It's a fair criticism but imo it's not too hard to write off that bit of absurd narrated exposition at the beginning and instead think of it as being about anti-intellectualism and broken institutions, since the rest of the movie seems like more of a satire of those things, and the plot doesn't really land on eugenics as a solution to its problems.
We live in polarized times, which means that for every ‘Idiocracy is a documentary!’ take that goes around, there’s also a critique that argues that Idiocracy is a celebration of eugenics. Have you thought about that interpretation of it?
Well, yeah. I mean I’ve actually read that a couple of times. But to me, I thought the opening made it very clear that whatever side you take, nature and nurture are both covered in that. That guy is clearly not a good father. I mean, there’s a kid with a motorcycle in the front yard, and no one’s paying attention to this. He’s just irresponsibly knocking up different woman, and proud of it. It’s not like he’s a good, upstanding role model for the kid. So I think it’s pretty clear here that, whichever one it is, [nature or nurture], there’s some combination of both. I obviously don’t believe in eugenics. I think you could look at it both ways—you have this couple that’s trying to be so responsible that they end up never having kids. Then there’s another couple who just irresponsibly keeps having them and not raising them right. So, you know, if the other couple adopted the other kids. I’m sure they would probably be better off.
Yeah the eugenics take always seemed a weird one. No implications that the family reproducing like rabbits shouldn't have any children, just that maybe it would be good if they had a reasonable amount of kids responsibly. Also the couple that never had kids despite wanting kids shouldn't have been so cautious as to miss out.
Well I can kind of understand it, because it pins the cause of a problem of declining population level intelligence on who is having children, which is a controversial idea to say the least.
The thing is, the movie itself is fine. It is self contained satire that never tries to pass itself off as more than an absurd joke. It's that everyone is citing it as prophetic or relevant that's the issue. Ironically, the people that can only process real events through their favorite fiction aren't nearly as smart as they think they are.
Yeah, but it is because the rich people in modern times didn't have kids while poor people were, even having significant resources given to them to allow them to survive and reproduce.
I don't know if they were portrayed as "rich", but just a couple that was very careful and considered about everything. A clean and organized and empty house being a consequence of that. While trying to fit children in "properly" they never found the time.
Certainly the two preserved people were not rich.
Also, I don't think the message was that "poor people" should not reproduce " as your eugenics claim asserts, think the takeaway would be that folks should find some happy medium, the people let planning and anxiety get too in the way of having the children they wanted, and the other example needed at least some more responsible sensibilities.
We live in a society. We depend on each other to keep that society functional.
We resent the effort it takes to maintain life, because that prevemts time being spent on the less.mundane stuff.
Humanity built rules and morals to keep us on track, but nature doesnt loose - it reroutes the river. Controlled breeding looses out to hornyness. And Entropy eventually topples the sand castles of humanity. Like giant avalanches of garbage.
The non-producing couple were portrayed as being yuppies, which would be upper middle class. This is conveyed in how they dressed, their home, and how they spoke. It isn't the wealthy elite, but the professional class below them. This contrasts with the poor group living in a trailer park during a time when trailer park trash was a common expression.
And I don't think that "poor people shouldn't procreate" was the message of the movie. However, the movie has a thesis from those first few minutes, intended or not, that making life safer and easier for everyone to predominantly lead to the dumb uncultured masses taking over well built systems until they degrade to the point where they don't work any more.
The opening scene has no mention of genetics. Just that stupid people raise stupid children. Yes, in real life, a child can break free of bad parentage, but it's rare and outside the scope of an 84 minute movie. In real life, the stupid people would be way, way more mean spirited, but that would make for a bad comedy.
I tried watching it after hearing about it here a few times... I was shocked at how it's basically just a comedy for rich white conservatives. If anything its message is supportive of fascism; the whole premise is that poor people are stupid and rich people are smart, and humanity 500 years in the future has gotten stupider because the rich people failed to control the poors and got "great replaced" by stupid poor people...
Though it showed the people who were not having kids, as middle class, and it showed the people having kids, as poor, it wasn't a point in the story that the rich got replaced, only the smart people.
Wealth was never a point or even a subtle representation in the movie. It was certainly a movie written by a rich white man though, and can definitely be critiqued as having those biases.
Judge has shown time and again that he is very against institutional controls and concentrated power in general. All the "pro fascism" stuff you're taking about are your own ideas for "solutions" to the problem Idiocracy poses.
I don't see how it favors rich, white, or conservatives.
The smart people are not explicitly described as rich. The couple in the intro just are overly cautious and miss out on kids. Certainly the two people preserved from the past are by no means rich.
I also don't see conservative values as somehow aligned.
I didn't see any racial split.
There was no implications that anyone should have "controlled" anyone. To the extent there was a message, it was that some people are overly cautious and should love a little, and other people might could use a bit more self restraint and raise children responsibily.
None were very well liked even when they were fresh, but things like "Big Stan", in which his pipsqueak convict character has to go on a karate-kid-style journey to learn martial arts from David Carrodine in order to fend off rapists before he heads off to prison is kind of a case study in a whole genre that could be called 'damn, you really thought that was funny?'
Norm MacDonald and some of the other SNL folks dabbled in some of the same jokes, but were much more talented, so some of this stuff feels a little forgivable. Schneider though... oof.
Also: I haven't seen it, but I'm going to guess that 2008's "You Don't Mess with the Zohan" -- in which Adam Sandler stars as an Israeli Mossad super ninja who wants to be a stylist -- probably didn't age great.
he's the one that hasn't aged well. gone off the deep end, he has. antivax, transphobe, trumpette, pimps for moms for liberty.. you name it. actually got pulled from the stage in Regina (ca) during an event two years ago, in the middle of his routine, due to piss-poor taste and 'inappropriate' (to say the least) content. src
I disagree. The core of the film is very much anti-trans with characters on screen becoming physically ill at the notion of transgenderism. It is very much the sort of script that would be discarded with great alacrity these days.
Many of the one-off jokes in the film are slapstick of a decidedly Jim Carry nature for sure, but the sequel does it better with less punching down and more giggling with rather than at.
The other thing about it now is they cut the scene in every version of the film that establishes Ace is using his "powers" for good: when he pretends to be a trainer of dolphins to head off the reporters. Without that scene, he's just an asshole the whole film.
Ace Ventura: Heinz Getwellvet. I am trainer of dolphins. You want to talk to de dolphin, you talk to me.
Reporter #1: What happened to the regular trainer?
Ace Ventura: Vat happened to him? Vat happened to me? Seven years I am wit Siegfried.
[he holds up only four fingers]
Ace Ventura: Ve are making de dolphins disappear, und den Roy is coming wit ze tiger und ze shtuffing in de pants und den I'm gone.
Reporter #2: [skeptically] Where is Snowflake?
Ace Ventura: Why do you care about Snowflake? Do you know him? Does he call you at home?
[shouts]
Ace Ventura: Do you have a dorsal fin? To train ze dolphin you must zink like ze dolphin! You must be getting inside ze dolphin's head. I am saying to Snowflake, "Akay!... Akay Akay Akay?" und he is saying "AKay Akay!" und he is up on ze tail "Eeeeeeeeee!" und you can quote him!
