MIKE JUDGE’S LATEST FILM - ‘FUTURAMA’ MEETS ‘THE WAR AT HOME’
IS AMERICA BECOMING AN IDIOCRATIC REPUBLIC?
Hello Sports Fans, this commentary is for all the folks who go to the movies to see films that are thought provoking. Did you see ‘Who Killed The Electric Car?’, ‘Why We Fight’, ‘Loose Change’, ‘Invisible Children’, or ‘Conspiracy of Silence’? If not, get ready to not see another thought provoking film, ‘Idiocracy’, a new film done by Mike Judge (‘Beavis & Butt-Head’, ‘King of the Hill’). Like the other aforementioned documentaries, this film is being kept in limited distribution because even though America still has ‘freedom of the press’ and Hollywood does make and award films that represent and reflect our current reality (‘Crash’), ‘The Man’ (old school black slang for the ‘Establishment’, itself an old school white term branding for the ‘status quo’, a Latin term [very old school] for business as usual), chooses to restrain creative truth thereby allowing only the ‘hip’, the activist, the reader, the Jedi, the person not plugged into ‘The Matrix’, to see the truth, to know the truth. ‘Idiocracy’ may point some educated viewers to both the British study that ‘found that the intelligence of British 11-year-olds has actually declined during the last 20 years and to data from the Danish draft board indicating that intelligence peaked in the late-1990s and has now fallen to levels not seen since 1991, when MC Hammer-inspired parachute pants were all the rage’*. Any wonder we have Emo kids who are ‘cutters’, teens smoking and drinking despite the warnings, and perps in Congress ‘unnoticed’ by their peers? Conceivably this is why the ‘Great Unwashed’, known more recently as ‘the Silent Majority’ are so apathetic as daily updates show the mentality of those who ‘make the rules and govern our lives’.
Perchance the limited release, six cities and no promotion, isn’t due to Mike Judge’s artistic rendition of modern life and the film striking a communal resonant cord the way ‘The Matrix’ did for its views, but more for the message of the film, it telling thoughtful Americans that we can’t expect other people to solve our problems for us. If you’re alarmed by the callousness and the crassness of our culture, which you certainly should be, do something about it. Lead or follow. Getting out of the way is not an option. Failing that, you should at least try to outbreed the people you hate most*.
* - source Reihan Salam, MSN Slate, 9/29/06