'Extract' - Mike Judge

I'm a pretty big fan of Mike Judge. Being at least partially from Texas, I always thought King of the Hill was a funny and poignant take on a 'typical' Texan family. In addition to being hilarious, Office Space spoke to my generation's distrust of 'adult life' like few films have before or since. I even thought Idiocracy was vastly underated and unwatched as a thought provoking social commentary, even if it was greatly flawed. Because of all this I was eagerly looking forward to his 2009 release Extract.

After watching it this week (I don't find it cost effective to see comedies in the theater) boy was I disappointed. This movie ranks up there for me in terms of cinematic disappointment maybe almost on the level of The Phantom Menace (OK that might be a GIGANTIC stretch, even if I didn't think it was 'that bad' the first time I saw it). How could the creator of Office Space and Beavis and Butthead make something so.... bland?

In a short plot summary, Extract tells the story of a small business owner, played by Jason Bateman, and his struggle with being a part of the rat race. Really the problems start here. Does Jason Bateman ever play anything other than the likable audience surrogate? He's boring, never really funny, and his exasperated face gets old, quick. You also have That 70's Show's Mila Kunis arriving to spice things up as a grifter/con artist. There is also a subplot where Bateman hires a male prostitute to sleep with his wife (Kristen Wiig) so that he can hook up with Kunis without feeling guilty. Oh yeah, and a bearded and almost unrecognizable Ben Affleck plays Bateman's best friend.

That's a lot of big names to mess up. You get the slightly more hip crowd with Bateman and his Arrested Development stint, and Wiig is often pretty decent on SNL. Ben Affleck and Mila Kunis are pretty big in their own right and were probably used to draw in a bigger audience. Extract wasn't a complete failure (Wikipedia tells me it made $10.8M on an $8M budget) but I don't know anyone who saw it. It also scored decently well with the critics (a score of 61 on Metacritic and 63% on Rotten Tomatoes), even getting a B from my AV Club folks. All this points to a 'decent but underwhelming comedy', however if I had to 'grade' it, I would give it more something in the C- range.

First things first, it's just not very funny. There were a few guffaws here and there while I was watching it, but not anything close to what I think a 'comedy' requires. If your movie has less laughs in it than the average episode of The West Wing, you know there's a problem. No one watches comedies for the plot, especially if the plot of your movie is slow and meandering.

Back to that plot. The story starts when a worker in Bateman's factory suffers a major crotchal injury on the job. Kunis sees this in the newspaper, and starts to date the injured party in order to get him to sue the company for more money. She also gets a job at the extract company for unknown reasons. Bateman's personal life starts to go downhill when the prostitute he hired continues to screw his wife long after Bateman tries to 'fire' him. Additionally his injured employee hires a lawyer (Gene Simmons?) and might take the entire company out with the lawsuit. Everything seems to go downhill for Bateman, until miraculously everything gets fixed. He even meets up with Kunis for a night of romance, and she doesn't steal his wallet!

This last bit is the most confounding part of the movie. We don't spend NEARLY enough time with Kunis to figure out her character. She seems just like a self serving conwoman, and until Bateman gives her a verbal lashing she's completely one dimensional. However after he insults her and her parasitic way of life, she breaks down and cries. She doesn't really say anything, they have sex and then she leaves. Did she learn anything? Was she playing them all along? What the hell happened? Would she really turn down pursuing a multi-million dollar lawsuit just because the nice guy tried to make her feel guilty?

However my biggest problem with the movie is that it just felt like a cheap transparent ripoff of Office Space. I understand why he would want to recapture the magic from his cult success, but it doesn't work if the new movie has nothing to stand on by itself. There are the same comments about work being a drag, and feeling that your life is a waste, but even Judge doesn't seem to be committed to the message this time through. And unlike achieving some sort of cathartic change like we get in Office Space, here everything goes back to the status quo.

Extract is not worth seeing. I hope Mike Judge hasn't lost it, but perhaps after the monetary debacle of Idiocracy (the film industry refused to advertise for the movie, or even put it in many theaters based on it's strong anti-corporate message) he has decided to make middling movies that get made and make money without being the least bit interesting.

