The latest foray into my Netflix queue was a Friday viewing of Idiocracy. Like Mike Judge's previous feature Office Space, this movie was dumped by its studio with little fanfare to a tiny contractually obligated release, and will find its audience (if at all) only on DVD. Critical opinion is pretty split--was it dumped because it's lousy, or was it dumped because they can't handle the truth? It barely crossed the Rotten Tomatoes "fresh" threshold, but if you look closely a lot of the good reviews can't be distinguished very much from the bad reviews.

I think this is the one that got it right. The movie is kind of moronic, and not just because it's satirizing moronicness. But a lot of the gags are great, and the concept behind the film was better than the execution. As that review pointed out, a lot of poorly executed movies that didn't even start with a good concept get released, so why not this one? I guess the message is that you can be bad and stupid, or good and cutting, but you can't get away with mediocre and cutting.

Still, I thought there were enough laughs to sustain the movie, especially since it's under an hour and a half. It's not like you're wasting a day or anything.