Here's a movie that's getting stranger and stranger the more details we get -- and I'm loving it. First, Mike Judge's Extract was simply a movie that "explores what it's like to be the boss when everything seems to be shifting around you." Then it became about a guy who owns an industrial flower-extract plant and has to deal with workplace issues and a cheating wife. Now, it turns out that one of the "workplace issues" is an employee who loses a body part in a freak accident, and that the wife is cheating on the protagonist with a gigolo. Awesome.

Jason Bateman plays the factory owner -- that, we already knew. We also knew that the amazing Kristen Wiig is playing the wife, and Mila Kunis another employee. The new info is that Clifton Collins, Jr. has joined the cast as the maiming victim, and Ben Affleck as an ambulance-chasing lawyer who, I'd imagine, wants to milk Bateman's character for all he's worth. No word on who's playing the gigolo.

I got pelted with poop for praising Mike Judge's last movie, the largely direct-to-DVD Idiocracy, the first time I wrote about this project, but I stand by comments. It would have been easy for Judge to do Office Space 2, but it's been gratifying to watch him go in some even more offbeat directions instead.

Back in the old days, moviegoers used to get a cartoon before every movie. A lot of the classic Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry, Droopy, Popeye, Superman & Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons that many of us grew up watching on TV were once savored on the big screen. Eventually filmmakers began cranking out cartoons much more cheaply for television, and it was the end of an era -- almost. In recent years, Spike & Mike's touring cartoon festival has been a big success and other cartoon festivals have joined in. Earlier this year the five Oscar-nominated animated shorts opened in theaters, although together they ran nearly two hours. The new The Animation Show 4 collects some 18 shorts and series and runs less than 90 minutes. (See official site.)

Curator Mike Judge, the gentleman behind "Beavis & Butthead" and "King of the Hill," is definitely a man who likes his cartoons to get to the point, and so the three longest shorts here run about 7 minutes apiece. Steve Dildarian's Angry Unpaid Hooker is one of them. When his girlfriend arrives home early, Tim has trouble explaining the angry unpaid hooker sitting on his couch. The befuddled Tim will go on to star in his own series, "The Life and Times of Tim." Another epic is This Way Up, from the team of Smith & Foulkes. In it, a pair of long-faced morticians (father and son?) carries a sarcophagus to its final resting place, attempting to keep the box upright despite cruel fate's best attempts to knock it down. Stefan Mueller's Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen and Mr. Horlocker, from Germany, is the other "long" one. A cop investigates some noisy neighbors in an apartment building, but can't quite get the entire story until the same scenes are played out again, behind closed doors. This features the greatest cinematic drug trip since James Toback's Harvard Man.

After years of Beavis and Butt-Head, there was Office Space. But after red Swingline staplers and the need for flair, Mike Judge took a number of years off from directing -- until the largely ignored Idiocracy. This time around, however, we don't have to wait as long (as Eugene pointed out in April). Extract is on the way, and now EW's Hollywood Insider has shared more of the plot, and who's in talks to co-star alongside Jason Bateman.

The film will focus on a guy who owns a flower-extract plant -- the industrial sort, not the leafy sort. In typical, professional Judge fashion, the guy is having a bunch of bad luck, which includes "workplace issues and a cheating wife." EW sources say that Kristen Wiig is looking into playing the wife, while Mila Kunis might grab a role as a plant employee. That sounds like a set up for Forgetting Sarah Marshall, revisited -- the man can choose between his crappy partner and the wonderful nice girl right in front of him.

Between the possible murk of an actors' strike and Wiig's SNL schedule, the film is slated to start production in August.

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.

I've heard more rumors about Idiocracy than any other film this year. The Mike Judge-directed movie had a surprisingly limited release in September -- perhaps because it was considered unmarketable by Fox, or perhaps because Judge and Twentieth Century Fox had a dispute and the release was merely for contractual obligations. No one knows, and Judge isn't talking. And I heard a rumor that the movie might not even get a DVD release, because Fox wanted to wash its hands of the film. I saw the movie twice when it played in Austin, and I thought that it would be stupid not to release the movie on DVD. It's far from perfect, but it's full of enjoyable gags that could lead to a cult following similar to that for Judge's previous film, Office Space.

Perhaps Fox agrees with me, because this morning I found out that Idiocracy is scheduled for a January 9 DVD release. I noticed that the DVD cover art (partially shown above) is very different from the original movie poster from Idiocracy, and I actually find it an improvement. It's probably intended to appeal to the Office Space crowd, especially since the cover also says "From the creator of Office Space, Mike Judge." The DVD looks pretty bare-bones in terms of features: the only listed special feature so far is a set of five deleted scenes. My guess would be that the deleted scenes are the ones that Judge was unable to finish with the necessary special effects because of budget constraints: the scene at the Liberry of Congress, and maybe even the National Fart Museum. Did you really expect a commentary track from Mike Judge, or a featurette on why the movie didn't get a wide release? I feel lucky that we're getting a DVD at all, and thankful that the rest of the country will get a chance to see the movie. Will it tank on DVD, or will Judge fans walk around saying, "Welcome to Costco, I love you!" and making naughty jokes about Starbucks lattes? I'm hoping for the latter.

Sometimes Thursday rolls around and you really have no idea what it will bring you. Could you have ever imagined watching Office Space cut to look like a slasher flick? God bless the wonders of modern-day technology and the internet. What the Maynard? has recut scenes from Office Space into a trailer that makes it look horrifically good as a fear-inducing movie starring Milton as the killer. Come on, he's creepy, he mumbles, is misunderstood and he carries a red Swingline stapler. What's not to fear? He's a horror film baddie just waiting to be unleashed on the unsuspecting masses.

