work for you. If you like your humor over the top and with a bitter edge, find out if it’s in your city this week. In a very oblique way, Idiocracy has agriculture as a plot element, with crops endangered by corporate interference, so maybe this movie does belong on a garden blog!
In my photo collage there’s a snapshot of Luke, speaking to a reporter at a benefit showing of My Dog Skip a few years ago. I was inches away from him at the Stubb’s Barbecue party following the movie, but was too chicken to say a word, darn it. Now don’t misunderstand – this isn’t a Mrs. Robinson thing – more like imagining Luke as another one of my adult nephews, who could hang out on the patio and tell me about movies and acting while I fed him homemade peanut butter cookies. In my dreams!