When Beavis and Butthead debuted on MTV’s Liquid Television in the very early 90s, it was not at all conceivable that its creator, animator and primary voice actor Mike Judge would, over the course of two decades, build a career that eventually conformed to the key points on the Troubled Maverick Timeline. First with those double entendre-happy half-brains to his long-running King of the Hill, Judge has done more to legitimize animation as a commercially viable vehicle for sly social critique than anyone in the post-Simpsons era save Matt Stone and Trey Parker. With Office Space, he cast Jennifer Aniston, then the biggest star on TV, in a sharp satire about 20 something stagnation far away from Central Perk, and audiences didn’t immediately get it. He followed that with Idiocracy, an apocalypse comedy that Fox dumped on the mere assumption that audiences wouldn’t immediately get it. Both films went on to find fervent cult audiences; Office Space looked a lot better on video and cable once its timeless comedy of little guy vengeance could be safely sifted away from the Aniston baggage; Idiocracy looked a lot better when it was actually available to be seen. After all this, it’s no wonder that Judge, who has written and directed each of his features, is treated like an auteur — quite the feat for a guy who makes visually indistinguished comedies mostly about working class guys and their frustrated ids. Who does he think he is — Kevin Smith?
Actually, Extract made me laugh more than any the last few Kevin Smith movies, but where Zach and Miri Make a Porno seemed to bring its maker’s career into sharper focus, Extract seems to derail Mike Judge’s previous progress as a filmmaker with Something to Say About The Way We Live In This United States. The story of Joel (Jason Bateman), a small business owner whose dreams of selling out to General Mills and finding a way to justify cheating on his wife are both thwarted when the insolence of one of his workers causes a chain reaction that results in another worker losing a testicle, Extract first takes too long to get going, and then seems to stumble into three or four conclusions. It’s riotously funny for about an hour in between (much of this thanks to the perfect cast, including Ben Affleck as Joel’s bartender buddy, Mila Kunis as the con bimbo who catches his eye, and Kristen Whig as his bored and boring wife), but those who have come to expect a Mike Judge movie to precisely skewer a contemporary social sphere may be disappointed. I didn’t previously give Office Space or Idiocracy much credit as anything other than very smart comedies, but Extract makes them both look like quasi-libertarian morality plays about the absolute necessity of personal responsibility. Those films were about men manning up to change the status quo; Extract is about a guy briefly taking his balls out of a drawer, juggling them for a bit and then putting them back after coming to the understanding that his status quo is actually great. Take away the ample discussion of testicles, and there’s something almost Capraesque going on here.
Obviously it’s ironic to criticize a critic so aggressively, but that’s just what people love to do to infamously contrarian New York Press film critic Armond White, who seems to be getting his worst scrutiny yet over his negative review of District 9. The comments and campaigns against him have been going on all week, but now that Roger Ebert has gotten himself involved, it’s a bigger deal. Especially since Ebert first defended White and then took it back. Yet his initial statement that White is “the ideal critic” who “is often valuable because [his opinion] is outside the mainstream” remains on Roger Ebert’s Journal to contractrict the change of mind.
It’s also a bit ironic that this is all because of a movie about creatures who’ve been segregated against. Would District 9’s fanbase prefer to ghettoize critics who disagree with them? Should there be websites and free weeklies that have “Populist Critics Only” guidelines? I don’t want to side with or against White, becuase there’s no need to, what with freedom of speech and press and everything. I will admit that when I began writing film reviews many years ago, I looked up to White more than anyone and even gave myself the nickname “The Film Cynic” (which I still use for my Twitter moniker at least), because I was a more negative and cynical person back then, and also, I honestly admit, because I thought it’d help get me controversially noticed.
Certainly White gets a lot of notice and publicity for his opinions, too, but the important thing is that he’s an interesting read, and not just for how against-the-grain he is. Even if he is ever intentionally anti-majority just to be anti-majority, he presents reasonable arguments and raises necessary points while doing so. Besides, does anyone really want to live in a world where everybody likes District 9 or Up or The Dark Knightand where nobody has anything fresh, smart and positive to say aboutTransformers 2? How boring that world would be.
That’s my two cents. Check out a few other film blog responses to the White blackballing after the jump:
Will this year’s presidential election be determined by which candidate is more hip? Barack Obama is younger, listens to Jay-Z and Kanye West and is something of a trendy choice among college students. McCain, on the other hand, is older and (now) less athletic but is still considered to be hip in a cool grandpa kind of way. Like the grandpa who has exciting war stories to share. Have you seen the video footage of him jumping from an explosion during the USS Forrestal fire? That’s pretty cool.
