Mike Judge Kicks Off Live-Action 'Extract' Starring Jason Bateman
Filed under: Comedy, Casting, Deals, 20th Century Fox, Miramax
Mike Judge made a lot of friends and Fox made a lot of enemies when Judge's last live-action feature, Idiocracy, was dumped into a couple of theaters (it made a whopping $438,000) and then ushered to DVD. Those who saw it (myself among them) raved, making the movie a minor cult hit, but it certainly got a lot less exposure than anything from the creator of Office Space should have.Judge will attempt to remedy that with his next movie, which will be called Extract, and which its distributor (Miramax) will hopefully actually distribute. Jason Bateman, rightly adored by everyone, is attached to star. Variety, which broke the story, provides only a very cryptic plot description: "Extract explores what it's like to be the boss when everything seems to be shifting around you." No word on what the protagonist is the boss of or exactly what is shifting around him.
What can I say? It's hard to be anything less than enthusiastic about something in which both Judge and Bateman are prominently involved, even if I did miss the boat on Office Space when it first came out. I do hope that Bateman will still have time for that Arrested Development movie we've been sort-of promised. The thought of that actually happening makes me cry happy tears.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-28-2008 @ 11:03AM
GL said...
No fan of Idiocracy. I can certainly understand why it didn't get much exposure.
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4-28-2008 @ 11:38AM
Cincinnati Mike said...
Idiocracy is one that a lot of people, me included, WANTED to love. But it didn't deliver. Smart, culturally observant, a real warning shot for our ever stupider society...definitely. But I didn't laugh once.
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4-28-2008 @ 11:41AM
kevjohn said...
Maybe his cinematic ecomonic failures are the penance he must pay for unleashing King of the Hill upon the world.
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4-28-2008 @ 12:31PM
Philpott said...
so each and every one of you has to post something to talk crap about the guy? Slick.
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4-28-2008 @ 6:06PM
Cincinnati Mike said...
You got me, angry bear....I will admit that "lab monkeys with boners" in the opening of Idiocracy cracked me up!
4-28-2008 @ 12:50PM
ronmoses said...
Idiocracy was crippled by the excessive reliance on voice-overs. Count the number of times a perfectly good scene, which was moving along nicely up to that point, is suddenly muted in favor of the voice-over: "What Joe discovered over the course of what would have been the rest of this scene is...". It's called "show don't tell," folks.
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4-28-2008 @ 1:26PM
Jon said...
You don't get away with pissing on corporations when you're making a movie for one. I was astounded at the skewering going on, and the fact that Judge used real companies - Costco, Carls Jr., etc. - to make his near-brilliant satire on the dumbing down of modern culture. This was hubris incarnate - a move as brave if not braver than getting the same company (Fox) to fund that other anti-corporate indie movie posing as a studio flick, Fight Club. I usually can't stand stupid potty/fart/dick jokes and slapstick, but in the context of a film that's about the relentless downward spiral of our collective intelligence I found it actually rather hilarious.
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4-29-2008 @ 8:47AM
davenix said...
You guys raved over Idiocracy? Really...? Wow, that movie was all kinds of bad, and not in that good Bruce Cambell way.
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