“Idiocracy”

Logline: The most average man in the US military is cryogenically frozen in an experiment which accidentally lasts 500 years, awakening to discover society has become so dumbed down he is the smartest man on the planet
Featuring: Maya Rudolph, Luke Wilson
Director: Mike Judge
Writer: Mike Judge and Etan Cohen, story by Mike Judge
Distributor: idiots at Twentieth Century Fox
TOP SECRET Opening Week Release Pattern: Opens at the Atlantic Palace 10 in Alhambra CA, the Allen 16 in Allex TX, the Mansell Crossing 14 in Alpharetta GA, the Atlantic Station Stadium 16, the Parkway Point 15 and the Phipps Plaza 14 in Atlanta, the Austell 22 in Austell GA, the Barton Creek Square 14, the Gateway 16 and the Tinseltown 17 in Austin, the Brea West Stadium Cinemas in Brea CA, the Buena Park Metroplex 18 in Buena Park CA, the Mall of Georgia 20 in Buford GA, the Burbank 16 in Burbank, the Riverstone 15 in Canton GA, the Lakeline Mall Cinemas in Cedar Park TX, the Century City 15 in Century City, the Hollywood 24 in Chamblee GA, the Winnetka All Stadium 21 in Chatsworth CA, the City North 14 in Chicago, the Chicago Heights 15 in Chicago Heights IL, the Conyers Crossroads 16 in Conyers GA, the Covina 30 in Covina CA, the Country Club Hills 16 in Country Club Hills IL, the Crestwood 18 in Crestwood IL, the Showplace 16 in Crystal Lake IL, the Culver Plaza 6 in Culver City, the Dallas 17 and the Keystone Park 16 in Dallas, the North Dekalb Mall 16 in Decauter GA, the Arbor Place 18 in Douglasville GA, the Medlock Crossing 18 in Duluth GA, the Tinseltown 17 in Grapevine TX, the Gurnee Cinemas in Gurnee IL, the ArcLight 15 in Hollywood, the Greenway Palace Stadium 24, the Gulf Pointe 30, the Marq*E Stadium 23, the Studio 30, the Tinseltown USA 290, the Tinseltown Westchase 17, the Willowbrook 24 and the Yorktown 15 in Houston, the Deerbrook 24 in Humble TX, the Irvine 21 in Irvine CA, the MacArthur Marketplace 16 in Irving TX, the Tinseltown 17 in Jacinto City TX, the Katy 19 and the Katy Mills 20 in Katy TX, the Town 16 in Kennesaw GA, the Lakewood Center Stadium 16 in Lakewood CA, the Discover Mills 18 in Lawrenceville GA, the Lincolnshire Stadium 20 in Lincolnshire IL, the Stonecrest 16 in Lithonia GA, the Long Beach 26 and the Pine Square 16 in Long Beach, the Beverly Center 13 and the Bridge cinema de lux in Los Angeles, the Southlake 24 in Morrow GA, the Naperville 16 in Naperville IL, the Norwalk 20 in Norwalk CA, the Block 30 and the Stadium 25 in Orange, the Paseo Stadium 14 in Pasadena CA, the Hollywood Movies 20 in Pasadena TX, the Tinseltown USA Cinemas in Pflugerville TX, the Legacy Cinemas and the Tinseltown USA Cinemas in Plano TX, the Puente Hills 20 in Puente Hills CA, the Round Lake Beach 18 in Round Lake Beach IL, the Criterion 6 in Santa Monica, the Streets of Woodfield 20 in Schaumberg IL, the Schererville 16 in Schererville IL, the Sherman Oaks 5 in Sherman Oaks CA, the Simi Valley Plaza 10 in Simi Valley CA, the Village Crossing 18 in Skokie IL, the Snellville 12 in Snellville GA, the South Gate 20 in South Gate CA, the Southlake Town Center 14 in Southlake TX, the First Colony 24 in Sugarland TX, the Rolling Hills 20 in Torrance CA, the Universal City 18 in Unviersal City CA, the Webster 18 in Webster TX, the Avco Cinema Center in Westwood, the Promenade 16 in Woodland Hills, the Tinseltown 17 in Woodlands TX and the Seven Bridges Cinemas in Woodridge IL (86 locations total) on September 1
MPAA Rating: R for language and sex-related humor
Running Time: 84 minutes
Aspect Ratio: Flat (1.85:1)
Sound Format: Dolby Digital, DTS

‘Idiocracy’
Are things bad now? `Idiocracy’ imagines a future in which people are, well, take a guess. Its satire is spot-on.