So, the outcome of the race may depend on what the majority of Americans think is cool. Charisma or Muscle. It reminds me of an election for high school class president. Who is more popular, the preppy basketball player or the more jockish captain of the wrestling team?
But do we really want a cool president? Let’s take a look at some of the coolest fictional presidents from the movies and decide if it’s truly a good idea to base our vote on which candidate we’d prefer to hang with.
Ben Affleck will probably star in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy follow-up, Extract. The film “centers on a flower extract factory owner (Jason Bateman) who’s dealing with workplace problems and a streak of bad luck, including his wife’s affair with a gigolo.” Affleck play not the gigolo, but “an ambulance chasing lawyer.”
Screenvision, a company previously noted for screening baseball games and opera performances in movie theaters, is bringing a BBC adaptation of the classic girls novel Ballet Shoes (one of my favorites at age 7) to US multiplexes. The film stars three veterans of the Harry Potter franchise: Emma Watson, Gemma Jones and Richard Griffith.
Heaven’s Gate superfans, take note: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is going to help MGM preserve the MGM/United Artists archive.
Late last year, we had a lot of questions about Brawndo, the fake sports drink from Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, made real by a company called Omni Consumer Products. Among those questions: Why would FOX throw their support behind the drinkable spinoff of a film they were barely willing to release? Is Omni Consumer Products, the company responsible for getting Brando on the shelves, a “real” company, or is it an elaborate Robocop joke? Finally, five months later, Rob Walker answers all those question (and more!) in the New York Times magazine:
[Brawndo] happened not because of a movie-studio marketing brainstorm. (Twentieth Century Fox released the film briefly and without much enthusiasm in 2006 before tossing it to the DVD market, where it has gained a cult following.) It happened because of an Idiocracy fan in Oakland named Pete Hottelet. A graphic designer with very particular pop-culture tastes, Hottelet has started a business devoted to bringing to life certain products from movies. His business is called Omni Consumer Products, a name borrowed from the fictional megacorporation in Robocop. In addition to Brawndo, Omni has acquired from Paramount the license to market Sex Panther, a made-up cologne from the Will Ferrell vehicle Anchorman (“150% More Awesome Than Any Other Cologne. Ever.”).
Read the full story here, or click through for the Times‘ Rob Walker’s attempt to make sense of it all, after the jump.
Baby Mamahad a big weekend. The Tina Fey comedy made $18 million dollars, beating Harold and Kumar’s take by about $4 million and easily enough for the top box office slot. Still, the stoner comedy more than made back its production budget in its first weekend, and that’s cause enough for Warner execs to take credit for handling their first post-merger New Line release successfully.
The Hollywood Reporter says IFC is in “final negotiations” to distribute The Pleasure of Being Robbed, the Josh Safdie feature which has been the subject of much chatter since it was announced as the only American film to screen at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes.THR’s Gregg Goldstein is calling this turn of events ” a final triumph for SXSW producer Matt Dentler,” who selected the film for his final Emerging Visions sidebar before departing for Cinetic.
Idiocracy is not even mentioned in this Variety story about Mike Judge’s next project, a workplace comedy called Extract which is set to star Jason Bateman. Pay no attention to the political satire which spawned an energy drink even though the film itself was barely released––me want more Office Space!!!
With the New Hampshire primary upon us, and in response to the results of last week’s Iowa Caucus, I’ve been thinking about the possible influence of pop culture on Democratic voters. Is it possible that Obama performed better than Clinton because 24 is a more popular TV show than was the short-lived Commander in Chief? The former has so far featured two African American Presidents, played by Dennis Haysbert and D.B. Woodside, while the latter was about a female President, portrayed by Geena Davis. The next season of 24, which is set to premiere once the WGA strike is finished, will actually feature a female President, played by Cherry Jones, but it may be too late. Americans could already be set on nominating a black man, because they’re more familiar with seeing such a President on both the big and small screen.
