I can definitely see your point on this and there are many things about it that are funny as ideas but don't come off well when realized. And I really can't get past the chintzy announcer.
> Also on the news tonight: teens and young adults
> filming themselves barreling into fences to knock them
> over has become a kind of recreational sport for kids
> in New York. They videotape themselves ramming bodily
> into wooden fences and toppling them over, and post
> them to YouTube. Pure Idiocracy stuff.
>
> -B.
I definitely see what you're saying. I guess I just didn't think that the film put all that much distance between itself and its own sublime fascination with imagining what the world would look like in the future if the mediocrity of the present was allowed to continue. Maybe this is what you mean by b-movie. Because, in the end, though it obviously thinks this would be a bad way for US society and culture to turn out, it also thinks it would be pretty funny if it did.
It also has the added bonus of making a really mediocre guy into a hero--not because he rises to a challenge or becomes a new person or any of that bildungsroman stuff--but simply because he gets transferred to another context where everyone else is so much dumber than him he couldn't lose.
But I do think it would make a much better film if it was recut (and the female character--who was a hooker! why choose this as the female lead? was tweaked) so I guess I agree with you in principle. In any case, after you watch it, you definitely want to go read something (and possibly take some courses in botany--just in case.)
s