The thing is it was a refreshing change when it came out. I thought it was the funniest movie I'd seen in years, bought the DVD when it came out thinking it was still great then when I tried watching it again a year later and it completely lost it's luster. It's like Juno, that one movie was great for a change of pace in an otherwise stale genre
IDK, I didn't really buy into the hype of either film at the time so when I eventually saw them on DVD, I was disappointed of course. Individual scenes in Napoleon Dynamite were entertaining on their own merits and highly quotable, but the film barely had a cohesive plot and felt more like a series of comedy sketches stringed together rather than a proper movie.
Juno was terrible thanks to the dialog alone. IDK who wrote that script (and don't care to look it up), but it was some of the most unrealistic dialog I've ever heard in a piece of media. Everyone talks like robots and always has the perfect quirky comeback anytime anyone says something. The only person in that film who spoke like a human being was Michael Cera, but every scene with him in it was insufferable because he's Michael Cera.
Diablo Cody was the writer of Juno, and I only know it because she became a hot commodity after the breakout success of Juno. And she had a middling hit with Jennifer's Body but hasn't done anything of note since.
Meanwhile whomever did Napoleon Dynamite was getting offers left and right, and his followup Nacho Libre was a dud because they were banking on the same success of ND but starring Jack Black. Jon Heder got a bunch of offers, including that skating movie with Will Ferrell but I think he kinda just fizzled out
I thought this was screamingly funny when it came out. It was the movie everyone quoted until "Napoleon Dynamite" came out. I tried rewatching it maybe a year or two ago and it's aged like milk. Too much of the comedy relies on unhealthy stereotypes & tropes.
It’s purposefully stupid so the tropes don’t bother me, the reason it was funny at the time was because the tropes hadn’t been established as much. It’s like saying old art is boring cause everyone does that now not realizing it was the OG. I still liked it and we watched it for movie night once and my at the time 19 and 21 year old kids liked it, we all quote it now.
It actually holds up better when you interpret the guy walking out of, and back onto the closet, without either of them aware, in one of the first scenes, as demonstrating the theme of the movie.
I got free-ticket coupons when the film melted in the middle of (an inconsequential scene in) Shaft. We chose to see Dude, Where's My car?. I still want my money back.
It's got two very quotable bits, but the rest I didn't like in the slightest. Both leads have done better work!
Someone completely ruined the band Alt+j for me years ago by pointing out that the singer's voice sounds like Adam Sandler doing that goofy squeaky voice. Now I cannot unhear it. Every time I hear a song by them it makes me lol.
Now I've passed this onto you, and whoever reads this. You've now been cursed as well.
Hey Happy Gilmore is still decent I think. Pretty sure I watched that in the last few years. Maybe big daddy too I haven't watched that in a minute tho.
Everything else by Sandler, yeah you're dead right
Yes, turns out the Adam Sandler movies get him and his friends a nice vacation to e.g Hawaii or some South African resort AND a paycheck to go along with it. When you realize that, you kinda understand why he's producing that slop rather than genuinely good films. The slop is consistent, it'll basically always do well enough to justify the cost.
Paul Thomas Anderson first announced that his follow-up to Magnolia (1999) would be an Adam Sandler comedy at a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival. The news was greeted with laughter by the assembled press. When "Punch-Drunk Love" eventually played at Cannes, Anderson won the Best Director award and was nominated for the festivals' top prize, the "Palme d'Or". Months later, Sandler was nominated for a Golden Globe in the "...Musical or Comedy" category.
City Lights is a great example of this but it is ALSO a great example of the opposite of this, specifically with all the jokes where drunk driving is the punchline
One of my favorite teen movies was 16 Candles, which I loved as a kid, and looked forward to showing my son, when he got old enough.
The day came, and he watched it without cracking a smile. When it ended, he asked, "What did you think was funny? The underage binge drinking, the wanton destruction of a beautiful house, the Asian racism, or maybe it was the statutory rape? What exactly is funny about this movie?"
I guess I've only seen that movie once and it was about 30 or 40 years ago, I don't remember a beautiful house being destroyed? I don't remember any statutory rape? I guess it was just considered a normal sex scene back then? Either way I don't remember that part either.
Remember the big party that was the centerpiece of the film? And the older guys were discussing having sex with the younger girls, one of them even saying "She's a child!" But the older guy went after her anyway.
Wait, you mean to tell me that 16 Candles was supposed to be a comedy!?
Teenage me absolutely did not pick up on that tidbit when I saw it in the early 2000s. I just saw it as yet another crappy romance film from the 80s. I was so bored that I can't actually recall a single memorable scene from the film.
Hate to break it to you, dude, but the movie was very much a product of its time. Anyone younger than Gen X isn't going to "get" the film. As a Millennial, I surely don't.
Anthony Michael Hall's character of The Geek was a comedy acting masterpiece. Easily the funniest teen character among ALL the great 80s New Wave Teen Comedies.
It was John Hughes' first film, and it was a sloppy mess, but it was also an interesting concept because it flipped a lot of the standard teen movie tropes. The Main Girl was sweet and smart. Her parents weren't idiots, they were overwhelmed by circumstances, but they were good people who loved their kids. The Big Athlete turned out to be a sweet guy who genuinely liked the Main Girl. And The Geek turned to be the coolest of them all.
As a fan of Home Alone, Ferris Bueller, and Planes/Trains/Automobiles, I get why you like the film, but from even a 20-year-old lens, it just doesn't hold up to modern scrutiny. But you're allowed to like what you like, so long as you acknowledge the fact that the whole sexual harassment subplot was fucked up then, and is still fucked up now. Poor Sam didn't deserve to be treated like an object.
I clicked through rewatching some of it and it’s generically raunchy, like it was trying to outcompete the American Pie movie for sex references and topless women.
here's a fun fact - unlike most films of the time, it doesn't celebrate sexual assault as acceptable!
It also is surprisingly not bi-phobic - both Fiona's MMF threesome and Jenny's European crush's bisexuality are not treated as aberrations against nature, etc.
Mi scussi guy, everybody at the beach, the hooligans, and literally the entirety of Cooper's character seems like a way bigger deal than stay black bert lmao.
I rewatched not long ago and would argue it remains one of the best raunchy teen comedies, not like that's a high bar but I was still laughing through it.
The Mi Scussi guy is the best part of the film, and honestly I feel like that scene is even more relevant today then it was back then. Perverts should be mocked and ridiculed like they are in this film even moreso today!
I wasn't actually saying those scenes were wrong, I was pointing out how dumb the other commenter's complaint about "stay black bert" was...which they then kinda proved on their own by making a racist joke in their next comment lol.
I mean, the guys at the beach are being mocked for being perverts who women correctly avoid.
The hooligans . . . . I agree it's not good to let people think being English is acceptable, but they are taking the piss out of Italians, so it's a hard call . . .
Yeah, call me when American Eyeties are being incarcerated and killed by police at numbers far outside anywhere near representative to their population percentage.
Then you double down by dropping an actual fucking slur while completely forgetting the actual history of Italians in America. Fuck off, racist piece of shit.
while completely forgetting the actual history of Italians in America
Yeah buddy, I lived long enough around Italian-American reactionaries who were the most dependable enforcers of white privilege to find that laughable. My Black friends honestly had to look up some of the slurs the old men in Brooklyn would use for them without hestitation.