By Carina Chocano
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 4, 2006

What does Mike Judge have to do to get a movie released and marketed? He could stop making satires as merciless and spot-on as this one, for one thing. His second film in seven years, “Idiocracy,” was completed nearly two years ago and dumped on Friday, reviewless and unmarketed, in six markets not including New York and San Francisco. (Because who could possibly be interested in the long-awaited movie by the director of “Office Space” there?) It’s this sort of vote of no-confidence that gets people wondering — just how bad could it be? Which raises the issue of what “bad” means to the studio that unleashed “Date Movie” and “Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties” on an unsuspecting populace.

Judge has a gift for delivering brutal satire in the trappings of low comedy and for making heroes out of ordinary people whose humanity makes them suspect in a world where every inch of space, including mental, is mediated. The movie would be worth seeing for its skewering of the health system alone — in the future, hospitals will resemble a cross between a chain auto-diagnostic center and a Carl’s Jr., powered by Help Me technology — even if its opening thesis on the moment in history (roughly now) that evolution tipped into devolution weren’t so clear-eyed.

“Idiocracy” is Judge’s pitch-black, bleakly hilarious vision of an American future so bespoiled by rapacious corporations and so dumbed-down by junk culture that the president of the United States is a three-time “Smackdown!” champion and former super porn-star. The movie begins with a comparison of two family trees. A high-IQ couple waits for the perfect time to have a child, a decision they don’t take lightly, while elsewhere, in the trailer park, the dim bulbs breed like rabbits. The high-IQ couple waits too long, the husband dies of stress during fertility treatments, and their line stops there. Meanwhile, the moron population explodes.

Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson), however, is not actually a moron. He’s an average, unambitious, essentially lazy guy biding his time in the Army until he can collect his pension. It’s his perfect averageness (that and his dead parents and no siblings or wife) that make him the perfect candidate for an Army experiment in cryogenics. The idea is to freeze the best soldiers for thawing at a later date, when they’re really needed. Joe is chosen as the guinea pig, and because the Army can’t find a servicewoman to meet the same criteria, they freeze a hooker named Rita (Maya Rudolph) alongside him.

The experiment is meant to last a year, but in that time the base shuts down, is replaced by a Fuddruckers, and Joe and Rita are forgotten for more than 500 years. Meanwhile, humanity devolves to the point where it can’t take care of its basic needs, like dealing with garbage or growing crops, and when Joe and Rita find themselves unearthed during the great garbage avalanche of 2505, they discover to their great surprise that they are the smartest people on Earth.

An IQ and aptitude test he takes in prison (non-payment of his hospital bill) gets Joe taken to the White House, where President Camacho (Terry Alan Crews) makes him secretary of the Interior and entrusts him to fix all the problems. But Joe is focused on getting home and enlists his incompetent lawyer and stupid friend, Frito Lay (Dax Shepard), with leading him, and Rita, to a time machine.

The plot, naturally, is silly and not exactly bound by logic. But it’s Judge’s gimlet-eyed knack for nightmarish extrapolation that makes “Idiocracy” a cathartic delight.

In the future, Fuddruckers will become Buckrudders — and then finally just come and say what it’s been longing to say for years. (It will remain, however, a popular destination for children’s birthday parties.) Carl’s Jr. will adopt as its motto, “Fuck you, I’m eating.” The phone company will have merged with several media companies, the U.S. government and, of course, Carl’s Jr. Costco will house one of the nation’s top law schools. (It will also have warehouses roughly the size of Connecticut.) The streets will resemble Universal CityWalk in bad decline.

And the No. 1 movie in America — well, see it for yourself and find out.

Los Angeles Times

Funny business

In “Revel With a Cause,” Stephen E. Kercher argues that the “satire boom” of the 1950s and ’60s was not only just entertainment but also a social movement — one that changed American life.

By Rich Cohen

‘Revel With a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America’
Stephen E. Kercher
University of Chicago Press: 576 pp., $35

Nothing ages as poorly as a joke. It’s a dirty little secret — the records of Mort Sahl, that revolutionary genius, no longer play funny. How do I know? Because when I listen to them, I don’t laugh. Monologues that kept my father in stitches don’t touch me. In the end, all that remains of the old comedian (or of most old comedians, since I still find the Marx Brothers pretty funny, ditto Jackie Gleason) is the pose of the comic, the way he held his cigarette or stood in the light — the way, in other words, he faced the world.

In fearful times, comedians are often the first to stand up to authority. It’s in their nature. They know the teacher is going to come down with the ruler, but they go for it anyway. In fact, if you study the history of comedy, you study the history of dissent. This is what Stephen E. Kercher has done in “Revel With a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America,” a survey of the “satire boom,” the comedic flowering that ran from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s. “Far from being mirthless,” he writes, “the two decades following World War II spawned satiric forms and techniques that have permanently altered the direction of modern American comic expression.”

