Posthuman Blues

Yet another movie that won't be showing anywhere near me:

Sharp, funny view of a stupid future

"Idiocracy" is a movie that looks stupid, but only in the service of astute commentary. As a prologue explains, smart people are getting outnumbered. While the intelligent tend to be careful about their breeding, a lot of morons are not; too boneheaded to think about birth control or sensible family size, they're cranking out more dumb babies every day.

So when soldier Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson) wakes up 500 years in the future, the result of a botched hibernation experiment, he finds the country hopelessly dense and incapable of solving the most basic problems. Buildings are teetering and collapsing. Garbage towers high in the streets. Farm fields are barren because a sponsor pumps salty energy drink into every place water used to be -- including the irrigation systems.

Most everyone in 2505 is a mouth-breathing lout, barely capable of forming a sentence. They've elected as president the guy who seems cool to them, a loudmouthed porn-star wrestler (unfailingly funny Terry Crews, the dad from "Everybody Hates Chris"). They pass their days consuming, defecating, fornicating and gawking at anything that goes boom. Then consuming some more. And because they don't know any better, they've let themselves be co-opted by corporate marketers, taking brands ("Frito") for names and wearing disposable clothes covered with ads.

(Via Boing Boing.)

I don't find the premise at all "out there." We're effectively there already.