Mike Judge
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Judge is indifferent to anything resembling space or rhythm, yet the low-tech chintz of his approach ultimately enhances the caustic themes by making the futuristic atmosphere absurdly transparent; as with Godard's Alphaville, we are already living in the future, for how wide a gap really separates Date Movie and Failure to Launch from Ass, the single, unchanging shot of a gassy, naked butt topping box-office charts in 2025?
If you didn't know any better, you'd think there was some relation to totalitarian science fiction satires like "Idiocracy."
…a touch of the satirical cynicism of Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy…
Here’s the studio audience howling at everything he says like a horde out of “Idiocracy.”
Remember "Office Space," with Jennifer Aniston as a flair-wearing Chotchkie's waitress?
Give the makers of "Office Space" the bad news -- the residual checks may be getting smaller because "Waiting" is probably going to play on an endless loop at Comedy Central for the rest of our lives.
While the foibles of twentysomthings living off sarcasm and minimum wage isn't exactly fresh ground to work with, "Waiting" also takes aim at those omnipresent TGI Fridays-type of restaurants, and, "Office Space" notwithstanding, it still feels like a fresh target.
There's real potential in the premise of young, unmotivated screw-ups logging time at a dead-end restaurant joba hash-slinging Office Space, basicallybut first-time writer-director Rob McKittrick makes it look like a homemade sitcom laced with profanity.
But McKittrick's script, which never met a penis joke it didn't like, refuses to raise itself to the clever, subversive level that made the similarly-themed "Office Space" such a cult success.
Ryan Reynolds (the poor man's Seann William Scott) is our cheeseball host on a tour of Shenaniganz, a chain restaurant not unlike the one that was skewered more effectively in "Office Space."
He is as much "one of the crowd" as was James Murray in King Vidor's silent classic "The Crowd" more than 70 years ago.
Later, the terrific Michael Stuhlbarg plays way, WAY against type as a “Deliverance” style backwoods Eater, the kind of role often played by Stephen Root (if we’re going to keep those “Office Space” references coming).
Inspired by Woody Allen’s “Sleeper,” it stars Luke Wilson (a much more tolerable actor than his more famous brother Owen) as Private Joe Bauers, who is a guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program.
Midway through, though, Judge declines to make Office Space a slacker version of Being There, instead opting for a half-assed revenge of the nerds as Peter and fellow drones Michael Bolton (David Herman; and yes, the obvious jokes on the name are made) and Samir (Ajay Naidu; and no, the obvious ethnic jokes are seldom indulged) plot a computer rip-off.
At times throughout The Wolverine , the latest Marvel movie-franchise installment featuring Hugh Jackman as an unkillable, possibly immortal mutant, the repeated mob-on-hero battles bring to mind Luke Wilson’s plaintive speech in Idiocracy about the good old days when movies told actual stories, “so you cared whose ass it was, and why it was farting.”
Shepard, a graduate of The Groundlings improve troupe, Mike Judge's Idiocracy, and MTV's Punk'd, has a comic's timing that combines well with his Bruce Dern-style physicality.
He apparently never got Coco Chanel’s memo to remove one piece before going out, and this movie, his first foray into action after building a career in horror, has something of the garish feel of Jennifer Aniston’s work outfit in Office Space.
With subtle visual nods to “Office Space” (1999)…
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2026)
Directed by Gore Verbinski
influenced by Idiocracy (2006)
Themes
It almost feels like Idiocracy for the TikTok generation. One thing Idiocracy failed to predict was how glued to our phones we’d all be, so it’s satisfying to see a film satirize humanity’s stupidity while directly addressing our dependence on screens. Much like Idiocracy, the satire is far from subtle, and viewers may find it too aggressively on-the-nose.
It's like if Mike Judge's Idiocracy were good and not up its own ass.
I Feel Pretty (2018)
Directed by Abby Kohn
influenced by Office Space (1999)
Visuals Characters Themes
In I Feel Pretty, Schumer is Renee Bennett, a New York-based high-end fashion company website manager who toils away in a converted Office Space-like basement.