Italians were made white in America quite a while ago. Reminding people that want to enforce white supremacy that they were often not considered white isn't racism, it's pointing out that racism is bad to the people that most need to understand that.
It's a sex comedy about a guy trying to be sexually abstinent, and in the climax of the film he fails because a woman has explicitly non consentual sex with him, in a framing the film presents favorably.
I haven't seen it, btw. This is the description I've heard.
That's because she wanted the cash of the pool. Remember? The colleagues were running a pool of which day he'd break and spank/wank/fuck. The ex- found the pool, placed a bet on night 39, where she raped him.
The silver lining of the film is to make longer connections with women with sex less prominent, and it'll be better.
There is the culture of NoFap, which seems to become an identity after the film so...
Part of her probation is not being hit by a car, and she violates it twice.
I have very strong feelings about her and her lack of comeuppance, and the many confused contemporaneous conversations I had about how fucked up her trespass was.
Seltzerberg's entire filmography. If you've seen Date Movie, you've seen Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans,Disaster Movie, etc, because they're all the same thing with a different set of clothes on, as it were.
Epic Movie had a couple of good jokes in it but I walked out of the theater during Date Movie when the Pimp My Ride joke came up. They didn't even try to make that movie funny.
For obvious reasons I never saw the remaining films.
I actually liked the experience. No, not the movie, that was terrible LOL. But I remember watching it with my friends in highschool and we were the only ones in the theater aside from some other group, so we were quipping our own funnier jokes back and forth with these strangers making each other laugh lol.
The other day I wanted to watch a fun animated movie, and found that I'd never seen a Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles movie that came out in 2007. Downloaded, put it on... and immediately greeted by the weinstien logo... then they had not one but TWO different Asian actors doing lines in the "broken Chinese accent." Kinda ruined the whole movie for me.
I thought it was silly because of how crazy far-fetched and unrealistic it was, since that stuff could never happen in real life. But now that kind of comedy has aged terribly and is no longer funny at all.
I'm actually going to say this nonsarcastically. In its defense most of the movie is still pretty funny, but the eugenicist intro is really bad. It would've been better if you'd chopped that off and said he'd just been isekai'd to a world of stupid people.
Really though I'd say the part that's aged worse is maybe not even the film itself but the way that people keep trying to compare it to the present day. Idiocracy is a world of well-meaning idiots who still have hearts of gold, and the day is saved when they step aside and let the smartest guy in the room figure things out. That is the exact opposite of the problem we're facing today, where the villains at the top are very smart and very evil, smart enough to know how to use stupid people as puppets for their selfish aims. Idiocracy doesn't even have any true villain in it.
I've seen many people mention how they feel Idiocracy has gone from a comedy to a documentary. I disagree. I believe it's become a vision of a better future than the one we currently have ahead of us. I wish I was kidding.
The idiots weren't well-meaning with hearts of gold. They enjoyed guys actually getting kicked in the balls, gladiator games, and extreme objectification of women.
Thanks, it's like people didn't actually watch this movie before parroting these opinions about it. "Camacho actually had good intentions", except the part where he sent Not Sure to be executed at the end.
The way I saw it, the idiots in Idiocracy were that way because they were stupid, and less so because they were actually malicious. That's in contrast to today where we have people who are certainly capable of doing better but chose to act the way they do.
How is it eugenicist? It took and actual real life trend in many western countries at the time and caricatured it to an extreme. It is a goofball comedy.
I mean, it was questionable then too. But looking back on how Eddie Murphy decided to tank his career says a lot about how comedians of the time loved punching down.
The more recent one was pretty good all considered but it was legitimately jarring how he never did the Axel laugh. Like I remember when Eddie said he was retiring it but he really should have made an exception for Aquell Folie.
I love Dead Like Me, but the problem is Ellen Muth seemed to just give up midway through the first season and her IRL eating disorder showed. So many of the other characters were pulling their own weight but even they couldn't carry it.
I did a marathon in the last year and it was difficult to get through the last few episodes...let alone the movie
Two that come to mind to me are Click and That's my Boy. Both Adam Sandler movies of course. The first one is very queerphobic and sexist, and the second one is a story about pedophilia. Still surprised they managed to get Christopher Walken for Click tbh...
I think White Chicks is overall still a good movie, but Terry Crews' character date raping the one guy so hard he ends up in a wheel chair was a bit too far.
The only one of those I saw back in the day was Schuh des Manitu and it was already god awful then. 90% of the jokes are basically "haha gay people funny". While I don't think Germans necessarily lack humor, Germany's most mainstream comedians really don't help to disprove the stereotype.
Michael Bully Herbig isnt mainstream. That it is only "gay = funny" is wrong. Yes it is not a complex movie. It falls more in the same categorie that "Naked Gun" falls into. A spoof. A spoof of western, as it is the case here. They are quite similar in humor.
"God awful" it isnt. It won multiple awards and is still cult today. Sounds more like it wasnt your personal taste. In what language did you watch it?
I watched it in German. Did they even bother to translate it?
Bully is definitely mainstream or at least was back then and, sure there are other jokes admittedly (that also weren't very funny imo). I guess that part just left a particularly bad taste in my mouth. Seeing as Michael Herbig isn't gay (afaik) it never sat right with me the way gay stereotypes were played for laughs by him. It's just cheap and unimaginative. Of course humour and taste are subjective, but in my subjective opinion it's just not funny at all.
I recall quite liking the parody film, Unfastened Coins
It's a non-serious exploration of the sinking of the Titanic, told in an over the top conspiratorial tone with nonsensical theories and conclusions, similar to Loose Change
We watched this one in my high school civics class lol. Teacher was a wacko conspiracy/UFO guy. We were supposed to be learning about the constitution or some shit 😂
I watched Waiting not too long ago, for the first time since it came out probably, and they use some of the classic early 'oughts terms that we don't use anymore. Often.
There's an episode of an old sitcom called Gimme A Break I would recommend. A white kid did blackface in front a bunch of black people, and the hard-r n-word was spoken uncensored by Nell Carter.
The DC character Amanda Waller was modeled after her both physically and force of will, iirc.
Blazing Saddles? For the time,it was genius....is the blatant racism still funny.... I would say yes because Mel brooks forces you to evaluate it and then laugh or don't laugh.
What the movie is REALLY about is, there's two groups of racists: There's the elites, the governor and cronies, whose racism is borne mainly from greed and thus insaitable and incurable, and then there's the townsfolk whose racism is borne of xenophobia and easily cured by understanding. World War 2 veteran Mel Brooks' intended solution to the problem of racism is to understand that xenophobia is just human nature and that those people are best reached out to with civility and good intentions to get through to them on their level, and the way you deal with the folks who are intentionally enforcing systematic racism is to shoot them in the dick in the real modern-day street because nothing else will ever work.
"The Right" is content to laugh at the racism because that's the part they like and they mentally check out somewhere around "throw out your hands, stick out your tush" and "The Left" would try to cancel Mel Brooks because "You can't have white people in a movie saying the N word. That's racist." They're over here trying to boycott Lucas Pope because a game he made 13 years ago has a "strip search to confirm gender" mechanic. The point Pope is trying to make is that brutal dictatorships sure are dehumanizing, but no, brains turn off at "I think that's anti-trans."
