General News

Mike Judge’s IDIOCRACY Midnights This Weekend at The Tivoli!

By Tom Stockman | April 9, 2017

“The #1 movie in America was called ASS. And that’s all it was for 90 minutes. It won eight Oscars that year, including best screenplay.”

IDIOCRACY plays this weekend (April 14th and 15th) at the Tivoli as part of their Reel Late at the Tivoli Midnight series.

In Mike Judge’s utterly rude, crude, and politically incorrect 2006 yarn IDIOCRACY the U.S. Army selects a thoroughly average Army private, Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) for their top-secret Human Hibernation Project, because he is thoroughly average. Since the U.S. Army couldn’t find anybody in their ranks to fill the female slot, they have selected a hooker, Rita (Maya Randolph), from an African-American pimp named Upgrayedd (the extra ‘d’ stands for “double dose”). Joe and Rita are put into suspended animation for only one year as a part of the experiment, but an accident occurs and they wind up being suspended for 500 years! Our hero and heroine end up at the bottom of a gigantic garbage heap. As civilization grows even more idiotic, mankind lets the garbage pile up into mountains for centuries. They are released from their capsules as a result of the Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505 and discover a society where the dumbest have procreated in such huge numbers that human evolution has degenerated to the point that everybody is an imbecile. Indeed, numbskulls proliferate, and a wrestler, President Camacho (Terry Crews) is the President of the United States. (oh, and there is a restaurant chain named Buttf@#kers. Mindless television programming and rampant consumerism rule the airwaves. The favorite TV reality show is called ‘Ouch, My Balls!’ where guys get kicked in the gonads. There is also the Masturbation Network and the Best Picture of 2505 is a film entitled ASS, and all it shows is a giant close-up of a naked, flatulent, male butt for 90 minutes. In a brilliant sight gag, a carnival ride time machine display takes citizens on a journey through the 20 Century and they learn that Charlie Chaplin and the Nazis tried to rule the world. There a Museum of Fart where people tour a number of displays depicting various eras of time and they get to press a huge red button that sounds various kinds of farts.

Nobody drinks water in the year 2505, and a Gatorade knock-off sports energy drink called “Brawndo” has become the number one employer in America and the number one beverage because it contains electrolytes. “Brawndo” looks like green radiator fluid. Nobody knows what purpose electrolytes serve, but they’ve been told it is good for them. Following this lack of logic, farmers rely exclusively on “Brawndo: to irrigate crops. Consequently, nothing grows anymore, and America has turned into a dust-bowl of devastation

IDIOCRACY, which was Mike Judge’s follow-up to his cult hit OFFICE SPACE, yet never played theatrically in St. Louis upon its initial release (Webster U ran it for three nights about 4 years ago). It may be a terrifying and over-exaggerated caricature of the world today, but just look around you at almost any time and you will see where many of the crazy ideas in this film came from. What’s even more frightening, is that in a future not quite as distant as 2505, the things you see in IDIOCRACY may well not seem as over-exaggerated as they do now. IDIOCRACY portrays one big nightmare of a future, yet manages to stay entertaining and, indeed, hilarious at many places. See for yourself when IDIOCRACY screens this weekend at midnight at The Tivoli.