scntfc wrote:btw your posts boring. be fucking funny! or something.

This is sound criticism.

GhostFace wrote:

OMG they're all playing SAMICKs. Is that the guitar of the future? If so pass the heroin, I'm outta here.

LutherBlissett wrote:I haven't seen South Park in a while, but I have it on reasonable authority that it blows.

Way to think for yourself there, Luther. "Steve Albini thinks it blows, therefore I'll make up my mind without actually watching it myself, based on what Steve said..."

Not to dis Steve or anything, but just because you're posting on Electrical Audio's BBS doesn't mean it's appropriate to defer to Steve's opinion as the final word on everything.

The movie is ok to sit through once. It gets a lot of credit that it shouldn't, it's not that good. The idea is great and a great movie COULD have been made here but it was not.
NOT CRAP but barely.

I agree that it could have been a lot better but seriously, how many jokes can you possibly make about how stupid everybody is? Once that sinks in, the movie pretty much just coasts along and peters out.

One of the few jokes I really found funny near the end of the movie was when Maya Rudolph and Luke Wilson were in the White House discussing how weird it is to be so much smarter than everybody else. Luke Wilson said, "I sure bet that Albert Einstein thought everybody else was a fuckin' idiot." To which Maya Rudolph replied, "Now you know why he invented that bomb."

Colonel Panic wrote:

LutherBlissett wrote:I haven't seen South Park in a while, but I have it on reasonable authority that it blows.

Way to think for yourself there, Luther. "Steve Albini thinks it blows, therefore I'll make up my mind without actually watching it myself, based on what Steve said..."

I've seen South Park, just not much recently. I did say:

in my experience its treatment of pressing issues is uneven and often reactionary when not simply opportunistic, cynical, and puerile.

That's *my* assessment of South Park. But, you know, I think Steve's a reasonable authority on the merits of South Park, I really do. Anyway, I'm not here to raise no money for a basketball team or no class ffh trip.

Not Crap.

I'm embarrassed by the way it peters out by the end, but it just seems to me that every element of the production is intended to be - for lack of a better word - stupid. The camera work is dumb. The sets are dumb. The music is dumb. It's literally stupid to it's core.

"Oh, I like havin' sex with chicks."
"Yeah, Frito, most guys do."
"Yeah, but I'm really good at it."

I also loved the little details like the guy talking over the intercom in the hospital: "Uh, paging doctor ... Bluh ... mah ...uhhhh."

Not even close to crap. It's got problems, but the problems it has are entirely due to the darkness of the subject matter.

When writing comedy, it's not easy (and sometimes impossible) to reconcile getting laughs under certain premises. It's tough triangulation to bring out a movie's worth of humor in stupidity. Mike Judge manages it enough in the film to warrant a Not Crap.

I mean, sure, he could be Judd Apatow instead and delight the mommies of the west with safe vaginal procedural comedies, but he did not. He looked at the plausibility of jaws hanging slacker, families getting pointlessly larger, corporate eclipse of culture etc. and did a pretty good job making a film from that point of view.

-r

jordanosaur wrote:Call me crazy, but I thought Idiocracy had a heavily satirized Orwellian sensibility.

Comparing this movie to Orwell is like comparing Michael Moore to Noam Chomsky.

This movie is pretty CRAPPY. When it is not delivering the lowest denominator humour that it is supposed to he satirizing, it's hamming home it's bludgeoned plot piece.

I like Office Space.