Monday, November 5, 2007


Ah the wonder's of cable and the HBO package. Eventually you just run out of stuff to watch and you begin to think that reading is a much better way to pass your time. But fear not , I venture into the depths of cinematography so you don't have to. You can read your books and watch enlightened films, while I schlep through the dregs of celluloid.

Last night Mr. H. and I watched Idiocracy. A film by Mike Judge (did you know he was born in Ecuador - me either) staring Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph. OK, so here's the deal - Wilson's character, a private in the army, likes to shirk duty, so he gets signed up for this experiment where he's going to be frozen for a year. Rudolph, a prostitute, is the female counterpart in this little experiment. Of course, things go horribly wrong and they end up being frozen for 500 years. Well 2506 is not the flying car future of our dreams (of course, neither is 2007, but that's another post). Seems everyone has gotten pretty stupid over the preceding 500 years because well the smart people aren't reproducing and the less that smart people are. When Luke wake's up, he's literally the smartest person on Earth.

Out of my say dozen friends my age, only two of those friends have kids. All the rest of us (maybe not the smartest people out there - but not among the less smart) are either still thinking about it, or not planning on having kids. Now, I don't have any friends I would consider "less smart" so I can't really speak to whether or not those people having more kids. But I definitely do feel sometimes that there is a dumbing down of the world. Sometimes I feel dumber, but that's probably all the dumb TV I watch. Anyway, even if the "smart" people aren't having kids, are we really getting out there and helping to leave no child behind or are we just sitting around watching our big screen TVs and hoping these problems take care of themselves?

I think this is the point Judge was trying to make with this movie. Unfortunately, the scathing wit he used to make Beavis and Butthead and Office Space was dumbed down just a little bit too much.

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