beavis
& butt-head
do america |
director
Mike Judge
screenwriters
Mike Judge
Joe Stillman
producer
Abby Terkuhle
music
John Frizzell
editors
Gunter Glinka
Terry Kelley
Neil Lawrence
animation
director
Yvette Kaplan
drug trip
sequence designer
Rob Zombie
cast (voices)
Mike Judge (Beavis/Butt-head)
Robert Stack (Agent Flemming)
Cloris Leachman (Martha)
Eric Bogosian (Ranger at Old Faithful)
David Letterman (Motley Crue Roadie)
Richard Linklater (Tour Bus Driver)
Greg Kinnear (Agent Bork)
Demi Moore (Dallas Grimes)
Bruce Willis (Muddy Grimes)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 81m
u.s.
release: 12/20/96
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other mike
judge films
reviewed on this website:
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space
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At
the risk of losing my more refined readers, I must report the
truth about Beavis & Butt-Head Do America: it's rude,
it's twisted, and it's hilarious. What does the movie's runaway
success say about the future of America? Who cares? The movie
works. Unless you're uptight, over 40, or Michael Medved, the
movie is funny almost nonstop. Nothing else matters.
For the uninitiated, B&B are teenage sex-crazed morons addicted
to TV. Their MTV show is instantly recognizable as a satire of
MTV's audience: teenage sex-crazed morons addicted to TV. Humorless
parents who take B&B at face value miss not only the satire
but its context, and B&B fell into disfavor after a five-year-old
torched his trailer allegedly in emulation of Beavis' "Fire!
Fire!" Suddenly, the boys became symbols in the tedious
debate over TV violence, and I lost interest.
I didn't think B&B's creator, Mike Judge, could sustain their
dim-witted appeal throughout a feature film. But as Beavis
& Butt-Head Do America proves, Judge has a feasible movie-comedy
duo here -- Cheech & Chong for the millennium. (Parents hated
that pair, too, before Cheech got Disneyized.) What's funny about
B&B is their absolute single-mindedness in any situation.
To them, TV and "scoring" (or the distant possibility
of it) are as holy as getting wasted was to Cheech & Chong.
The movie is structured as a road comedy. After B&B's TV
is stolen, they stumble into a motel room, where a shady guy
(voice, rumor has it, by Bruce Willis) mistakes them for hit
men and offers them $10,000 to "do" his wife (voice
by Demi Moore, according to the same rumor). B&B, of course,
misinterpret "do" and go off eager to please; their
odyssey takes them from Vegas to the White House, the national
greed capitols.
On the basis of this film and the MTV episodes I've seen, Mike
Judge is a ruthless nihilist. For all the leering about "hooters"
and jabs at principals or cops, you can't call Judge anti-woman
or anti-authority -- he's anti-everything. I'd find that mildly
troubling if his satire weren't so uncannily on-target. Judge
pokes vicious fun at a hippie teacher who spouts New Age-isms
and sings the tender PC ballad "Lesbian Seagull," and
there's a great opening-credits bit lampooning '70s TV.
Judge knows his audience. B&B trash everything in their destructive
quest for cheap thrills, which may be Judge's coded critique
of those other profligate B&B's -- baby boomers. Judge is
saying that the last 30 years have left us nothing except snide
commentary on dead culture. While their baby-boomer parents disapprove,
the jaded Gen-Xers in the audience plug right into the crappy
nihilism, laughing at the fact that they're laughing.
Beavis & Butt-Head Do America, like any comedy that
doesn't suck, tells us more about where we are now than most
earnest Oscar-hungry dramas do. The movie, which really pushes
the PG-13 envelope, will offend those who don't like their humor
crude and nasty. As will Jonathan Swift. Beavis and Butt-Head
-- the Gulliver of the degraded '90s? Every era gets the satirical
figure it deserves. Mike Judge is saying we deserve these two. |