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movie review - Idiocracy

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2007.03.07

I finally got around to seeing this movie (or any movie!) and I'm glad I made the investment. It's about a fellow who's not exactly living life to its fullest, drifting along in a dead-end job with nothing else to speak of. Through some comedic events, he's locked up in a cryochamber like Walt Disney and he disappears into the future.

The future, it turns out is not too bright. And by that, I mean the future USA is a place of great stupidity, where intelligence has literally been bread out of the populace as morons breed with abandon and the more intelligent members of society have fewer and fewer children. The movie-making takes the perfect tack, keeping things simple and feeding us narration in a way that's almost painfully clear. We real from scene to scene as the unlikely "smartest man in the world" solves the problem of crop failure by ending the use of Gatorade to water those crops. It closes with our hero and his equally brilliant fellow time-traveling gal somewhat well situated when someone mentions an out-of-control nuclear power plant fire down in Florida. A lot of the humor is by necessity very low brow but the writing walks the perfect line in this respect.

A favorite. Strongly recommended.

rand()m quote

A creative person would prefer their music to be stolen and enjoyed than ignored. This is the dilemma for every creative soul: he or she would prefer to starve and be heard than to eat well and be ignored.

—Pete Townshend