Idiocracy

If you hate your part-time job, you should watch Clerks.
If you hate your full-time job, watch Office Space.
And if you just hate people, then Idiocracy might be the film for you.

These movies would make for a great thematic trilogy for bitter people. In Clerks, Dante constantly whines about how he’s “not supposed to be here today”, as his weekend of ball hockey gets usurped from him by his responsibilities at work. Only his job isn’t that important, doesn’t pay well, and isn’t satisfying at all. It’s the worst reason for someone to sacrifice their weekend. In Office Space, you see the inanity of work in an office environment, how bureaucracy “works”, and shitty coworkers and managers. It’s a hilarious film, but it’s so depressingly accurate.

And now there’s Idiocracy. I heard about this film quite a while ago but it slipped under the radar and I completely forgot about it. It’s about an average man (aptly named Joe), who participates in an army experiment where he has to stay in a hibernation pod for a year. If it was successful, the hibernation pods would be used to preserve the army’s best fighters for future wars, so they test it out on Joe so they don’t waste any of their elite fighters. The experiment goes wrong when the leader behind the experiment is arrested and Joe (and another participant) are forgotten…for 500 years. Joe wakes up in the future to realize that everyone on Earth is a complete moron and he is the smartest man on Earth. You’ll immediately recognize the morons in the movie, because they seem like something straight out of an MTV show. Almost everyone is illiterate, fast food can be purchased via an ATM-like machine, and people love their low-brow entertainment (usually dick/fart jokes or ludicrous violence).

The #1 movie in Idiocracy:

The #1 TV show in Idiocracy:

It’s funny until you realize that this isn’t too far off the mark. Isn’t one of the most popular shows on television right now Jersey Shore? I never understood that phenomenon, or any of those other crappy MTV shows, which is why Idiocracy made me laugh so hard. It felt like someone out there understood what I felt too! The premise, however, is a bit snobby and dismissive. It imagines the world to be comprised of people who only enjoy the base pleasures in life, and how pathetic their life must be. Are you saying handjobs at Starbucks is a bad idea? No way man! There has to be balance as well. Can you imagine a world where it’s only high-brow stuff? That’d be an equally nightmarish situation, and Ass would still be the #1 movie, only it’d be filmed in black and white in some backwards chronological order or something.

But for all the haters out there who are knee-deep in stupidity, this is the movie for you.

And on that note…I’m off to work.