½*/****
directed by Albert Nerenberg
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Words fail me in describing this travesty, a hypocritical assault on the senses which traffics in the very imagery it pretends to deplore and leaves you drained, battered, and completely demoralized. Ostensibly, it's about the media events and herd behaviours that conspire to keep the stupid oppressed and the even dumber in power, but despite the presence of Noam Chomsky and scattered other intellectuals, Stupidity is an exercise in smug superiority that does nothing to fight the powers that be. It's more interested in looking smarter than the crowd instead of fighting for their rights, and to that end repeats ad nauseam the very images (Adam Sandler movies, Jackass stunts, fraternity-style gross-outs) that it should be opposing. Flashed over and over at Mach speed, these pictures simply grind you down, making you feel hopeless instead of angry, or simply angry with the twit who concocted the whole mess. The film gets half a star for threatening to have interesting content about 20 minutes in, when there's a potted history of intelligence testing showing the tenuous nature of the whole concept of intelligence and how the concept can be bent to a variety of whims. But then it's back to burning phone booths and people defecating on mattresses, and some disconnected conventional wisdom on how dumb it is to be stupid, or stupid to be dumb, and why do smart people do dumb things… Take it from me: you'd be stupid to spend time watching it.