The problem I fear is that the number of people who are willing and able to ask "What's this movie actually saying, overall?" is dwindling.
So, when you say "the left" is trying to boycott Lucas Pope over something that happened 13 years ago, what you actually mean is that one Tumblr account, which went inactive 10 years ago, once asked people not to buy his game. When you say that "brains turn off," you really mean more like one specific brain turned off.
At some point, we, as a society, need to come to terms with the fact that you can always find some stupid person saying some stupid thing if you look hard enough, and that that isn't representative of a larger movement.
Yeah. People act like this. It's one example of a broader trend of consuming media at a surface level and immediately discarding anything "problematic" because simply hearing certain words or discussion of certain topics at all makes them uncomfortable. In this very thread you have people calling Idiocracy "pro-eugenics" because it made its point that low-brow culture that actually values stupidity and ignorance seems to be growing at an alarming rate in the context of a family tree. Obviously that means the creator thinks only smart people should be allowed to breed.
“You couldn’t make that movie today. They’d take one look at the script and say hey. We can’t make this. This is Blazing Saddles, this is already a movie.” — Mel Brooks
It’s funny to me that part of the reason this movie feels racist now is because this movie was genuinely part of making the wider culture less racist. It worked!
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There is no competition: Idiocracy, because it isn't funny anymore when you are in it yourself.
I'd rather be in Idiocracy.
at least President Camacho knew they were doomed and was trying to fix it. Dickhead Trump is trying to speed-run our demise.
I know, sipping butter and watching Ow my Balls sounds better than working your life away. I can even be an airline pilot.
When I first saw it, it was a comedy. Now it's a horror movie.
It was funny when it wasn't real.
It's also pro eugenicist anti-poor nonsense.
It's a fair criticism but imo it's not too hard to write off that bit of absurd narrated exposition at the beginning and instead think of it as being about anti-intellectualism and broken institutions, since the rest of the movie seems like more of a satire of those things, and the plot doesn't really land on eugenics as a solution to its problems.
Mike Judge made a statement about it in an interview:
Yeah the eugenics take always seemed a weird one. No implications that the family reproducing like rabbits shouldn't have any children, just that maybe it would be good if they had a reasonable amount of kids responsibly. Also the couple that never had kids despite wanting kids shouldn't have been so cautious as to miss out.
Well I can kind of understand it, because it pins the cause of a problem of declining population level intelligence on who is having children, which is a controversial idea to say the least.
The movie presented a problem within the human experience.
Eugenics is the fascist answer to the question of existence. Always will be.
The thing is, the movie itself is fine. It is self contained satire that never tries to pass itself off as more than an absurd joke. It's that everyone is citing it as prophetic or relevant that's the issue. Ironically, the people that can only process real events through their favorite fiction aren't nearly as smart as they think they are.
XKCD 603 has never been more relevant than this
Aren't the wealthy in Idiocracy also, well, idiots?
I thought the thing was everyone was an idiot
Yeah, but it is because the rich people in modern times didn't have kids while poor people were, even having significant resources given to them to allow them to survive and reproduce.
I don't know if they were portrayed as "rich", but just a couple that was very careful and considered about everything. A clean and organized and empty house being a consequence of that. While trying to fit children in "properly" they never found the time.
Certainly the two preserved people were not rich.
Also, I don't think the message was that "poor people" should not reproduce " as your eugenics claim asserts, think the takeaway would be that folks should find some happy medium, the people let planning and anxiety get too in the way of having the children they wanted, and the other example needed at least some more responsible sensibilities.
We live in a society. We depend on each other to keep that society functional.
We resent the effort it takes to maintain life, because that prevemts time being spent on the less.mundane stuff.
Humanity built rules and morals to keep us on track, but nature doesnt loose - it reroutes the river. Controlled breeding looses out to hornyness. And Entropy eventually topples the sand castles of humanity. Like giant avalanches of garbage.
The non-producing couple were portrayed as being yuppies, which would be upper middle class. This is conveyed in how they dressed, their home, and how they spoke. It isn't the wealthy elite, but the professional class below them. This contrasts with the poor group living in a trailer park during a time when trailer park trash was a common expression.
And I don't think that "poor people shouldn't procreate" was the message of the movie. However, the movie has a thesis from those first few minutes, intended or not, that making life safer and easier for everyone to predominantly lead to the dumb uncultured masses taking over well built systems until they degrade to the point where they don't work any more.
Idiocracy is not at all positive about selective human breeding.
The opening scene has no mention of genetics. Just that stupid people raise stupid children. Yes, in real life, a child can break free of bad parentage, but it's rare and outside the scope of an 84 minute movie. In real life, the stupid people would be way, way more mean spirited, but that would make for a bad comedy.
Yeah some of the memes are funny but the themes of the movie are pretty regressive :(
I tried watching it after hearing about it here a few times... I was shocked at how it's basically just a comedy for rich white conservatives. If anything its message is supportive of fascism; the whole premise is that poor people are stupid and rich people are smart, and humanity 500 years in the future has gotten stupider because the rich people failed to control the poors and got "great replaced" by stupid poor people...
why anyone on Lemmy thinks it's good is beyond me
Though it showed the people who were not having kids, as middle class, and it showed the people having kids, as poor, it wasn't a point in the story that the rich got replaced, only the smart people.
Wealth was never a point or even a subtle representation in the movie. It was certainly a movie written by a rich white man though, and can definitely be critiqued as having those biases.
Judge has shown time and again that he is very against institutional controls and concentrated power in general. All the "pro fascism" stuff you're taking about are your own ideas for "solutions" to the problem Idiocracy poses.
I don't see how it favors rich, white, or conservatives.
The smart people are not explicitly described as rich. The couple in the intro just are overly cautious and miss out on kids. Certainly the two people preserved from the past are by no means rich.
I also don't see conservative values as somehow aligned.
I didn't see any racial split.
There was no implications that anyone should have "controlled" anyone. To the extent there was a message, it was that some people are overly cautious and should love a little, and other people might could use a bit more self restraint and raise children responsibily.
Everything Rob Schieder started in.
None were very well liked even when they were fresh, but things like "Big Stan", in which his pipsqueak convict character has to go on a karate-kid-style journey to learn martial arts from David Carrodine in order to fend off rapists before he heads off to prison is kind of a case study in a whole genre that could be called 'damn, you really thought that was funny?'
Norm MacDonald and some of the other SNL folks dabbled in some of the same jokes, but were much more talented, so some of this stuff feels a little forgivable. Schneider though... oof.
Also: I haven't seen it, but I'm going to guess that 2008's "You Don't Mess with the Zohan" -- in which Adam Sandler stars as an Israeli Mossad super ninja who wants to be a stylist -- probably didn't age great.
he's the one that hasn't aged well. gone off the deep end, he has. antivax, transphobe, trumpette, pimps for moms for liberty.. you name it. actually got pulled from the stage in Regina (ca) during an event two years ago, in the middle of his routine, due to piss-poor taste and 'inappropriate' (to say the least) content. src
It can't age poorly when it was never good to begin with
It was unwatchable cringe shit when it came out.