Dune - Book and Film

To me, Dune was always one of those pieces of nerd culture that I was aware of but never really interested in. Although everyone has heard of it, it seems that as the book ages, fewer and fewer young people have actually read it. Add that to the fact that those who do read it tend to be the ubernerds, and thus tend to complain about things like the sequels and the movie adaptations, it never really seemed to grab my interest. As I started to read other science fiction books I realized to really have any kind of basis in science fiction I would have to read the defining book of the genre. I am very glad I finally picked up a used copy of Dune (alas not with the awesome cover I've shown) because it wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that Dune is to science fiction what Lord of the Rings is to fantasy.

While I was reading Dune I constantly found myself thinking 'oh hey, that's just like the characterization in Ender's Game' or 'that sounds EXACTLY like the plot in Avatar' (which I haven't seen) or 'gee that sandworm seems mightily similar to those space worms in Star Wars'. Although some people don't like this kind of comparison, Dune is the kind of story in which every thing that comes after seems to rip off from. In a way it's more influential than Lord of the Rings seeing that science fiction seems to have permeated popular culture and mainstream media more-so than fantasy.

Also as in Lord of the Rings, Dune seemingly (I say seemingly only having read it this once) rewards rereading. The story throws you right into the plot and action without much exposition and what back-story you do learn, you learn naturally as the story unfolds. The book contains seemingly hundreds of made up words that require constant referencing to the glossary (as I also found myself doing in my first go through LOTR, although the map is less helpful here) and a complex political, ethnic, and social structure in which out characters inhabit. Frank Herbert's world is a fully realized one, and it's the kind of creation that obsessive readers love to revisit.

Now when it comes to the plot, Dune is a little slow compared to LOTR. The first third of the book is mostly setup and political maneuvering and really only the last 100 pages or so contain any kind of 'action'. The middle section of the book is where it really reaches a lull, where it seems that we spend 200+ pages with Paul and his mother wandering in the desert followed by them trying to convince the Fremen not to kill them. I could imagine why some people might find this book 'boring', although I thought it was written well enough to get me through the sand wanderings.

I must admit however, that I did see the movie before reading the book. About a year or so ago I went through a phase of watching David Lynch movies. Always one to be a completist I watched Dune, even though I knew nothing of the book and hadn't heard very flattering things. Being almost a complete Lynch apologist, I was still completely baffled by the film. A year later I remembered almost nothing about it, except that there was some weird glow worm floating in space and that Agent Dale Cooper was running around in tights. I had to constantly ask Lindsay 'what the hell is going on' and was kind of lost. The visuals were there (as they always are with Lynch) but it didn't make much sense.

After reading the book and re watching the film, I realize why this was the case. The book checks in at over 400 pages of small print, making it longer than any one of the LOTR books. Apparently Lynch shot a 4-5 hour cut of the movie, and presented this to the studio. Obviously at the time the studio did not want to do something as long as what the extended edition of Return of the King would end up being, so they cut it down to 2 hours. In this attempt they seem to have left the first hour of the movie exactly the same, seeing that it follows the book almost page by page. However from the time that Paul and his mother are left to wander in the desert to the end they condensed 350 pages into one hour. The film jumps from one thing to the next, leaving the uninitiated clueless. Making this even worse, there is a fair amount of mythology and religious plot-lines and subtext in Dune, making these parts of the film incomprehensible. Lynch got the mood and setting right, but he was a complete failure in condensing the movie down to a manageable length losing perhaps the whole point of the story. (No worry, Frank Herbert was said to be thrilled with Lynch's creation, and did not hold any changes or omissions against him)

As much as I enjoyed reading the book (although it did take me quite a while) I'm not sure if I could recommend Dune to someone unless they had specific interest in the history of the science fiction genre. As I said, it is a little slow and dense and really isn't for those who aren't invested in the book. Furthermore although the book has many sequels (unlike Tolkein, Herbert wrote this as a stand alone piece, and then as science fiction authors are known to do he hastily wrote 3 more volumes after it made money) everyone I have asked had pretty much said that they weren't worth reading. This comes from a reading nut, a science fiction nut, and an 80 year old man who only seems to like Dune and LOTR along with classics at his old age. Thus I don't have a lot of confidence that the sequels are worth anything. I will probably read Dune again, and I expect I might even enjoy it more the second time. Dune is an important book, and it's incredibly influential. I'm just not sure it's 'required reading' for anyone besides the most dedicated.