Kercher, who is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, has watched and analyzed legions of lost television shows, comic strips, routines, sketches. The old names keep turning up: Dick Gregory, Nichols and May, Bob Newhart, Bob and Ray. Much of their work was heroic because it flourished in the wake of McCarthyism. This was life re-asserting itself, the giggle that wells up in your chest after the gym teacher has chewed you out.

It began with the cartoonists — people like Bill Mauldin, a World War II grunt who painted Army life as it was lived, not as it was sold; or Al Capp, Herblock and Walt Kelly, whose “Pogo” comic strip became a national sensation. “By 1958,” Kercher writes, “an estimated fifty million readers followed ‘Pogo’ in five hundred newspapers worldwide…. The quadrennial ‘I Go Pogo’ presidential campaigns that Kelly initiated in 1952 — campaigns intended to parody presidential candidates and their campaigns — became sizeable high school and college fads.”

Plays, films, nightclub routines: Each is minutely detailed in “Revel With a Cause.” Reading the book is like watching a slo-mo explosion, one triggered by Ernie Kovacs, Sid Caesar, Henry Morgan, Stan Freberg and Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad magazine. Then Steve Allen’s “The Tonight Show,” the Compass Players in Chicago — who spawned Shelley Berman — and Second City, a reflection of which can still be seen on “Saturday Night Live.”

According to Kercher, many of the comedians who made their names in the 20 years after World War II were Jewish or African American — outsiders no less obsessed with the phoniness of the system than J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield or Norman Mailer’s White Negro. “[F]or many of these artists and performers,” he points out, “humor did not provide an escape from reality but instead a momentary flight from the unreality of postwar American life.”

By the late 1950s a parallel universe had developed, a world of funny people who saw themselves as distinct from the bourgeoisie.

“We were members of a comic underground,” cartoonist Jules Feiffer recalls, “meeting in cabarets and cellar clubs, making startlingly grave and innovative jokes about virginity, Jewish mothers, HUAC and J. Edgar Hoover.”

When listening to these old routines, you have to ask yourself: What comes first, the joke or the message? Is the latter a byproduct, something that arises naturally, or is the joke the candy that hides the medicine? Because in the end — and the end is now — the candy rots and you are left with a generation of young people looking for what makes this stuff funny. Old newspapers are read only by historians and conspiracy nuts.

At times, “Revel With a Cause” strikes me as too earnest, too academic — that’s my beef, as Jay Leno used to say. It reads like a college survey in which the professor shuts you up by saying: Comedy is no laughing matter! “By considering their humorous work seriously,” Kercher writes, “I will demonstrate that American postwar satiric writers, artists, and performers responded critically and creatively to concerns many middle class Americans shared over race relations, the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the spread of hypocrisy and deceit.”

Kercher is the sort of guy who takes four hours to tell you the plot of a 90-minute movie, who explains why a whoopee cushion is funny rather than letting the humor stand for itself. I’m not suggesting that a writer chronicling comedians has to be their equal on the page, but because these men, the best of them, were defined by a daredevil, hope-we-don’t-get-lynched recklessness, I do think they are owed some liveliness.

Yet “Revel With a Cause” is saved by its portrayal of Lenny Bruce, who is its hero and stands as an endpoint to all the comedic kvetching. Pictures of Bruce never fail to touch me. His face is as melancholy as that of Chaplin’s Tramp. He was a hero of the age, so had to be broken on the wheel. That’s the way it is with revolutionaries. Their ideas might sound dated, but their example lives.

Bruce was born Leonard Schneider. He never made it past fifth grade. He served in the Navy, where he handled bombs, which seems like a literary symbol. (Almost all the comics Kercher writes about served in the military, which gave them the authority to take on the generals; this lack of authority — today, most humorists come from the class that does not serve — is one of many problems of having an all-volunteer military.)

Bruce began doing conventional stand-up but soon broke out and started speaking his mind. He made fun of Catholics, Jews, everyone. Talked about sex. A New York critic called him “a truthteller, a kind of prophet, the kind that goes right back to Ezekiel.” Walter Winchell called him “America’s No. 1 Vomic.” He was arrested for obscenity and tried and arrested and tried again. In Los Angeles, the case against him was made by none other than Johnnie Cochran Jr. — part of the legal team responsible for O.J. Simpson’s acquittal — who tried to nail Bruce to the cross.

