I just going to drop this here.
Is this my favorite or maybe this?
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It isn’t just Taco Bell. Look at these “Hidden Valley Ranch” monstrosities. I mean, really. It is terrible salad dressing, and they sell it by the keg? (also, sweaters and blankets. Sheesh)
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Circa 1985:
Where I lived, this was a huge trend (most likely with a popped collar, though). Your mileage may have varied.
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What is even more disturbing is that people actually eat there… millions and millions of people. It’s processed crap.
Remember Jazz Caps from Wendy’s?
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What exactly is the racist premise behind it? If you mean eugenics, the movie only hints strongly toward it and the issues caused by the societal changes are more about intelligence than race.
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Unfortunately some people are convinced the time savings are worth the risk. All those saved minutes aren’t going to do any good if all that processed crap leads to bad health.
Because it lets people point at under-developed communities (which is generally why people have more kids, not stupidity), and write them off as stupid. Where race comes in is that many communities are under-developed because of race, so putting this idea out there is at best ambivalent to or aloof to race in a way that is frankly inexcusable.
That said, as a person who always kept Idiocracy at arms-length because of that low-key contempt toward poor people, last year really kinda felt like an Idiocracy moment for a little bit.
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How?
Can it be wrong if it never tried to be right? The premise and set up for Idiocracy was no more idiotic than many other movies otherwise better reviewed, (Terminator, The matrix) in fact if the movie is wrong in any way, its that I do think that the idea for dumbing down the human race was possibly unnecessary in that today I am pretty sure it is not necessary for people to be more stupid tomorrow than they are today for such a world to come about, that it wasn’t considered obvious back then informs us how positive a world view informs this view.
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This could be an interesting conversation, please take my comment in this spirit.
I simply don’t see this as part of the text. The most problematic aspect of this movie is that it not particularly well made. It doesn’t realize that it is sci-fi, and it wants to play out like a morality tale, that puts some of its concepts at odds with itself. Yes, in a sense, this is a bad movie not a very good movie.
This is how it’s possible to read things into the movie that are simply not there. Yes, your reading is possible, but only if you take the movie much more seriously than it takes itself.
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And Jonathan Swift urged people t eat babies. BABIES!!! Dear God, I can’t even…
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Except that with Swift people said “this is ridiculous” with Idiocracy people say “this is so true” even when it demonstrably isn’t. Idiocracy is clumsy, ham-fisted satire in search of a target.
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Yeah, I just don’t put much stock in the “I wasn’t trying to be classist/racist” reasoning–it may not be fair to Mike Judge personally, but that is the “unfair” standard that white dudes with money have to hold themselves to, in 2006 and today. The movie could have gone a lot of places, but in the end, it puts a lot of stock in a particular construction of “intelligence” that reveals a lot more about Mike Judge than anything else.
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If you didn’t like it, you can just say so.
I’ll be the first to admit it comes off as classist. But racist is a stretch, unless you intentionally conflate the two, in spite of most of the examples in the film of the lower class being white.
Does race correlate highly with class in our current society, sure, though that appears to be improving. Were there brazen illegal acts committed less than two generations ago to enforce this (redlining, etc.), certainly. Do we all have a burden to ensure this doesn’t happen again? Absolutely. Can a filmmaker make a satire film about degeneration of society based on class and intelligence and NOT race? I believe it is possible. Apparently you do not.
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I never saw it that way. I thought it was picking on stupid people, not poor people or people of any particular race (though they did profile a white guy in the main example). They might have been poor, but it was their stupidity that was being ridiculed. Choosing to extend that to race was not a part of the film or its message, as I saw it. As for extending it to income, yeah, class was a part of the story, and perhaps that was a little ham-fisted. [edited]
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Lots of proselytizing from Ivory Towers here today.
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I was amazed to see the folks who thought it was racist focused on Camacho. There was not one mention of Rita - the female lead is a WOC and a prostitute. Part of what I enjoyed in the movie was Joe’s stupidity about Rita’s profession and artistic ability, though. Love is blind, right?
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Well; Kelly Ripa is going to wear those Taco Bell branded clothes when she and Ryan Seacrest are moderating a presidential primary debate between Kanye West, The Rock, Guy Fieri and Khloe Kardashian on their morning show in 2020.
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