Word: extraction
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Mike Judge loves to hate the workplace. With his new film “Extract,” the writer/director (“Office Space,” “King of the Hill”) serves up his signature dish of nine-to-five disenchantment with a hearty helping of general human stupidity. Unfortunately, somewhere in the mix, Judge forgot a vital step of the recipe, and instead of an understated cult classic a la “Office Space,” we’re teased with a film that could have been delicious...
...lead character of Mike Judge's quietly hilarious Extract, clean-cut Joel Reynolds (Jason Bateman), is decency incarnate. He loves his wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig). He's good to the employees of the company he built from the ground up, a factory that produces flavoring extracts of all sorts, from cookies and cream to root beer. Unlike his gruff business partner Brian (J.K. Simmons), he knows all of them by name, from shrill Mary (Beth Grant) to Step (Clifton Collins Jr.), an earnest goofball who aspires to be floor manager. Because of Joel, Reynolds Extract is the coziest factory around...
...shoplifting, we know this Joel is headed for trouble - girl and, likely, financial. After Cindy reads about an industrial accident in which Step loses a component (and a half ) of his manhood and stands to gain an insurance and lawsuit settlement, she's a freight train steaming toward Reynolds Extract. But we're also hoping the con woman isn't too hard on the factory or its owner; it's Bateman's great gift to be able to make us inordinately fond of a rock-solid average guy. He's become so good at this that it comes...
...cult appeal of Office Space, a movie told from the point of view of the office drone, has always puzzled me a bit, but the truth is, I watched it from my couch, on DVD, always a soporific setting. I'm happy to have seen Extract in a theater, where the largeness of the screen allows the smallness of the movie to grow on you, and where every subtle comic twitch on Bateman's face can be seen and appreciated. There's nothing vanilla about...
Some exiled Burmese dissidents have criticized Webb for lending legitimacy to the generals. But Webb did, at least, extract one concession from the junta. When the Senator's plane left Burma on Aug. 16, it carried an extra occupant: John Yettaw, the American sentenced to seven years' imprisonment with hard labor for his midnight swim to Suu Kyi's home. His saga--that of a middle-aged Mormon from Missouri who used homemade flippers to visit the world's most famous political prisoner--is stranger than any fiction, even that of Senator Jim Webb...