I know cause I lived with a dumbass drummer who thought Sandler was funny. Even HE was turning that crap off halfway through.
Having forgotten pretty much everything about Ace Ventura: Pet Detective I tried to watch it with my nephews and immediately had to turn it off lol
Pet Detective aged like milk. When Nature Calls is still classic.
It's in the bone!
There's a reason that the sequel got replayed on tv more then the original. At least, I remember being replayed.
It was shit when it came out
Three darts is too much...
And now... A YAK! YaaaaaAAAK. YAAAaaaaAAK. YAAK!
Bumblebee Tuna. Bumblebee Tuna! (Your balls are showing.) Bumblebee Tuna!
It's dumb slapstick comedy, then and now. OP's tastes changed.
I disagree. The core of the film is very much anti-trans with characters on screen becoming physically ill at the notion of transgenderism. It is very much the sort of script that would be discarded with great alacrity these days.
Many of the one-off jokes in the film are slapstick of a decidedly Jim Carry nature for sure, but the sequel does it better with less punching down and more giggling with rather than at.
Yeah, this did not age wellwhere the bad guy is intra conversion trans.
Not a good look now.,
Laces out!
Immediately?
Is there anything bad about it until the very end when he gets the clue about the chief?
Also, there still are people like that. It's just unfortunate that it's the main character.
That was 1994 (question is about the 2000s)
Are you gonna go back & correct the people who named 80's movies too?
difficult to give a shit
The other thing about it now is they cut the scene in every version of the film that establishes Ace is using his "powers" for good: when he pretends to be a trainer of dolphins to head off the reporters. Without that scene, he's just an asshole the whole film.
Ace Ventura: Heinz Getwellvet. I am trainer of dolphins. You want to talk to de dolphin, you talk to me.
Reporter #1: What happened to the regular trainer?
Ace Ventura: Vat happened to him? Vat happened to me? Seven years I am wit Siegfried.
[he holds up only four fingers]
Ace Ventura: Ve are making de dolphins disappear, und den Roy is coming wit ze tiger und ze shtuffing in de pants und den I'm gone.
Reporter #2: [skeptically] Where is Snowflake?
Ace Ventura: Why do you care about Snowflake? Do you know him? Does he call you at home?
[shouts]
Ace Ventura: Do you have a dorsal fin? To train ze dolphin you must zink like ze dolphin! You must be getting inside ze dolphin's head. I am saying to Snowflake, "Akay!... Akay Akay Akay?" und he is saying "AKay Akay!" und he is up on ze tail "Eeeeeeeeee!" und you can quote him!
[Ace spits]
I rewatched Napoleon Dynamite last week and it holds up well IMO. So, not that.
Bow to your Sensei!
I hadn't seen it until this year; it held up well, but the peak for me was the jumpcuts while they talk about Pedro's bike
Nothing left for me to do but dance.
The thing is it was a refreshing change when it came out. I thought it was the funniest movie I'd seen in years, bought the DVD when it came out thinking it was still great then when I tried watching it again a year later and it completely lost it's luster. It's like Juno, that one movie was great for a change of pace in an otherwise stale genre
Some movies only hit on the first watch. Once you know the gags, twists or ending its just "Yeah Ok."
IDK, I didn't really buy into the hype of either film at the time so when I eventually saw them on DVD, I was disappointed of course. Individual scenes in Napoleon Dynamite were entertaining on their own merits and highly quotable, but the film barely had a cohesive plot and felt more like a series of comedy sketches stringed together rather than a proper movie.
Juno was terrible thanks to the dialog alone. IDK who wrote that script (and don't care to look it up), but it was some of the most unrealistic dialog I've ever heard in a piece of media. Everyone talks like robots and always has the perfect quirky comeback anytime anyone says something. The only person in that film who spoke like a human being was Michael Cera, but every scene with him in it was insufferable because he's Michael Cera.
Diablo Cody was the writer of Juno, and I only know it because she became a hot commodity after the breakout success of Juno. And she had a middling hit with Jennifer's Body but hasn't done anything of note since.
Meanwhile whomever did Napoleon Dynamite was getting offers left and right, and his followup Nacho Libre was a dud because they were banking on the same success of ND but starring Jack Black. Jon Heder got a bunch of offers, including that skating movie with Will Ferrell but I think he kinda just fizzled out
Shallow Hal is a pretty good contender
Isn't the ultimate message of the movie wholesome though? I've never actually seen it.
The basic message is supposed to be but loses intent because of the fact it's all fat jokes
Dear god. Never seen that, watched the trailer just now and can't imagine that ever being funny.
I watched it when it came out, and I remember it being pretty meh, with very few (if any) laugh-out-loud moments, or even audible chuckles.
I can't stand Jack Black, never found him funny.
Big "theatre kid" energy.
I nominate "Dude, Where's My Car?".
I thought this was screamingly funny when it came out. It was the movie everyone quoted until "Napoleon Dynamite" came out. I tried rewatching it maybe a year or two ago and it's aged like milk. Too much of the comedy relies on unhealthy stereotypes & tropes.
It’s purposefully stupid so the tropes don’t bother me, the reason it was funny at the time was because the tropes hadn’t been established as much. It’s like saying old art is boring cause everyone does that now not realizing it was the OG. I still liked it and we watched it for movie night once and my at the time 19 and 21 year old kids liked it, we all quote it now.
ZULTAN!
Dude, what's mine say?
Sweet! What's mine say?
Dude! What's mind say?!?
Sweet!.. What does MINE say?!
DUDE!!! what does MINE SAY?
SWEET! WHAT ABOUT MINE?!
SWWEEEEEEEETTTTT!!!!!
Today I learned.
It actually holds up better when you interpret the guy walking out of, and back onto the closet, without either of them aware, in one of the first scenes, as demonstrating the theme of the movie.
I got free-ticket coupons when the film melted in the middle of (an inconsequential scene in) Shaft. We chose to see Dude, Where's My car?. I still want my money back.
It's got two very quotable bits, but the rest I didn't like in the slightest. Both leads have done better work!
I watched it a couple years back. I thought it was funny.
Don't go dissing the original Hangover movie like that.
Meanwhile Napoleon is like a fine wine.
Anything with Adam Sandler
Primarily because he's about as funny as a erectile dysfunction
He's at his most hilarious when he sings with the squeaky voice 🙄
Someone completely ruined the band Alt+j for me years ago by pointing out that the singer's voice sounds like Adam Sandler doing that goofy squeaky voice. Now I cannot unhear it. Every time I hear a song by them it makes me lol.
Now I've passed this onto you, and whoever reads this. You've now been cursed as well.
This is one of those monkey paw curses in reverse because, if anything, you just made Alt+J better.
Made me think of this internet classic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlBskd3IaNw
I had Sleep Token ruined for me by a friend saying the singer sounds like he's singing around a mouthful of peanut butter.
Hey Happy Gilmore is still decent I think. Pretty sure I watched that in the last few years. Maybe big daddy too I haven't watched that in a minute tho.
Everything else by Sandler, yeah you're dead right
Punch Drunk Love is good because he had no hand in it other than acting.
I can't tell if they aged poorly because I also hated them when they first came out.
