movies

My favorite movie.

I showed it to my mom, who worked in an office and she brought my copy in to lend to someone. I got it back around 3 months later when eventually everyone on her floor had seen it.

Rewatching as an adult, this is a psychological thriller. Phoebe Cates is dangerously unhinged and hurts everyone close to her with her delusions. She sinks her friends houseboat and assaults a violin player at the mall. Then she passes her illness on to her new boyfriends daughter.

In Idiocracy, people take a crisis seriously, the state is actively looking for experts to solve the crisis, and defers to them quickly, and when evidence appears people change their minds. Finally they elect the person with the actual best plan for the future.

Idiocracy fundamentally has a wrong view of American stupidity. Idiocracy treats Americans as well-meaning but too complacent to care about the long-term consequences. It declares that society's problems are from a (genetic) lack of useful effort.

But, as the past 10 years have made increasingly hard to deny, American "stupid people" are actively hostile to reckoning with the long-term consequences of their actions. Ignorance was only ever an excuse. It's entitlement rather than complacency, and society's problems come from ('genetically smart') people deliberately bending useful effort towards societal harm for personal gain.

But while it may not have been quite as grating, Idiocracy was already wrong when it came out. Civil rights were suppressed with "ignorant" excuses that were a fig leaf on the desire to do harm. The eugenics the movie takes as a premise - that "smart people" breeding leads to a smart world and inversely for "stupid people" - is itself a form of "ignorance" about genetics that was actively being used as a fig leaf for genocide in the US in the century before.

But no, I'm sure you "just don't get" how Idiocracy is endorsing a genocidal view eugenics. It's easier to "believe" brawndo makes the plants grow.

Ack ack!

I wish I could find it again, but years ago I saw a video about why you couldn't make Blazing Saddles today, aside from it already existing/permission/etc. It wasn't the racism or anything, or how people today are too sensitive.

It couldn't be made today because Blazing Saddles basically destroyed the entire genre.

Prior to its release, Westerns were everywhere. They were incredibly popular, with countless movies and TV shows released every year. Then this movie comes along, points out all of the overused tropes, and reveals the formula they've all been using. The genre of Westerns has never recovered. It would be lampooning obscure content with dated references that people don't understand.

That's the real reason it couldn't be made today.