And what a crop of African American actors we’ve seen as the leader of the United States: Morgan Freeman (Deep Impact); James Earl Jones (1972’s The Man); Tommy ‘Tiny’ Lister (The Fifth Element); Chris Rock (Head of State); Terry Crews (not so well known, but extra points for playing a porn star-President in Idiocracy); and of course Haysbert and Woodside. Now, let’s see who we’ve got for white female Presidents: Polly Bergen (1964’s Kisses for My President); Lisa Simpson (in a flash-forward episode of The Simpsons); Dulcie Smart (a TV movie called Post Impact); Ernestine Barrier (1953’s Project Moon Base) and of course Davis. Which group has more star power? Exactly. Even Robert Zemeckis chose to exclude the female President featured in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact when the director made his film version. Anyway, Clinton at least has a better chance than an African American woman. The only black female Presidents I can find in TV and film include one played by Melanie Henderson on an episode of The Electric Company and reference to one in a deleted scene from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which features the woman as an added fifth face on Mount Rushmore.
On Friday, Danny Leigh at the Guardian linked to and excerpted from my post about Brawndo, the fictional scourge of mankind from Idiocracy, which Fox has allegedly inked a deal to produce as a real-life energy drink. Admittedly, the story does seem a little too future-world-y, irony-oblivious, Baudrillard-rolling-in-his-grave-y to take at face value, and the Guardian commenters expressed doubts.
“Er, hang on a second, is Brawndo really really real?” asked commenter JohnCooperClarke. “Have a look at the manufacturer listed at the bottom of the page - it’s Omni Consumer Products. From Robocop. A fictional big nasty corporation. Mind you, I had to Google to make sure that somebody hadn’t opened a real OCP…”
Remember last week, when I told you about how Fox had struck a deal to produce real-life Brawdo, the fictional energy drink that threw the Earth into chaos in Idiocracy, a film that Fox barely released and all but refused to promote? That energy drink now has a website (emblazoned with the Fox logo, natch) and a commercial, embedded above. You can even add Brawndo as a friend on MySpace (preferred, to complete the corporate circle) or Facebook.
So, to recap: Fox wouldn’t support a film about Brawndo, the energy drink that destroys plants, debases the human race, and makes those who drink “win at yelling,” but they are now putting wholehearted support behind the actual drink, which they’re attempting to sell to social network junkies without a trace of a reference back to the film. To be fair, I’ve seen the movie, and as far as I can tell, it didn’t exactly feel “like having sex with a tractor trailer in a parking lot.” So I’m going to give Fox the benefit of the doubt on this one.
Fox barely released Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, but now they’re partnering with something called Redux Beverages to release a line of energy drinks called Brawndo, named after the puke-green beverage that replaced water (and destroyed all agriculture) in the film’s future world.
Charlie Wilson’s War: Jeff Wells is cranky that the HFPA has declared it eligible for nominations in the Musical/Comedy categories at the Golden Globes; LIBERTAS is pissed that it’s “premised on a whopper of a lie that undercuts the entire film turning it into yet another 2007 piece of liberal propaganda.” Pick your own battle, I guess.
Future of Classic informs us that today would have been Busby Berkeley’s 112th birthday. They offer a list of “five things you might not have known about” the dance director of the greatest psychedelic-socialist musical numbers of the 1930s; oddly, the fact that he was a raging alcoholic didn’t make the list. Oh well. Too bad YouTube appears to be broken, because I bet I could find a clip from Take Me Out to the Ballgame that would prove it.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
Obviously it’s ironic to criticize a critic so aggressively, but that’s just what people love to do to infamously contrarian New York Press film critic Armond White, who seems to be getting his worst scrutiny yet over his negative review of District 9. The comments and campaigns against him have been going on all week, but now that Roger Ebert has gotten himself involved, it’s a bigger deal. Especially since Ebert first defended White and then took it back. Yet his initial statement that White is “the ideal critic” who “is often valuable because [his opinion] is outside the mainstream” remains on Roger Ebert’s Journal to contractrict the change of mind.
Ben Affleck will probably star
Late last year, we had a 
Baby Mama
With the New Hampshire primary upon us, and in response to the results of last week’s Iowa Caucus, I’ve been thinking about the possible influence of pop culture on Democratic voters. Is it possible that Obama performed better than Clinton because 24 is a more popular TV show than was the short-lived Commander in Chief? The former has so far featured two African American Presidents, played by Dennis Haysbert and D.B. Woodside, while the latter was about a female President, portrayed by Geena Davis. The next season of 24, which is set to premiere once the WGA strike is finished, will actually feature a female President, played by Cherry Jones, but it may be too late. Americans could already be set on nominating a black man, because they’re more familiar with seeing such a President on both the big and small screen.
