idiocracy

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petergunn

plywood violin
just watched it... best B movie i have seen in ages... holds up to Deathrace 2000 and Phantom of the Paradise and other great early 70's dystopian explotiation films...

just as those movies reflected the disillusion, cynicism, and plain fucked up-ness of post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, post-Manson/Altamont America, this one does with the Bush/Fox/Halliburton/Paris Hilton times we live in now...

watch it til the very end, it has one of those great negative endings...


watch the whole movie here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7500188198885025570
 
swears

swears

preppy-kei
Yeah, I mentioned this in the "films you'd recommend" thread. It's great, very funny and very dark. The scene in the hospital shortly after he wakes up is one of the most depressing I've ever seen. Does anyone find the premise slighty dogdy? Y'know social Darwinism and all that, or is it actually plausible?
 
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petergunn

plywood violin
swears said:
Yeah, I mentioned this in the "films you'd recommend" thread. It's great, very funny and very dark. The scene in the hospital shortly after he wakes up is one of the most depressing I've ever seen. Does anyone find the premise slighty dogdy? Y'know social Darwinism and all that, or is it actually plausible?
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it's not so much the Social Darwinism that i find interesting, it's the way that they accurately describe what a future made up of all the worst traits of our culture today would look like...

quick example: when i grew up, sports stadiums in the US had names like Candlestick Park, Boston Garden, and Jack Murphy Stadium. Those stadiums have been replaced in their respective towns with AT&T Park, TD Banknorth Garden, and Qualcomm Stadium. With the way the public interest is frequently made subservient to the needs of the private sector now, you can understand how a future where crops are watered with gatorade could plausibly happen. It's just taking the governments no-bid Halliburton contracts to it's most ridiculous extreme.



The idea that all smart people would be gone is, of course, ridiculous. If you want to see this Social Darwinsim to a more logical conclusion, you'd probably come to the one made by some scientists a few months back; that humanity would split into two forms: a tall, skinny, intellignet elite and a short, stocky, worker bee. Which is certainly no less depressing...
 
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nomadologist

Guest
Peter, do you know where that video of the dumb Americans was shot? It looked like Florida or somewhere semi-tropical.

My problem with videos like that is only that some of it looks like careful editing--where they don't show the question that proceeds an answer, for instance. Or the way the interviewer is often off camera so you can't be sure the question isn't overdubbed in or something. Not saying that these people didn't seem like complete idiots. But I'm sure I could go over to Australia right now and come up with a very similar video about how stupid Australians are...

Don't you think some of reason the people seemed stumped by questions like 'how many sides does a triangle have?' is because they're camera shy?
 
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petergunn

plywood violin
nomadologist said:
Peter, do you know where that video of the dumb Americans was shot? It looked like Florida or somewhere semi-tropical.

My problem with videos like that is only that some of it looks like careful editing--where they don't show the question that proceeds an answer, for instance. Or the way the interviewer is often off camera so you can't be sure the question isn't overdubbed in or something. Not saying that these people didn't seem like complete idiots. But I'm sure I could go over to Australia right now and come up with a very similar video about how stupid Australians are...

Don't you think some of reason the people seemed stumped by questions like 'how many sides does a triangle have?' is because they're camera shy?
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all of these things are true.

however, when i see christmas decorations i stilll get excited, even tho i know there is no such thing as Santa Claus, if you get me...

i will say that there are certain types of ignorance that are more prevelant in America than in the rest of the educated world, and certainly lack of awareness about the rest of the world is one. Like when I go to Canada or the UK, the average person knows way about what's going on in my country than i do theirs. That's the point the guy was trying to make and yes, I'm sure his methods to make it were dubious to say the least (it IS television after all...)
 
F

fldsfslmn

excremental futurism
There's a difference between being able to recall certain basic facts (currencies, names of countries, rudimentary synopses of current events) and actually knowing what's going on your (or any) country. On trivia-lite grounds Canadians will almost always win over Americans, but go a little deeper and you'll find Canadians often have an even lower ability to process relationships of cause and effect, the repetition of key themes in politics, and even our own sub-American smugness, wastefulness, and total capitulation to the corporatization of politics and everyday life.

In Canada, laughing at Americans has become a national obsession. Canadians are always "off the hook" based on the substance of a little rote learning done as a child, and we know it. Rote learning, regurgitation, complicity to some fact you learned as a child (if you see what I mean here) . . . Those things are exalted here in Canada because most people realize they're precisely the things keeping us from being as stupid as "those Americans." Canadians therefore cling more and more desperately to "facts" and flee further and further from an active, exploratory, imaginative, social way of being-in-the-world.

I think the "not knowin' nuthin'" of Americans portrayed in videos like these is less dangerous than what's going on in Canada. The problem is not that Americans are stupid (or not stupid) it's that too many of their lives are "too good" for anyone to want to change anything. It's an oft-circulated but patently mythic argument that "an informed populace leads to political change." Or at least it's a holdover from the days when very few people had even basic literacy.
 
MATT MAson

MATT MAson

BROADSIDE
I was excited to see Idiocracy - the premise sounded great, and especially after all the hype about Fox trying to supress it and not being able to see it in the cinema.

However once I did, I'm far more inclined to believe Fox sent it straight to DVD because it was a mediocre, straight-to-DVD sort of film. It was indeed a B-movie, it wasn't that controversial at all. I wanted it to work better, but for me it was just too sloppy. The ideas put forward by Oliver Curry about two types of human emerging is a great premise for a film comedy, but this wasn't it.

As for the whole laughing at dumb Americans thing, being a Brit living in NYC, constantly mocked by my American better half for my 'Britishness', it's obviously something I enjoy doing all the time. But British people, and people everywhere are just as dumb and ignorant about the rest of the world. I'm sure there are some stats that prove some countries are more aware of international news and other cultures than others, but basically, dumbness is a global issue.
 
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petergunn

plywood violin
MATT MAson said:
I was excited to see Idiocracy - the premise sounded great, and especially after all the hype about Fox trying to supress it and not being able to see it in the cinema.

However once I did, I'm far more inclined to believe Fox sent it straight to DVD because it was a mediocre, straight-to-DVD sort of film. It was indeed a B-movie, it wasn't that controversial at all. I wanted it to work better, but for me it was just too sloppy. The ideas put forward by Oliver Curry about two types of human emerging is a great premise for a film comedy, but this wasn't it.

As for the whole laughing at dumb Americans thing, being a Brit living in NYC, constantly mocked by my American better half for my 'Britishness', it's obviously something I enjoy doing all the time. But British people, and people everywhere are just as dumb and ignorant about the rest of the world. I'm sure there are some stats that prove some countries are more aware of international news and other cultures than others, but basically, dumbness is a global issue.
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of course.

(if the premise of the movie had happened, islamic fundalmentalists would have taken advantage of the fall of the west and taken over the whole world anyway)

although stupidity is a world wide problem, americans are generally more ignorant of world issues than the rest of the 1st world. we don't travel internationally as much or take as much interest in the outside world, for a variety of reasons. one, because america is so large and has many regions and cultures in it, you can do ALOT of traveling within america itself. two, it's much easier for europeans to travel country to country, i mean, i can't hop on a train to paris. lastly, many americans see america as the sole superpower and don't real feel like have to take interest in other countries. america is indeed the dominant culture force in the world. kids in paris, london, and tokyo can tell you the names of america actors, singers, and basketball players, kids in NYC can tell you basically nothing about paris, london, or tokyo.

Idiocracy is the best b-movie with a message since "they live" (and it might be better...)
 
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