Idiocracy

I stuck in the this netflix rental last night. Premise: a man and woman of average IQ wake up 500 years in the future to find that humanity has 'dumbed down'. It is very funny...but the humor is disturbing.....

As Steve Sailer writes:
Unfortunately, when watching it at home on DVD, you miss experiencing the horrifying Charlton-Heston-and-the-Statue-of-Liberty moment when "Idiocracy" is over and you emerge from the theatre into the mall full of shiny logos and sniggering pedestrians and you realize that reality today looks just like 2505 does in the movie.

One of the curious things surrounding this film was the unwillingness of Fox to promote it::

• It is early in 2007 but the funniest (and most scathing) movie I have seen all year is without a doubt Mike Judge's — of Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill and the turn-of-the-century-defining Office Space fame — latest effort: 2006's Idiocracy. A movie that, apparently, no one wants you to see, as it premiered with an extremely limited release (in seven cities on a mere 125 theaters) with no promotion from its studio (20th Century Fox), no screenings for critics and, as it released on DVD this February, still not a marketing peep to push sales or rentals.

• . Steve Sailer, a film critic for the American Conservative magazine, points out that Fox didn't tell Moviefone the film's name, so it was called simply "Untitled Mike Judge Comedy" on the listings site.

From a wiki article>

"Idiocracy" finally gets a nationwide release this week with its appearance on DVD, but Fox is still making little effort to promote the film.
According to the Austin American-Statesman ^[4], 20th Century Fox, the film's distributor, did nothing to promote the movie — while posters were released to theatres there were no trailers, television ads, or press kits for media outlets provided. This led to speculation that 20th Century Fox may have actively tried to keep the film from being seen by a large audience, while fulfilling a contractual obligation to release the film in theaters before releasing it on DVD. Due to Fox's reluctance to provide concrete information, various theories surfaced.^[5] In a New York Times article Dan Mitchell argued that Fox might be shying away from a cautionary tale about low-intelligence dysgenics. ^[6] John Patterson of The Guardian suggests it is a result of the film's anti-corporate message, noting that in the film Starbucks now delivers handjobs, Fuddruckers' name gradually morphed into "Buttfuckers," and the motto of Carl's Jr. has devolved from "Don't Bother Me! I'm Eating!" to "Fuck You! I'm Eating!" ^[7] (A Carl's Jr. vending machine is depicted cheating a customer out of her money.) The film also satirizes soft drink manufacturers, with the fictional company Brawndo in the film controlling large swaths of the U.S. government (to the detriment of mankind), and includes an unflattering depiction of the Fox News Channel (Both Fox News Channel and 20th Century Fox are owned by the Rupert Murdoch-controlled News Corporation).

One of the funny gags of the film are the dumb-down corporate logos - outlined here.

Fuddrackers becomes ...well check out the link above. All the Corporate logos are dumbed down...except one...Fox......So perhaps it was a little to real, eh?

Sailer also writes:
This year's smartest movie about morons wasn't Fox Studio's expertly-promoted Borat, which turned out to be a string of old-fashioned Polish Jokes. (Here's my review in The American Conservative). No, it was Idiocracy, which Fox did everything in its power to prevent the public from seeing.

I thought feverish attempts to promote Borat and the reluctance to promote Idiocracy was curious too;

John Derybshire writes:
[Borat] illustrates the tremendous power of folk memory. Sacha Baron Cohen (who is an observant Jew) has said, in an interview, that he wanted to make some points about antisemitism.

Nothing wrong with that. I have expressed the opinion somewhere that we have entered an age in which antisemitism will again drive large world events. It is a great and terrible force.

But where is it located? According to SBC, it is located among East European villagers, super-genteel middle-class Americans, and redneck southern Christians. This is precisely the folk memory of the Ashkenazim. The enemies are mean, stupid, persecuting peasants of the Old Country, exclusive country-club patrons, and Klansmen.

Could anything be more wrongheaded? Jews are indeed in peril in the world today, but not from any of those sources. SBC is the Jewish equivalent of those Irish Americans I used to (and still occasionally do) get into arguments with, for whom nothing at all has happened since 1846.

To which Sailer adds:
He has not noticed the modern world, preferring instead to stay in the warm cocoon of his grandparents’ stories about brutish muzhiky, great-uncle Irv being kept out of Yale, and tobacco-spitting good ol’ boys sneering at pointy-head Jewish perfessors. I don’t think I have ever seen this odd phenomenon so clearly illustrated. I am sure SBC had no idea he was doing this.

Reallly, Borat represents the old contempt and prejudice against Slavs, Southerners, WASPs and so on. For this WASP who has a southern mother, its' a little hypocritical and tiresome. But if Cohen had really addressed the modern sources of anti-Jewish behavior, he'd have to bring up most of the Muslim world, and a significant presence in the American black community (Nation of Islam for example) - in other words, if he included those sources along with us nasty WASPs and southerners , it might sound like a line from Tom Leher or a little paranoid.
I am pretty un-pc so the insults don't bother me but......in the language of idiocracy- dudes, if you're going to diss it out, you gotta take some too.