Dumb in a bad way Idiocracy can’t make stupid people appealing 
The target audience for Judge's Beavis and Butt—Head animations were of course Beavis and Butt—Head themselves. The great thing about dumb—ass humor is the sheer universality of it. Somewhere in our brains, wrapped inside our more tasteful neo—cortexes, there resides some eternal fart—joke—loving schlub, and it really doesn't take a bong—load to let him out. Most times, just attitude will do the trick.
Thus it is with Judge's feature film Idiocracy, out on DVD after Fox gave it the briefest possible theatrical run last year. It's the story of a regular guy (Luke Wilson), frozen in a military experiment, who wakes up 500 years from now to find he's the smartest person alive. Basically, it's a movie about really stupid people—made for really stupid people. And that's not quite as smart as it seems. Beavis and Butt—Head at least had the virtue of brevity, getting its laughs and then getting offstage in proper vaudeville fashion. Even Judge's more evolved King of the Hill breaks itself into the standard sitcom A and B stories, getting through each half—hour episode without the viewer's thumb wandering onto the TiVo remote's Guide button.
Idiocracy is on the short side of feature—film length, but not short enough. Or else there's just not story enough—Paul Verhoeven's 1987 Robocop made the crass imbecility of the future's pop culture, TV included, the background for its corporate—skullduggery narrative, to rather better effect. For Idiocracy, it would constitute the foreground if there were anything behind it.
What really sinks Idiocracy is the heavy—handed voice—over Judge piles on it. The narrator thuddingly points out every obvious element; in case you're so stupid that you can't tell that these are really stupid people you're watching, the disembodied voice obligingly fills you in. Maybe this is the Fox studio heads' take on their audience's mental abilities; given the level of Fox News, they could be right. If it was Judge's directorial decision, one can only hope that his tongue was firmly planted in his cheek.
The resemblance to the premise of C.M. Kornbluth's 1951 classic "The Marching Morons"—that low—I.Q. types will inherit the earth by outbreeding smart folk like us—might or might not be intentional on Judge's part. But Kornbluth's short story—he at least was astute enough not to pump up the notion into a novel—worked the tension between the future's dumb—ass masses and the dwindling, overburdened cognitive elite who try to keep things going. In Judge's shallow gene pool future, everybody is equally stupid. Kornbluth was Golden Age SF's arch—curmudgeon; his story's smarties temporarily solve their problem by inveigling a third or so of the planet's dunces into rocket ships for a jaunt to the advertised paradise of Venus, then blowing them all up in outer space instead. That was written just six years after the end of the Third Reich's experiment in weeding what it considered inferior types out of the population; Kornbluth was politically incorrect before political correctness was even invented.
Mike Judge isn't that tough. Idiocracy drizzles out to a clunky happy ending that doesn't add up to much more than a public health advisory for intelligent guys to start laying more condomless pipe. Good idea or more facile irony? By the time Idiocracy's end credits roll, it's hard to tell.
- K.W. Jeter
Cocaine Cowboys
Billy Corben's informative and entertaining Cocaine Cowboys documents when Miami became the drug—dealing capital of the known universe. Apart from the archival photographs and news stories, Cocaine Cowboys is informed by the first—person testimony of several of key players, including a trafficker, a wholesaler and a killer—who could've been characters in Scarface and Miami Vice. Corben and co—producer David Cypkin provide the commentary on the film and deleted scenes, which appear alongside the featurette Hustlin' with the Godmother: The Charles Cosby Story. – Gary Dretzka