She's Peter from Office Space meets The Devil Wears Prada’s Andy Sachs, a girl who inadvertently frees herself of expectations while navigating a glamorous labyrinth whose inhabitants mostly view her like some sort of Tolkien bridge troll.
Renee is an exile at work (an existential situation that worked better in Mike Judge’s movie “Office Space”), but when she is summoned to LeClair headquarters she glimpses another world.
Schumer plays Renee, a New Yorker working at the low end of the online department of Lily LeClaire, a top line cosmetics company; her basement office, a metaphor for her station in life, is basically Milton’s from “Office Space.”
Tonally and thematically, Stearns seems to be chasing the likes of Office Space and Fight Club , or the kinds of films popular in dorm rooms and message boards alike.
Because the latter contains elements of the former, along with some of the social commentary and revenge fantasy of Office Space and Falling Down.
Bingo! “The Art of Self-Defense” may be presented as an absurdist satire, but like the best American comedies — from the workplace ennui of “Office Space” to the competitive one-upmanship of “Talladega Nights” — it doubles as a keen critique of our national character.
It begins as a droll comedy in the same vein as Office Space and gradually becomes increasingly dark and unpredictable once Casey takes karate classes.
Sorry to Bother You (2018)
Directed by Boots Riley
influenced by Idiocracy (2006), Office Space (1999)
Themes Visuals
If the head-trip films of the 1960s had a fling with Mike Judge's Idiocracy and spawned a progeny as anarchically scattershot as it is brilliantly sincere, the result might look like this.
Set in what appears to be a parallel universe, the world of “Sorry to Bother You” resembles something from the Mike Judge school—think of the opening sequence from “Idiocracy.”
Sorry to Bother You also takes a look at consumer culture, capitalism, the nexus of morality and success and labor force issues; think Idiocracy crossed with Get Out.
Written and directed by Oakland rapper Boots Riley -- his filmmaking debut -- Sorry to Bother You has the makings of a cult film, à la other everything-including-the-kitchen-sink movies such sa Repo Man , Idiocracy , and How to Talk to Girls at Parties .
For a spell, Riley’s cultural ire is so cool-headed that Sorry to Bother You easily distinguishes itself from Mike Judge’s similarly themed Idiocracy , but along the way it, too, settles for swinging for the fences—so much so that the target of its satire is no longer in its crosshairs.
Instead, it’s a gleeful kitchen sink throwback to the satiric, absurdist, wildly inventive indies of the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s like “Repo Man”, “Being John Malkovich”, “Bamboozled”, and “Fight Club” combined with a dash of Mike Judge’s 2006 comic (yet eerily prescient) dystopic fantasia, “Idiocracy”.
Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)
Directed by John Patrick Shanley
influenced Office Space (1999)
Themes
Although many films and TV shows have dealt with office politics through the years ("Working Girl," "Working") and others have played off the mechanical drudgery of "worker bee" employment and its effects on the worker ("Falling Down," "Joe Versus the Volcano," "Brazil"), the increasing depersonalization of the corporate world and its dehumanizing effects on the employees during the 1990's makes films such as this one that much more timely and easy to identify with.
The Simpsons Movie (2007)
Directed by David Silverman
influenced by Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996)
Cartoons that work beautifully on TV often get swallowed up by the big screen, as anyone who sat through the static and dopey “Beavis and Butt-head Do America” will recall.
Office Space is most definitely a comedy, something like Norma Rae with a college degree and a sense of humor.
House of 1000 Corpses (2003)
Directed by Rob Zombie
influenced by Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996)
Zombie, who animated the most bizarre part of Mike Judgeâs Beavis and Butt-head Do America, in which the animated idiots desperately swallowed a fistful of hallucinogenic cacti and dreamed themselves into a Zombie-created hellhole, has a clear and present love of nasty, bad trash movies.