In fact, I've watched this trailer several times now (that really says a lot about me and how I spend my time, but I don't want to take away from the quality of the people who worked on this edit, so do your best to now ignore this entire parenthetical) and it gets better each time. It makes me want to see this version of the movie. Although they could have just as easily made Michael Bolton the bad guy if they used the footage from when he goes to town on the printer. That's scary enough in the normal version of the movie, although not quite as scary as fat David Herman in Idiocracy. Yikes.

Check out the trailer after the jump, just be sure and keep your stapler nearby.

I'd like to introduce a new Cinematical column, IndieSeen, which will focus weekly on various aspects of independent filmmaking, distribution, and exhibition. Maybe I'll interview a woman who shot a feature in her basement for under $200, maybe I'll ruminate on well-known actors who built careers on non-studio films, or maybe I'll look at the latest alternate method of film distribution. But for my first column, I'm going to talk about a studio-produced film ... one that received a theatrical release that most indie filmmakers wouldn't envy. Perhaps it's a lesson about the virtues of making a film independently.

The Mike Judge film Idiocracy has had one of the weirdest theatrical releases ever. Twentieth Century Fox considered postponing the release indefinitely, then decided at the last minute to give the film an extremely limited run in only six U.S. cities, which did not include New York. The studio did not publicize the movie one bit: no trailers, no ads, and only two stills from 2004 that everyone on the internet used in their online reviews. Overall, the film did only moderate business after its Sept. 1 release, and quickly faded from the public eye.

However, Idiocracy is still playing in two theaters, at least for the next week: Regency Academy 6 in Pasadena, CA, and Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar in Austin, TX. My husband and I decided to see the movie again last Sunday night, figuring it might be our last chance, and assuming we'd be two of maybe a half-dozen people in the theater. We were amazed to have to stand in line to get in, and we estimated 50 people in the audience, which is a good count for any theater on a Sunday night at 9:45 pm. I noticed that a number of other people had seen the film before, because they were anticipating the gags -- is Idiocracy attracting a small cult of fans?

The New York Times tells us what happens when bad word of mouth hits before the movie does. It kills it pretty much dead. Sony Pictures ran into this with their latest dead-in-the-water film, All The King's Men. The film opened this past weekend at seventh place with only $3.8 million in ticket sales, and a cast that most studios would kill for: Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Anthony Hopkins, Patricia Clarkson, Mark Ruffalo, and James Gandolfini. That has to smart; you'd expect to get at least four or five good movies out of those cast members, and instead Sony is left holding the bag on a real clunker.

The problem, as the article states, is that once a studio announces that a film is being pushed back, it is basically announcing that "this sucker ain't done yet, we're putting it back in the oven and hoping for the best!" That kills any sort of forward momentum the film has, makes people scratch their heads and wonder what the heck the problem is, and almost always gives rise to a rumor somewhere that something has gone terribly wrong. It's bad enough when a studio doesn't hold any press screenings, like the recent Snakes on a Plane, but even worse when they reschedule anything for a year later. Just look at what happened to Mike Judge's Idiocracy. Shelving it made the movie even dumber.

Central Texas bloggers are, for once, all talking about the same thing: Idiocracy. Austin, Dallas and Houston were three of the seven cities in which the Mike Judge movie opened last Friday, and local film bloggers grabbed the rare opportunity to write about a movie before the New Yorkers could. In addition to the film itself, alot of bloggers are also writing about how disgusted they are with Twentieth Century Fox's limited release and non-publicity accompanying the release. Here are a few reactions from Austin and Dallas film bloggers:

• Austin Movie Blog: Sarah Lindner calls Idiocracy "not half-bad." She notes, "The main thing that bothered me, though, is that you can tell the movie is unloved. While I liked Idiocracy's inventive vision of the future, the film looks cheap and rushed, especially some special effects."
• Dumb Distraction: Micah quotes his wife: "Funnier than Beerfest." He speculates on the reasons for the limited release: "When did a little thing like bad taste prevent a studio from releasing a film?" He also experiences some very Idiocracy-like moments on the drive home.
• Matt Dentler's Blog: Matt thinks Idiocracy is definitely flawed, and that the jokes get old after a while. However, he observes that the opening sequence is "so clever it could exist as its own short film (or could be virally sent around the Web or YouTube as a guerilla marketing campaign)."

More news on a different filmmaker currently in Austin: Blake at Cinema Strikes Back alerts us to a local news clip about Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino's segment of Grind House. You can see Tarantino and Kurt Russell quite clearly over at the Texas Chili Parlor, but not that kickass car.

Happy Labor Day! All year long, you've been working hard, meeting deadlines, filing reports, sending emails, crunching numbers and counting up those vacation days, while strategically placing them at certain times throughout the year in order to maximize their potential. Heck, you deserve a day off -- 24 hours of rest, relaxation and a whole lot of nothing.

My favorite kinds of movies to watch on Labor Day are those that remind me why this day is important in the first place -- ya know, why it matters. And, what a better way to do that then to throw in a package of tasty microwave popcorn, slide into those comfy slippers and settle down with a few of your favorite work-related flicks. So, on a day that's dedicated to the American working men and women, how about we celebrate not working by enjoying some of the following films: