Movie Review: Extract
September 4, 2009 by admin
Filed under Movie News
Mila Kunis
“Extract” is worth seeing for a multitude of reasons. It’s one of the funniest movies of the year, it’s Mike Judge’s best film to date, it’s a comedy that has an enjoyable subtext, and there isn’t a single comic performer who doesn’t get a chance to shine, no matter how big their character’s part or the actor’s public recognition. But the best reason is that you’re watching a comic legend in the making as Jason Bateman gives his finest performance to date. That’s saying something not only because of his work on “Arrested Development” but in every film he’s managed to steal no matter how little screen-time he had.
Honesty may be the best policy but lies and deception make for such better comedy. Bateman plays Joel, the owner and COO of an extract plant he built from the ground up. He’s not sure whether to sell his company or how to make the best extracts but he does know one thing: he needs to get laid. His wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig) seems to have no sexual desire and a frustrated Joel finds himself ogling Cindy (Mila Kunis), a new employee who is actually a con-woman trying to find a way to find a way to grab a chunk of the cash that testicular-impaired employee Step (Clifton Collins Jr.) is entitled to after becoming having his testicles impaired by an exploding gasket. Goaded by his friend Dean (Ben Affleck), Joel’s life spirals out of control into increasingly hilarious situations and the best part is you never quite know how Bateman is going to play it.
Watching the movie, some may see that Bateman is simply reprising his character from “Arrested Development”, but they’re missing the nuance. At worst, he’s a variation except Michael Bluth never had to worry about incompetent employees, having terrible reactions to illicit drugs, and having a cast that plays entirely to his character. Everyone in AD got a chance to shine and interact in different ways but watching every supporting character give a terrific comedic performance forces Bateman to up his game and that’s why he delivers the best comedic performance in his career thus far and it’s clear that he’s only just begun.
While Bateman is essential to the film’s success, a lesser actor would still have a deep bench that could carry the film. I’ve never seen a film with so little deadweight. You can usually point out one or two supporting actors who disappoint but with “Extract”, you have to search pretty hard. Even if there’s a character (e.g. Suzie) that doesn’t get a lot of jokes and/or memorable lines, what Judge does with the character and how the actor plays the role makes it all click together. But other performers almost come close to outdoing Bateman and in the process create unforgettable Extract movie image Mila Kunis.jpgcharacters. The most memorable is David Koechner’s beyond-irritating neighbor “Nathan” who manages to (arguably) eclipse Gary Cole’s infamous Bill Lumbergh from “Office Space”. The only thing about these characters which may throw some viewers is that they can drop out for long periods of time rather than having a constant presence in the lead character’s life. But none of that matters because I can just say this: Gene Simmons is funny in this movie. That’s magic.
There have been a lot of great comedies this year but the best ones are those with the sharpest observations like “In The Loop” and “World’s Greatest Dad”. While “Extract” does have satirical influences, it’s not the slicing observations of real-life so much as a fable about how even the smallest of every-day deceptions can lead to outrageous circumstances. It’s not even so much a matter of “honesty is the best policy” as much as it’s about being polite and cautious at the expense of one’s patience and better judgment. It may not be the deepest or most incisive statement but it’s why I would put this film a little past “The Hangover”. They both made me struggle to breathe during their funniest moments, but “Extract” takes that little step but it never slows down any of the comedy no matter how satirical or broad it can be. The little character tics are fantastic but I’ve also never seen so many testicle jokes in one film. Even more surprising is that almost all the testicle jokes work.
There are plenty of reasons to see “Extract” and I’ve tried to explain the major ones without spoiling any of the jokes. But no matter what convinces you to see this movie, you’re missing out if you don’t see what happens when Jason Bateman joins forces with Mike Judge.
Rating —– A-
Source: collider
Movie Review: Extract 2
Review in a Hurry: Writer-director Mike Judge heads back to work with folks who would rather be anywhere other than their soul-sucking jobs. But instead of the doldrums of the Office (Space), here the stale stench of the factory is made somewhat funny with Jason Bateman and his time-clock-punching cohorts.
The Bigger Picture: Joel’s (Bateman) dreams of selling his almond-extract plant come to a halt when one of his employees, Step (Clifton Collins Jr.), is the victim of a serious on-the-job injury. Gene Simmons (yeah, that Gene Simmons) “steps” in as Step’s lawyer, eyeing mucho dollars from an accident that has left his client’s family jewels the worse for wear.
On top of the lawsuit, Joel suffers other emasculating crises, like the sitcom-y storyline about his lackluster marriage (to Kristen Wiig). And when Joel’s buddy Dean (Ben Affleck) cooks up a plot to win Joel the right to be unfaithful (with factory new-hire hottie Mila Kunis), things go horribly wrong in a rather obvious manner. Without giving too much away, if Joel and his wife just talked to each other, then the Three Company hijinks wouldn’t be necessary. And while Kunis is quite fetching in her blue-collar couture, she doesn’t have much to do but look hot. She’s introduced as a con artist, but when the factory workers lose their valuables they blame it on some wrongly accused schlub.
Thankfully, though the script is a bit predictable, Judge knows how to cast a picture. He has a knack for surrounding his leading man with really strong character actors. The always-reliable J.K. Simmons (Burn After Reading) is Bateman’s right-hand man. David Koechner (Anchorman) plays the worst neighbor ever, bringing a boorish charm to his scenes. And Ben Affleck is all sorts of awesome. Like Brad Pitt, Affleck seems to flourish in roles that are less leading man (um, Gigli) and more stoner bud. As the pot-smokin’ guru dolt, Affleck gets all the best lines and steals nearly every scene he’s in.
The 180—a Second Opinion: Extract gets the most out of its (admittedly) thin plot, but unlike everyone’s favorite, Office Space, we’re not sure if this has that all-important rewatchability factor.
Movie Review: Extract 3
The mass of men, wrote Henry David Thoreau, lead lives of quiet desperation. You could debate whether that statement is still true — or maybe more true — in the age of cozy fat armchairs and giant-screen TVs. But it’s certainly true this year in one breed of late-summer movie: the masochistic comedy of everyday jerkdom, in which we behold the flailing of losers who are really us. Extract and Big Fan both feature small-fry heroes who don’t act so much as they get acted upon. True, neither one of these men is particularly quiet. But that hardly makes them any less desperate.
Couldn’t Mike Judge, with his acid wit, have come up with a better title for a suburban-schlub comedy than Extract? The title refers to the company owned by Joel (Jason Bateman), who bottles ”natural” food sweetener on a mini-factory assembly line that he’s on the verge of selling to General Mills. The plan gets squashed when one of his workers (Clifton Collins Jr.) loses a testicle in a freak industrial accident. The worker decides to sue, mostly at the prompting of Cindy (Mila Kunis), a sociopathic hottie. The weirdest thing about Extract is that the small-business chicanery isn’t even Joel’s main problem. That would be his wife (Kristen Wiig), who draws her sweatpants tight with chastity-belt precision. Joel plans to relieve his sexual frustration by sleeping with Cindy, but he must first absolve his guilt by hiring a dumb gigolo (Dustin Milligan) to seduce his wife, a plan that ends up working a little too well.
I love Mike Judge’s cartoons (King of the Hill, Beavis and Butt-Head), and Idiocracy (2006), his unfairly dumped future-shock satire, had flashes of demented brilliance. But didn’t Judge realize that Extract, with its plastic setups and one-dimensional harpies, plays like Kevin Smith remaking a bad George Segal comedy from 1978? There are a handful of fun moments. Judge has Joel take one of the longest bong hits in movie history, and he casts Ben Affleck, in terrifying hair, as a pill-popping medicine chest of a bartender. (Affleck is the one actor on screen who looks like he’s having fun.) But there’s something didactic, overly programmed, about the middle-class misery of Extract. It’s not just the characters’ lives that are stifled — so is Judge’s spontaneity as a filmmaker.
Big Fan, the first movie directed as well as written by Robert Siegel (who wrote The Wrestler), stars Patton Oswalt as a 35-year-old Staten Island parking-garage attendant who has no life apart from his fervid devotion to the New York Giants. The movie is an unblinking look at the hidden (or perhaps not so hidden) pathology of American sports mania, in which the power and victory of your team becomes the sole conduit for your self-worth.
Oswalt’s Paul sits in his parking booth, then arrives back at the house he shares with his mother to call the Sports Dog radio phone-in show. There, he spouts the ‘’spontaneous” Go Giants! Eagles suck! rant he has already scrawled on a legal pad. Oswalt, looking like a mild, dwarfish Michael Moore, makes Paul an unnervingly rational nut, a spokesman for the ”wholesome” addiction our all-sports-all-the-time culture has become. After Paul spots the Giants’ superstar linebacker, he tails him to a strip club and ends up getting beaten up by his idol — an event that you’d think would leave him furious. But it only heightens the cultishness of his worship; Paul, it turns out, loves the Giants more than he loves himself. Big Fan, while it holds us right up to the suspenseful simmer of its nerd–Taxi Driver climax, doesn’t go where you’d expect. That’s what makes Siegel, more than Judge, a born filmmaker. C+
EW
Movie Review: Extract 4
Extract plant owner Joel Reynold (Jason Bateman) finds a prime diversion from his increasingly dull marriage to Suzie (Kristen Wiig) with the arrival of a pretty new temp, Cindy (Mila Kunis, seriously underused). He intends to stay faithful, but Joel’s bad influence of a best friend, Dean (Ben Affleck), comes up with a plan to test Suzie’s fidelity instead. While Joel is distracted, Cindy carries out a scheme of her own.
The buzz: The latest comedy from Mike Judge, who scored TV hits with “Beavis and Butthead” and “King of the Hill,” but had less immediate success with his carelessly distributed films “Office Space” and “Idiocracy.” “Extract” has been granted a not-so-enviable Labor Day weekend release, but at least has more studio support than his work usually receives.
