David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. "Idiocracy:" Alive and well at 20th Century Fox
"Idiocracy," a new theatrical film from Mike Judge ("King of the Hill," "Office Space," "Beavis & Butt-head"), is set 500 years in the future where the average human has an IQ approaching that of an eggplant (reasons given: Stupid people outbreed smart ones and lots and lots of advertising -- in the future, all clothing, all everything, practically, is covered with logos).
Luke Wilson stars as an average underachiever from 2005 (the film's been sitting on the shelf for quite a while) who is put in a cryogenic deep freeze and forgotten, only to emerge in that dystopian world of moronicism, where he's suddenly the smartest man alive. (His ability to speak in sentences irritates the rest of the populace.) Buildings are crumbling and leaning against one another; freeway overpasses have collapsed (which doesn't stop people from driving on -- and then off -- them); Carl's Jr. has merged with the phone company and the U.S. government; the local Cost-Co is as big as a state and offers a law school; Fuddruckers is now officially called what most people refer to it as anyway and still hosts children's birthday parties. The President is a former TV wrestler and porn star. The most popular TV show is called "Ow! My Balls!" (on the Violence Channel; there's also a channel devoted to helping viewers gratify themselves); the most popular movie is the Oscar-winning "Ass," 90 minutes of a bare butt farting. "Idiocracy" is pretty hilarious (if kind of a mess - at least a couple of scenes are very obviously missing)...
... and 20th Century Fox, which produced the movie, has flat-out dumped it (today was the first I heard of its release, a week after the fact; Judge told me he was working on it a while back, when "King of the Hill" celebrated its 200th table read). They released it into a handful theaters with no advertising whatsoever (they didn't release it in San Francisco -- where "Office Space" was a huge cult hit -- or New York); there were no screenings for critics (most weren't even told it was being released); there wasn't even a trailer cut for it (apparently, Moviefone, when first listing it, had it as "Untitled Mike Judge Film").
I supposed 20th decided since the movie was so anti-advertising it didn't want any its own self.
Now, movies get buried and shelved all the time, but usually because they're awful. This one isn't; not even close. One wonders what Judge must've done to piss the studio off so badly they decided to drown his baby in the bath water. (Someone who might've actually told me is, alas, on vacation.)
It can't be simply because the movie's subversive, because it is only mildly, unless a film studio considers a guy politely suggesting people read a book and think a little more to be bomb-throwingly radical.
Or maybe because it's old news, or the idea that it would take 500 years for civilization to reach this point struck someone at the studio as far-fetched. As I left the theater, my first non-filmic sensory perception was of a guy in a suit snapping open his cell phone and grunting, "Yo!" As I drove home, a large guy in an even larger pickup truck backed up traffic, parked in the middle of a narrow street talking to someone, oblivious to everything else around him. And when I got home, Nancy Grace was on TV.