We’re just gonna pretend Wedding Singer isn’t a classic huh?
Big Daddy and Waterboy still hold up too. Everything else though...
If by "Big Daddy" you mean Happy Gilmore, I agree.
Big Daddy is one of his films that holds up the least to modern scrutiny, next to Little Nicky.
Even Punch-Drunk Love?
That's not really a comedy. Adam Sandler is really good when he's doing more serious movies. When he's doing Adam Sandler movies, they're awful.
cough little nicky cough
I saw that in theaters.
It was so bad, on par with The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
Yes, turns out the Adam Sandler movies get him and his friends a nice vacation to e.g Hawaii or some South African resort AND a paycheck to go along with it. When you realize that, you kinda understand why he's producing that slop rather than genuinely good films. The slop is consistent, it'll basically always do well enough to justify the cost.
One of my favorite trivia from IMDB:
Paul Thomas Anderson first announced that his follow-up to Magnolia (1999) would be an Adam Sandler comedy at a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival. The news was greeted with laughter by the assembled press. When "Punch-Drunk Love" eventually played at Cannes, Anderson won the Best Director award and was nominated for the festivals' top prize, the "Palme d'Or". Months later, Sandler was nominated for a Golden Globe in the "...Musical or Comedy" category.
The only watchable Sandler movies are Uncut Gems, Hustle, and that one with the spider in space.
Spaceman was a GREAT movie. I personally think it's one of the best Adam Sandler movies ever.
, and a pretty good dentist.
Also Raign Over Me and Punch Drunk Love. And Funny People as someone else mentioned.
He's OK in Funny People, because he's basically just playing Sandler being a piece of shit.
+Punch Drunk Love (just an actor)
Main exception being physical comedy. Some of those old silent films are hilarious, and just as funny now as when they came out 😂
City Lights is a great example of this but it is ALSO a great example of the opposite of this, specifically with all the jokes where drunk driving is the punchline
or universal situations
https://youtu.be/imXC0Ryye0k
Not having a language barrier, or anchor for that matter, makes a significant difference.
Like Mr Bean. I think the gags about cutting through photos of the royal family only get funnier with age.
George Carlin
Well, I guess you did say most
One of my favorite teen movies was 16 Candles, which I loved as a kid, and looked forward to showing my son, when he got old enough.
The day came, and he watched it without cracking a smile. When it ended, he asked, "What did you think was funny? The underage binge drinking, the wanton destruction of a beautiful house, the Asian racism, or maybe it was the statutory rape? What exactly is funny about this movie?"
He ruins everything.
I guess I've only seen that movie once and it was about 30 or 40 years ago, I don't remember a beautiful house being destroyed? I don't remember any statutory rape? I guess it was just considered a normal sex scene back then? Either way I don't remember that part either.
Remember the big party that was the centerpiece of the film? And the older guys were discussing having sex with the younger girls, one of them even saying "She's a child!" But the older guy went after her anyway.
It was trashed during the party I think
Wait, you mean to tell me that 16 Candles was supposed to be a comedy!?
Teenage me absolutely did not pick up on that tidbit when I saw it in the early 2000s. I just saw it as yet another crappy romance film from the 80s. I was so bored that I can't actually recall a single memorable scene from the film.
Hate to break it to you, dude, but the movie was very much a product of its time. Anyone younger than Gen X isn't going to "get" the film. As a Millennial, I surely don't.
Anthony Michael Hall's character of The Geek was a comedy acting masterpiece. Easily the funniest teen character among ALL the great 80s New Wave Teen Comedies.
It was John Hughes' first film, and it was a sloppy mess, but it was also an interesting concept because it flipped a lot of the standard teen movie tropes. The Main Girl was sweet and smart. Her parents weren't idiots, they were overwhelmed by circumstances, but they were good people who loved their kids. The Big Athlete turned out to be a sweet guy who genuinely liked the Main Girl. And The Geek turned to be the coolest of them all.
As a fan of Home Alone, Ferris Bueller, and Planes/Trains/Automobiles, I get why you like the film, but from even a 20-year-old lens, it just doesn't hold up to modern scrutiny. But you're allowed to like what you like, so long as you acknowledge the fact that the whole sexual harassment subplot was fucked up then, and is still fucked up now. Poor Sam didn't deserve to be treated like an object.
Eurotrip - the whole dvd.
I clicked through rewatching some of it and it’s generically raunchy, like it was trying to outcompete the American Pie movie for sex references and topless women.
Edit: It can be very depressing in winter.
here's a fun fact - unlike most films of the time, it doesn't celebrate sexual assault as acceptable!
It also is surprisingly not bi-phobic - both Fiona's MMF threesome and Jenny's European crush's bisexuality are not treated as aberrations against nature, etc.
"Stay Black Bert" is a problem though.
Fair point.
Mi scussi guy, everybody at the beach, the hooligans, and literally the entirety of Cooper's character seems like a way bigger deal than stay black bert lmao.
I rewatched not long ago and would argue it remains one of the best raunchy teen comedies, not like that's a high bar but I was still laughing through it.
The Mi Scussi guy is the best part of the film, and honestly I feel like that scene is even more relevant today then it was back then. Perverts should be mocked and ridiculed like they are in this film even moreso today!
Mi Scusi guy is also the Straight To Jail guy from parks and recreation, which I would NOT have realized without looking at his IMDB page.
I wasn't actually saying those scenes were wrong, I was pointing out how dumb the other commenter's complaint about "stay black bert" was...which they then kinda proved on their own by making a racist joke in their next comment lol.
I mean, the guys at the beach are being mocked for being perverts who women correctly avoid.
The hooligans . . . . I agree it's not good to let people think being English is acceptable, but they are taking the piss out of Italians, so it's a hard call . . .
Bruh what...you complain about "stay black bert" then make that joke.
Yeah, call me when American Eyeties are being incarcerated and killed by police at numbers far outside anywhere near representative to their population percentage.
Then you double down by dropping an actual fucking slur while completely forgetting the actual history of Italians in America. Fuck off, racist piece of shit.
Yeah buddy, I lived long enough around Italian-American reactionaries who were the most dependable enforcers of white privilege to find that laughable. My Black friends honestly had to look up some of the slurs the old men in Brooklyn would use for them without hestitation.
Italians were made white in America quite a while ago. Reminding people that want to enforce white supremacy that they were often not considered white isn't racism, it's pointing out that racism is bad to the people that most need to understand that.
But meanwhile, you're all . . .
I don't remember it being that bad and Scotty Doesn't Know is a banger. Miscuzi!
Damon looked like he had a blast.
mi scusi
Yeah I don't get the love of it. Parts of it are ok, but there is a lot of cringe.
Hard disagree
that's a great channel.
🎵 The paaast was doin' its best 🎵
40 Days and 40 Nights.
I really want a sequel where the ex girlfriend is fresh out of prison. I don't even care about the plot, I just need her to suffer
That movie was so forgettable.. remind me what she did again?
It's a sex comedy about a guy trying to be sexually abstinent, and in the climax of the film he fails because a woman has explicitly non consentual sex with him, in a framing the film presents favorably.
I haven't seen it, btw. This is the description I've heard.