The verdict: As Judge’s most modest offering yet—less quotable than “Office Space,” less provocative than “Idiocracy”—“Extract” is one more film bound to find its audience outside of rather than in theaters. Absent the satirical edge of the filmmaker’s best work, the relative worth of this character-based comedy comes down to its strong cast. Bateman (enjoying his first solo lead on film since 1987’s “Teen Wolf Too”) continues his career ascent after a rejuvenating turn on “Arrested Development,” underplaying to great success in the midst of a collection of more colorful buffoons. Affleck matches him with an effortless shift into character actor mode as a shaggy, drug-loving bartender. David Koechner, J.K. Simmons, Dustin Milligan and KISS frontman Gene Simmons round out the ensemble, easily pinpointing the humor in one-note roles. Consistently amusing without ever becoming truly uproarious, the thin appeal of “Extract” doesn’t pose much threat to a comedy juggernaut like “The Hangover.” This one works best as an end of summer distraction.
Did you know? Judge actually started writing “Extract” after “Office Space,” but abandoned the project when Hollywood executives told him they wanted something more high concept. The DVD success of “Office Space” convinced him to get this workplace comedy off the ground.
sOURCE: chicago.metromix
Movie Review: Extract 5
Close your eyes while watching Extract and you might mistake it for a cartoon. That’s the beauty behind all of director Mike Judge’s films: The creator of Beavis and Butt-Head deals mostly in archetypes, sometimes outrageous ones, giving his characters just enough humanity to keep us watching.
Take Joel (Jason Bateman), whose life resembles nothing so much as that of a grown-up Charlie Brown. His version of kicking the football is trying to sleep with his wife (Kristen Wiig), only for it to be snatched away from him at the last second each night when she puts on her sweatpants.
Outside of his sexless marriage, Joel is the owner of a flavor-extract plant operated by a league of extraordinarily dysfunctional employees. Step (Clifton Collins Jr.), the team’s most competent worker, lost his testicles during a freak accident. Mary (Beth Grant), a 50-something bottle inspector, refuses to lift a finger if any of her co-workers stop to take a breather. And Cindy (Mila Kunis), the new temp, is a smoky-eyed grifter who uses her looks to rob everyone blind.
True to form, Joel fails spectacularly each time he tries to deal with a situation at work. Heeding the advice of his drug-obsessed bartender friend Dean (Ben Affleck) may be part of his problem. Joel, like many other men, has fallen under Cindy’s spell, and wishes to have an affair. Dean’s suggestion? Hire a male prostitute to seduce and sleep with Joel’s wife, which will make cheating fair game. Joel takes the bait, but only after downing an elephant tranquilizer provided by his friend.
Joel, Dean, and subsequently Brad (Dustin Milligan), the gigolo hired for the job, offer enough laughs to keep Extract moving. But Kunis’s depthless performance is a real handicap, especially since her character is supposed to be so disruptive, wreaking havoc on anyone who stares at her for more than a few seconds. The movie’s resolution requires ridding Cindy from the plant, and while Kunis’ one-dimensional performance makes this strangely satisfying, her casting feels like a miscalculation in an otherwise effective comedy.
Source: filmcritic
Movie Review: Extract 6
The latest from Mike Judge isn’t exactly a laugh riot. But it does have enough hints of hilarity to stand out in a season when so many comedies feel as if they fell off a production line.
Where Judge’s “Office Space” empathized with the drones, “Extract” sides solidly with The Man. You may find yourself doing the same, since Jason Bateman’s Joel is the saddest CEO we’ve seen in a while.
Sure, it looks like he has all the trappings of success: his own business manufacturing food flavorings, a caring wife (“SNL’s” Kristen Wiig) and a beautiful home.
Unfortunately, his wife is dangerously bored, his house is being stalked by a lunatic neighbor (David Koechner) and his do-nothing employees are ready to mutiny.
Then there’s the guy who wants to sue him (Clifton Collins Jr.) for an on-the-job injury, the lawyer who’s threatening to bankrupt him (KISS’ Gene Simmons) and the gold-digging grifter (Mila Kunis) hoping to take him for all he’s got left.
And did we mention the best friend (Ben Affleck) who continually doles out bad advice along with unidentifiable drugs?
The truth is, Judge takes such a gentle approach to Joel’s ongoing nightmare that it’s easy to assume he’s still scarred from the failure of his edgily acidic “Idiocracy.” But at the very least, he could have used more time to pull things together. His script is all over the place, while the distracted direction could most kindly be characterized as laid-back.
Still, he has found the ideal leading man in Bateman, who hits just the right notes of bemused helplessness.
The entire cast, in fact, seems to be having fun, with Affleck and Koechner cheerfully stealing each one of their scenes. And the jokes come often enough to leave us consistently amused and occasionally delighted. Judge may not always hit the satirical highs of “Office Space” (or “Beavis and Butt-head,” or “King of the Hill”), but he never lacks for flair.
Source: Extract
