September 6, 2006

Idiocracy

I remember seeing Mike Judge’s Office Space on its opening night seven years ago. Beavis & Butthead had come off of its cultural phenomenon status a year or two earlier and he was taking the big step into live action comedy. Given the popularity and lovable stupidity of the show, I was sure this thing was going to be huge. Then I stepped in the theater… and was the only one there.

Office Space only made $10 million at the box office (a little less than Ishtar and a little more than Basic Instinct 2), but since then has become a cult classic and the bestselling DVD of all time. Meanwhile, Judge was so disgusted by his experience with the studio that he has refused to make another movie until now. Surely Fox wouldn’t make the same mistake again and drop the ball with his new project Idiocracy, right?

Wrong. This time, instead of bungling the marketing and trying to recut the movie without Judge’s input, they’re not promoting it at all and have buried it in a bizarre limited release unlike anything I’ve ever seen. There isn’t a trailer, a commercial or a poster. Last week, Fox dropped an obviously unfinished cut in a half dozen markets – Atlanta, LA and a couple of cities in Texas – in such a sloppy fashion that Moviefone is calling it Untitled Mike Judge Comedy. Usually limited releases are meant to build buzz for a movie. This one seems focused on killing it.

I decided to support Judge and jump through the necessary hoops to see the film, and though it looks like it was edited with rusty knives and Scotch tape, his inimitable sense of humor is still there. Idiocracy’s concept is pretty simple: a painfully average guy (Luke Wilson) and a, um, lady of the night (Maya Rudolph) are frozen for a government experiment that’s supposed to last for a year, but due to the supervising technician’s ties to a pimp named Upgrayedd (“with two D’s for a double dose of that pimpin’”) they end up staying on ice for 500 years. When they’re thawed out, the world is entirely populated by the spawn of morons.

Judge’s hilariously nightmarish view of the future is the end result of a society with no education and complete reliance on consumerism. There are little jokes peppered everywhere, from the tagline of the energy drink that bought the FDA (“It’s got electrolytes!”) to the redneck/ebonics/Spanglish patois everyone speaks. It’s hard to imagine a better cast for this material than Wilson, Rudolph and former Punk’d star Dax Shepard, and Judge even succeeds in making SNL clinger Horatio Sanz funny. It’s not as funny as Office Space, but it’s far from the trainwreck that the (lack of) marketing might have you believe; after a few more viewings it will undoubtedly be just as quotable as its predecessor. Every problem here could have been fixed with a week of reshoots, and simply putting “From the creator of Office Space and Beavis & Butthead” on a thrown-together trailer would’ve guaranteed a $20 million opening. So what happened here? Why would a capitalist entity go out of its way to hurt a project that could make them millions? Idiocracy made me laugh harder than anything I’ve seen this year, but it’s also a sad reminder of how easily a studio can destroy the work of a talented filmmaker.