Save for the Britney Spears meltdowns and Tom Cruise couch-jumping fiascoes of the world, public opinion on any given celebrity is usually a pretty static thing. Everyone likes Will Smith. People have generally good feelings about Reese Witherspoon. Many can’t stand Katherine Heigl lately, but it’s not like she isn’t a teensy bit deserving of all that ill will. What we’re getting at here is that, for being a generally likable celebrity who’s never gotten himself into a weird public spat with Matt Lauer, Ben Affleck is an oddly polarizing figure. His career hasn’t been unlike that of a politician in that his approval ratings have run a wide gamut over the years. (Remember those rumors that he was running for senator?)
This month he’s back in theaters as a stoner sidekick type in Mike Judge’s Extract, and it suddenly finally feels OK to embrace B-Fleck again. Why now? We think we’ve managed to distill Ben’s likability down to five simple tenets. Read More »
A decade after Office Space, writer/director Mike Judge salutes Labor Day with a new workplace comedy about blue-collar incompetence.
Jason Bateman stars as the owner of a flavor-extract factory employing a staff of dunces. While he deals with his passionless marriage and his lust for a sly new hire, a worker’s oddball accident threatens to ruin the company’s future. The farcical plot is anchored by Judge’s keen sense of workaday humor and a gallery of memorable losers, topped by Ben Affleck’s loony, long-haired slacker. Read More »
Clifton Collins Jr. as Step in Extract Photo Credit: Sam Urdank/Miramax Film Corp
Clifton Collins Jr. has played a death row prisoner in Capote, a hit man in Traffic, and most recently, a Romulan officer battling the USS Enterprise crew in Star Trek. While his on-screen transformations appear effortless, one look at his bookshelves — laden with tales of serial killers, drug cartels, and pimps — reveals that Clifton does his homework and never phones anything in. We’re not sure what this says about his latest role as the victim of freak factory accident in fall’s long-awaited Mike Judge film, Extract.
After the jump, read on to find out about how Clifton went “balls to the wall” and performed a risky stunt while filming, and who was more computer literate back in the day, him or his buddy Judd Nelson. Read More »
Can Office Space writer/director Mike Judge make lightning in a bottle twice (four times if you count Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, which we don’t)? As we sit here suffering from a case of the Mondays, we certainly hope so — we need a new workplace movie to quote.
