Movie Review: Ride (2014)

Genre: Dramedy  

Director: Helen Hunt  

Starring: Helen Hunt, Luke Wilson, Brenton Thwaites  

Running Time: 93 minutes  

Synopsis: In New York City, Jackie (Helen Hunt) is a divorced magazine editor, over-involved in the life of her college-aged son Angelo (Brenton thwaites) and eager for him to become a writer. Fed-up with his mother's controlling behaviour,  Angelo drops out of college and relocates to Los Angeles to become a surfer. Jackie follows and takes up surfing to better connect with her son, and on the beach she meets Ian (Luke Wilson), who becomes a coach and romantic partner.

What Works Well: This mother-son drama benefits from a robust arc for Helen Hunt's character, reacting to an earlier family tragedy and a marriage break-up by smothering her son. Her subsequent journey to letting go encompasses moments of humour and romance soaked in the laid-back California sun.

What Does Not Work As Well: A good chunk of the running time is occupied with Helen Hunt falling off her surf board. Character definitions are neglected, with Luke Wilson's Ian reduced to shallow nothingness, and Jackie's ex-husband and his family rendered irrelevant. The writing reaches for edgy but often lands in painfully contrived theatricality. Other than a few swear words, this qualifies as a mediocre television movie.

Conclusion: Fall.

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Movie Review: Idiocracy (2006)

A science fiction comedy, Idiocracy offers a few chuckles but is defeated by a flimsy one-note premise.

In 2005, the US Army selects average soldier Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) for a one-year suspended animation experimental project. The other subject is prostitute Rita (Maya Rudolph). Something goes wrong, with Joe and Rita waking up 500 years later in 2505.

They find a world disintegrating under the weight of sheer dumbness, with humans having suffered continuous erosion of IQ over the centuries. In this derelict future Joe and Rita seek the help of lawyer Frito (Dax Shepard) to search for a time travel machine, but Joe is first thrown in prison then recognized as the smartest living human and summoned by President Camacho (Terry Crews) to solve all the world's problems.

Seeking laughs from stupidity is humour's lowest common denominator, and all of Idiocracy is constructed on the idea of humanity heading towards a phenomenally stupid future. Director and co-writer Mike Judge extrapolates evidence of declining IQ levels towards an end game where everyone is a moron, and a barely-functioning society is dominated by corporations equally governed by dumb people.

And so the streets are over-run by garbage, buildings are barely upright, reading and writing are lost arts, money and/or sex are predominant obsessions, vulgarity is widespread, every inch of space and every spoken sentence is used for advertising, and multi-syllable words are a stretch for most citizens. Joe as the most average guy in 2005 is now by far the brightest spark, and once his intelligence is recognized, he is tasked with sorting out the mess.

Idiocracy offers funky visuals and some laughs at the sheer imbecility on display, but otherwise expires well before the scant 84 minutes run out. And if Judge did err in his basic hypothesis, it was only because he was tragically generous in his timeline.



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