The People of the State of New York v. Lenny Bruce was the case that killed him — that, and the heroin. It was prosecuted by Frank Hogan, who also went after members of the Jewish Mob. Bruce was convicted, or so it seems, for not being funny enough, because the judge didn’t “get” his act. The decision called his routine “chaotic, haphazard, and inartful.” It’s a comedian’s worst nightmare: sentenced to prison because he bombed. On appeal, he did his routine for a panel that included future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

The satire boom was ultimately devoured by the forces it helped bring into power: Camelot and the New Frontier. “In terms of its political outlook, certainly,” Kercher notes, “most of the satire celebrated throughout American popular culture during the 1950s and early 1960s dovetailed with the cold war liberalism of Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy. Once they began to see themselves as part of the liberal establishment, American satirists yielded their positions as critical outsiders for the sake of becoming court jesters.”

To highlight this, Kercher quotes, among others, Feiffer, who suggests that the Kennedys “learned how to make [satire] ineffectual by embracing it.” In 1963 the cartoonist told a reporter that what most bothered him was the way he had been “accepted by the very people I’m trying to wound. They wound me by loving me to death while I’m expressing my hostility.”

The satirist is an insurgent — he can snipe and detonate and oppose, but he can never govern.

In the end, Kercher offers a compelling picture of a time when the funny man ruled, although he fails to explain just what made the funny man funny, what made the audience laugh. Partly this has to do with the nature of jokes, which, even more quickly than the comics who crafted them, fall into haggard ruins. Partly it’s the fault of Kercher, who simply does not have an ear for comedy. He is like a scholar who can explain what the invention of dessert meant in a sociological sense, but cannot tell you what the pudding tasted like, or why people keep ordering profiteroles. It reminds me of T.S. Eliot, that great lover of Borscht Belt comedy, who said: “We had the experience but missed the meaning.”

Rich Cohen is the author of “Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams,” “The Record Men: The Chess Brothers and the Birth of Rock & Roll,” and “Sweet and Low: A Family Story.”

The Independent

By Anthony Barnes, Arts and Media Correspondent
Published: 20 August 2006

A treasure trove of 3,000 tapes from the early days of guitar pop has been uncovered, chronicling the works of the man dubbed the UK’s answer to “wall of sound” creator Phil Spector.

The collection was amassed by Joe Meek, a volatile genius who shaped some of the biggest chart hits of the early Sixties with stars such as David Bowie, Rod Stewart, Status Quo and Tom Jones passing through the doors of his studio. The cache, known as the “tea chest tapes”, includes master recordings of many of the string of number one hits he created, as well as unheard sessions which never saw the light of day.

But fans of the charismatic record producer are now concerned that the uncatalogued boxes of 10in reels are simply rotting away as they oxidise and age. With the approach of the 40th anniversary of Meek’s death, fans and artists who appear on the tapes are demanding the recordings are properly preserved to protect his legacy.

Musician Clem Cattini of The Tornados, whose Meek-produced single “Telstar” was the first US number one by a British group and the favourite record of Baroness Thatcher, said: “It would be a terrible shame if this stuff, some of which has never been heard, was to be completely lost.” Meek’s biographer, John Repsch, added: “Leaving them there rotting year after year is just a terrible waste.”

Meek, who played no instruments himself but had a brilliant ear for sound, built up his ramshackle studio in a split-level flat at 304 Holloway Road, north London. His unconventional recording methods became the stuff of legend as he sought to create new effects.

He would record vocals in the toilet, or put the string section on the stairs, to create the right sound, twist screws that weren’t meant to be touched on the mixing desk and bash tacks into the hammers of his piano to alter its sound.

John Leyton, who scored a number one hit in 1961 before appearing in films such as The Great Escape and Von Ryan’s Express, said: “His studio was in a very dank maisonette and there were cables and tapes all over the place. It was an absolute mess. When I got there I thought, ‘So this is the glamour of showbiz.’ It just didn’t seem at all professional, and I thought nothing was going to come of it, but people were always amazed by the results.”

Meek, who was gay and had once been arrested for importuning, became increasingly unpredictable as his fame grew. As well as being obsessed with the spirit world, he also became fixated by the idea that he was being bugged by major record labels. He would often record the private conversations of guests to his home when he stepped out of the room to find out what they said about him.

In February 1967, long after his hits had dried up, he committed suicide, moments after murdering his landlady. His equipment was sold off to pay his debts and a huge cache of tapes was sold to businessman Cliff Cooper – who had performed in a Meek band, The Millionaires – on the proviso that he held them for the study of the producer’s methods.

Mr Cooper has held on to the collection ever since, but many Meek fans are now angry that the tapes – said to include sessions featuring Bowie, Jones and Stewart, as well as thousands of hours of unheard recordings – are crumbling away. Campaigners say if work is done now they can be preserved.

Mr Cooper told The Independent on Sunday: “I do feel guilty that this has gone on for so long but I was advised that it could be a litigation nightmare. I would love to do something with them. I intend to over the next few weeks.”