When I look back at 2004, it seems that it was the year of the low budget documentary. Michael Moore's much publicized Fahrenheit 911 seemed to open the flood gates, and there was a virtual tidal wave of direct to DVD low quality documentaries released. To cash in on this craze, the owner of Trailervision.com, a sight that makes fake movie trailers, have released their 2003 documentary Stuidity. This made-on-the-cheap movie attempts to look at what stupidity is, and how prevelent it is in our society. In the end though it doesn't reveal anything new, it just states what we all seem to know: there are a lot of stupid people out there.

This documentary is told in a rather conventional, if irritating style. It consists of a few talking heads spouting off their theories of intelligence, mixed with copious amounts of movie and news clips. The movie contains a lot of fast cuts, like a music video. They never stay on one shot for more than a couple of seconds, it's like they are afraid that their audience won't have the attention span to tolerate anything longer. This is a major fault, because they also don't take time to present a single theory or premise and build on it. The film just throws a bunch of quotes and images up on the screen that are vaugly related. Nothing is explored of examined in depth.

A typical segment has an interview with the owner of Fark.com differentiate between the terms stupid and asinine, and relates how frequently people preform stupid acts. They also interview a young man who has a web page devoted to photo-shopped images of criminals and infamous characters with Sesame Street's Bert in the background. While these are slightly amusing, they don't actually increase anyone's knowledge about stupidity or its nature.

Since this isn't a scholarly examination of the topic, it's filled with funny stories ala "News of the Weird" right? Nope, not really. There are a couple of amusing stories, but a large percentage of the movie's time is taken up with clips from old movies, often involving kids complaining about school or teachers lecturing their students about studying harder. There is also a lot of footage of a group of people sitting in a room trying to look like slack-jawed yokels. I assume this was included for comic effect, but it falls very flat.

I'm not sure what the point of this movie was supposed to be. Even the block letters that would grow to fill the screen and make such pithy observations as "Dumb is Sexy" weren't able to give this film the structure it needs. While it was a good attempt, in the end this film just doesn't work.

Audio:

The two channel audio track is fine for a documentary. While there isn't a lot of dynamic range, the dialog is clear and the narration and interviews are easy to discern. Though some of the audio to the vintage movie clips is rather rough, overall this movie sounds fine. There are no subtitles.

Video:

Being a documentary and having several different sources for the material, the full frame image quality is a bit of a mixed bag. The vintage movie footage is of slightly lower quality, but the contemporary interviews are mostly average. There is some soft images and some digital defects, but nothing that is really irritating. A so-so image overall.

Extras:

There are a good number of extras included on this disc. In addition to a list of reading material and a trailer for the film, there is a ½ hour interview with the director from the Documentary Channel, 48 minutes worth of extended interviews with people who appeared in the film such as Bill Maher and Noam Chomsky, a rather lame "Ignorant Quotient Test" and a commentary by someone who I assume is the director since he doesn't introduce himself, nor is his name listed on the menu. Now that's stupidity.

Final Thoughts:

I'm not sure what the creators were aiming for, but whatever it was, it didn't work for me. I found this documentary neither humorous nor enlightening. The editing style grew old really quickly and in the end the movie was just irritating. Skip it.