He's literally handcuffed to a bed and unconscious when she rapes him quite proudly
That's because she wanted the cash of the pool. Remember? The colleagues were running a pool of which day he'd break and spank/wank/fuck. The ex- found the pool, placed a bet on night 39, where she raped him.
The silver lining of the film is to make longer connections with women with sex less prominent, and it'll be better.
There is the culture of NoFap, which seems to become an identity after the film so...
I vaguely recall enough to confirm it. Yeah, that didn't age well. "Men can't be raped, bro"
Hartnett and Sossamon? Such chemistry.
...Is part of her probation to not to have sex for a month?
Part of her probation is not being hit by a car, and she violates it twice.
I have very strong feelings about her and her lack of comeuppance, and the many confused contemporaneous conversations I had about how fucked up her trespass was.
Difficulty: impossible
Seltzerberg's entire filmography. If you've seen Date Movie, you've seen Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, etc, because they're all the same thing with a different set of clothes on, as it were.
I wouldn't call these horribly aged though, they've always been shit.
And they're all so fucking stupid.
Epic Movie had a couple of good jokes in it but I walked out of the theater during Date Movie when the Pimp My Ride joke came up. They didn't even try to make that movie funny.
For obvious reasons I never saw the remaining films.
My son is 15 and he saw a few of them and laughed his ass off. So I really can't get behind that whole heartedly.
OH GOD I just remembered Meet The Spartans exists.
To be fair this one didn't age badly. It was already shit at release
In a so shit its funny way, or its just shit way?
It's Friedberg and Seltzer at their worst, and that's saying something.
I actually liked the experience. No, not the movie, that was terrible LOL. But I remember watching it with my friends in highschool and we were the only ones in the theater aside from some other group, so we were quipping our own funnier jokes back and forth with these strangers making each other laugh lol.
The other day I wanted to watch a fun animated movie, and found that I'd never seen a Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles movie that came out in 2007. Downloaded, put it on... and immediately greeted by the weinstien logo... then they had not one but TWO different Asian actors doing lines in the "broken Chinese accent." Kinda ruined the whole movie for me.
Idiocracy
I thought it was silly because of how crazy far-fetched and unrealistic it was, since that stuff could never happen in real life. But now that kind of comedy has aged terribly and is no longer funny at all.
/s :(
I'm actually going to say this nonsarcastically. In its defense most of the movie is still pretty funny, but the eugenicist intro is really bad. It would've been better if you'd chopped that off and said he'd just been isekai'd to a world of stupid people.
Really though I'd say the part that's aged worse is maybe not even the film itself but the way that people keep trying to compare it to the present day. Idiocracy is a world of well-meaning idiots who still have hearts of gold, and the day is saved when they step aside and let the smartest guy in the room figure things out. That is the exact opposite of the problem we're facing today, where the villains at the top are very smart and very evil, smart enough to know how to use stupid people as puppets for their selfish aims. Idiocracy doesn't even have any true villain in it.
I've seen many people mention how they feel Idiocracy has gone from a comedy to a documentary. I disagree. I believe it's become a vision of a better future than the one we currently have ahead of us. I wish I was kidding.
The idiots weren't well-meaning with hearts of gold. They enjoyed guys actually getting kicked in the balls, gladiator games, and extreme objectification of women.
Thanks, it's like people didn't actually watch this movie before parroting these opinions about it. "Camacho actually had good intentions", except the part where he sent Not Sure to be executed at the end.
The way I saw it, the idiots in Idiocracy were that way because they were stupid, and less so because they were actually malicious. That's in contrast to today where we have people who are certainly capable of doing better but chose to act the way they do.
That's little more than cartoonish at worst. No one in the film is truly evil the way that real world oligarchs are evil.
I apologize for punching down. The little man is a victim of his circumstances and can take no real responsibility for anything.
How is it eugenicist? It took and actual real life trend in many western countries at the time and caricatured it to an extreme. It is a goofball comedy.
President Camacho was a good guy, but pretty much everyone else were assholes.
Norbit.
I mean, it was questionable then too. But looking back on how Eddie Murphy decided to tank his career says a lot about how comedians of the time loved punching down.
Um, Eddie Murphy will live forever as Donkey
Mr Robinson's Neighbourhood!
The more recent one was pretty good all considered but it was legitimately jarring how he never did the Axel laugh. Like I remember when Eddie said he was retiring it but he really should have made an exception for Aquell Folie.
Freddy Got Fingered
It's always been an anti studio fuck you, and it's brilliant in that regard
Yeah, Tom Green was fantastic, and his humor was always so much more than on the surface.
That is one of the biggest counter examples. Critical anger for daring to release the film. It's considered a classic by now.
Soooooo did daddy actually want some sausage?
Some movies age like fine wine, some age like milk, Freddy Got Fingered aged like urine. It was sewage from the very beginning.
Oof yeah that's a rough one
This movie just came up the other day. I drove a LeBaron at the time it was released. I'll never forget "number one son".
"I have a bag of jewels for you. They're jewels Betty... They're jewels. I got them all for you."
Bring It On, which is surprising.
Just a little too much casual rape dismissed as "digits slip."
I kid you not, I was a male cheerleader, and I had that happen to me (not on purpose). Bloomers are required for a reason.
Cheerleading as a whole is incredibly tied in with patriarchy and sexualization of minors to begin with.
I haven't thought of it in years but i suspect me myself and irene might have some questionable parts.
I highly recommend the first few episodes of "dead like me" though. Perfectly captures the y2k/bondi blue imac g3 aesthetic.
I love Dead Like Me, but the problem is Ellen Muth seemed to just give up midway through the first season and her IRL eating disorder showed. So many of the other characters were pulling their own weight but even they couldn't carry it.
I did a marathon in the last year and it was difficult to get through the last few episodes...let alone the movie
Dead like me is great. I wish they had the chance to completely finish the story.
Was "dead like me" the oen about the pathologist who was a brain eating zombie?
No, dead like me was the girl who got killed by an airplane toilet, and then worked as a grim reaper
Okay I missed that one. What was I thinking of?
Are you thinking of Santa Clarita Diet?
No that was the thing that Timothy Olyphant did after Justified.
iZombie?
It was iZombie.
I don't know if 2010 is allowed, but Get Him To The Greek would probably have to be up there. Russell Brand and P. Diddy together on screen at last!
Two that come to mind to me are Click and That's my Boy. Both Adam Sandler movies of course. The first one is very queerphobic and sexist, and the second one is a story about pedophilia. Still surprised they managed to get Christopher Walken for Click tbh...
sandler basically makes movies as an excuse to take paid vacations with people he likes. he pays well.
The sad dad in Click still elevates Click though.
I think White Chicks is overall still a good movie, but Terry Crews' character date raping the one guy so hard he ends up in a wheel chair was a bit too far.
Not a film per se but I nominate How I Met Your Mother. Barney is a funny and great guy, but he's also a misogynist and a creep
Ted's a bigger creep. I hadn't noticed until I heard a woman say it. Thought about it and she was right.
At least Barney is self-aware of the fact that he's a creep. Ted thinks he's a nice guy
7 Dwarfs - The Forrest is not enought
In german there is a joke being done i think 3 times:
"Holt den Jäger!" (Get the Hunter!) a black Person walks in "Den Jäger, nicht den Nxxxx!" (The Hunter, Not the N-Word)
Yeaaaah...do i need to elaborate? 2006...what a different time of society, especially in germany.
Then there is basicly all of the Star Trek Parodies "(T)Raumschiff Suprise" by Michael Bully Herbig As well as the "Schuh des Manithu" Movie.
The only one of those I saw back in the day was Schuh des Manitu and it was already god awful then. 90% of the jokes are basically "haha gay people funny". While I don't think Germans necessarily lack humor, Germany's most mainstream comedians really don't help to disprove the stereotype.
Michael Bully Herbig isnt mainstream. That it is only "gay = funny" is wrong. Yes it is not a complex movie. It falls more in the same categorie that "Naked Gun" falls into. A spoof. A spoof of western, as it is the case here. They are quite similar in humor.
"God awful" it isnt. It won multiple awards and is still cult today. Sounds more like it wasnt your personal taste. In what language did you watch it?
I watched it in German. Did they even bother to translate it?
Bully is definitely mainstream or at least was back then and, sure there are other jokes admittedly (that also weren't very funny imo). I guess that part just left a particularly bad taste in my mouth. Seeing as Michael Herbig isn't gay (afaik) it never sat right with me the way gay stereotypes were played for laughs by him. It's just cheap and unimaginative. Of course humour and taste are subjective, but in my subjective opinion it's just not funny at all.
I feel like 50 First Dates doesn't hold up
Heretic!
Loose Change.
I recall quite liking the parody film, Unfastened Coins
It's a non-serious exploration of the sinking of the Titanic, told in an over the top conspiratorial tone with nonsensical theories and conclusions, similar to Loose Change
Man, I haven't thought of maddox in years!
Will have to look that one up, sounds entertaining.
Yeah that one wasn't even funny then.
It had its moments, none of them intentional.
We watched this one in my high school civics class lol. Teacher was a wacko conspiracy/UFO guy. We were supposed to be learning about the constitution or some shit 😂
Some kid in my class insisted we play it in my civics class. I tore it apart as it was playing.
Turns out it was a lesson on authority figures that don't know how to distinguish fact from fiction, seems like it stuck with you.
Austin Powers.
It was hilarious back then but now, I can't help but cringe through almost every scene.
If you're cringing at Austin I think it's doing its job. Austin is supposed to be a "poorly aged" character in a, for the time, modern setting.
There are a few (maybe more than a few) times where the "modern" world is out of date though.
I actually think this is one that stands the test of time.
Yeah i just rewatched it a few weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised at how well it stood up.
The Dr Evil/ Scott relationship stands the test of time.
Damn near all of them.
The one exception (it did age decently) is Austin Powers.
They must have used the time machine to look forward and figure out what they could get away with and then danced as close to the line as possible.
The franchise could have an amazing modern day sequel if done properly.
Point of order: International Man Of Mystery and The Spy Who Shagged Me are both 90s films. Only Goldmember is from the 2000s.
Which is an ironic thing to say in the Age of Trump.
Idk I either thought they were funny back then and still do, or I didn’t think they were and they still aren’t. My taste really hasn’t changed
I watched Waiting not too long ago, for the first time since it came out probably, and they use some of the classic early 'oughts terms that we don't use anymore. Often.
Little Man
Tropic thunder.
still hilarious, also the only actual good black face ever used
I feel like IASIP and Community did it well too
Community wasn't even blackface though, that's what made the whole Netflix removing the episode thing even stupider.
IASIP is IASIP and it would be wrong for the show not to have some very offensive racial jokes.
There's an episode of an old sitcom called Gimme A Break I would recommend. A white kid did blackface in front a bunch of black people, and the hard-r n-word was spoken uncensored by Nell Carter.
The DC character Amanda Waller was modeled after her both physically and force of will, iirc.
I'm a dude, playing a dude, disguised as another dude!
"What do you mean 'you people'?"
"What do you mean 'you people'?"
Sam Grossman, dancing, with the hairy arms and big hands, should have his own franchise.
From what I understand everything about that whole character is entirely Tom Cruise's original creation.
How?
Blazing Saddles? For the time,it was genius....is the blatant racism still funny.... I would say yes because Mel brooks forces you to evaluate it and then laugh or don't laugh.
The black sheriff isn't the butt of the jokes, the dumb fuck racists are. However, there are some gay jokes toward the end, but they aren't too mean.
One of the most legitimate uses of the n-word in media is to make racist idiots look even worse. And the people of the land scene is pure gold.
If I remember correctly, the "you know, morons" line was ad-libbed and Cleavon's laugh was genuine.
It was definitely intended, but not in the script they gave him, it was planned like that to make him laugh genuinely.
What the movie is REALLY about is, there's two groups of racists: There's the elites, the governor and cronies, whose racism is borne mainly from greed and thus insaitable and incurable, and then there's the townsfolk whose racism is borne of xenophobia and easily cured by understanding. World War 2 veteran Mel Brooks' intended solution to the problem of racism is to understand that xenophobia is just human nature and that those people are best reached out to with civility and good intentions to get through to them on their level, and the way you deal with the folks who are intentionally enforcing systematic racism is to shoot them in the dick in the real modern-day street because nothing else will ever work.
"The Right" is content to laugh at the racism because that's the part they like and they mentally check out somewhere around "throw out your hands, stick out your tush" and "The Left" would try to cancel Mel Brooks because "You can't have white people in a movie saying the N word. That's racist." They're over here trying to boycott Lucas Pope because a game he made 13 years ago has a "strip search to confirm gender" mechanic. The point Pope is trying to make is that brutal dictatorships sure are dehumanizing, but no, brains turn off at "I think that's anti-trans."
The problem I fear is that the number of people who are willing and able to ask "What's this movie actually saying, overall?" is dwindling.
Who is "they" and do you have a source about this?
I give to you: "They"
So, when you say "the left" is trying to boycott Lucas Pope over something that happened 13 years ago, what you actually mean is that one Tumblr account, which went inactive 10 years ago, once asked people not to buy his game. When you say that "brains turn off," you really mean more like one specific brain turned off.
At some point, we, as a society, need to come to terms with the fact that you can always find some stupid person saying some stupid thing if you look hard enough, and that that isn't representative of a larger movement.
Yeah. People act like this. It's one example of a broader trend of consuming media at a surface level and immediately discarding anything "problematic" because simply hearing certain words or discussion of certain topics at all makes them uncomfortable. In this very thread you have people calling Idiocracy "pro-eugenics" because it made its point that low-brow culture that actually values stupidity and ignorance seems to be growing at an alarming rate in the context of a family tree. Obviously that means the creator thinks only smart people should be allowed to breed.
You know, morons.
“You couldn’t make that movie today. They’d take one look at the script and say hey. We can’t make this. This is Blazing Saddles, this is already a movie.” — Mel Brooks
It’s funny to me that part of the reason this movie feels racist now is because this movie was genuinely part of making the wider culture less racist. It worked!
Wrong century
Breaking news: man doesn't understand commentary of racial oppression in history.
Famous 2000's movie, Blazing Saddles.
If you think the movie is racist... And not about making racism ridiculous... You haven't understood a damn thing.