When Beavis and Butthead debuted on MTV’s Liquid Television in the very early 90s, it was not at all conceivable that its creator, animator and primary voice actor Mike Judge would, over the course of two decades, build a career that eventually conformed to the key points on the Troubled Maverick Timeline. First with those double entendre-happy half-brains to his long-running King of the Hill, Judge has done more to legitimize animation as a commercially viable vehicle for sly social critique than anyone in the post-Simpsons era save Matt Stone and Trey Parker. With Office Space, he cast Jennifer Aniston, then the biggest star on TV, in a sharp satire about 20 something stagnation far away from Central Perk, and audiences didn’t immediately get it. He followed that with Idiocracy, an apocalypse comedy that Fox dumped on the mere assumption that audiences wouldn’t immediately get it. Both films went on to find fervent cult audiences; Office Space looked a lot better on video and cable once its timeless comedy of little guy vengeance could be safely sifted away from the Aniston baggage; Idiocracy looked a lot better when it was actually available to be seen. After all this, it’s no wonder that Judge, who has written and directed each of his features, is treated like an auteur — quite the feat for a guy who makes visually indistinguished comedies mostly about working class guys and their frustrated ids. Who does he think he is — Kevin Smith?
Actually, Extract made me laugh more than any the last few Kevin Smith movies, but where Zach and Miri Make a Porno seemed to bring its maker’s career into sharper focus, Extract seems to derail Mike Judge’s previous progress as a filmmaker with Something to Say About The Way We Live In This United States. The story of Joel (Jason Bateman), a small business owner whose dreams of selling out to General Mills and finding a way to justify cheating on his wife are both thwarted when the insolence of one of his workers causes a chain reaction that results in another worker losing a testicle, Extract first takes too long to get going, and then seems to stumble into three or four conclusions. It’s riotously funny for about an hour in between (much of this thanks to the perfect cast, including Ben Affleck as Joel’s bartender buddy, Mila Kunis as the con bimbo who catches his eye, and Kristen Whig as his bored and boring wife), but those who have come to expect a Mike Judge movie to precisely skewer a contemporary social sphere may be disappointed. I didn’t previously give Office Space or Idiocracy much credit as anything other than very smart comedies, but Extract makes them both look like quasi-libertarian morality plays about the absolute necessity of personal responsibility. Those films were about men manning up to change the status quo; Extract is about a guy briefly taking his balls out of a drawer, juggling them for a bit and then putting them back after coming to the understanding that his status quo is actually great. Take away the ample discussion of testicles, and there’s something almost Capraesque going on here.
Late last year, we had a lot of questions about Brawndo, the fake sports drink from Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, made real by a company called Omni Consumer Products. Among those questions: Why would FOX throw their support behind the drinkable spinoff of a film they were barely willing to release? Is Omni Consumer Products, the company responsible for getting Brando on the shelves, a “real” company, or is it an elaborate Robocop joke? Finally, five months later, Rob Walker answers all those question (and more!) in the New York Times magazine:
[Brawndo] happened not because of a movie-studio marketing brainstorm. (Twentieth Century Fox released the film briefly and without much enthusiasm in 2006 before tossing it to the DVD market, where it has gained a cult following.) It happened because of an Idiocracy fan in Oakland named Pete Hottelet. A graphic designer with very particular pop-culture tastes, Hottelet has started a business devoted to bringing to life certain products from movies. His business is called Omni Consumer Products, a name borrowed from the fictional megacorporation in Robocop. In addition to Brawndo, Omni has acquired from Paramount the license to market Sex Panther, a made-up cologne from the Will Ferrell vehicle Anchorman (“150% More Awesome Than Any Other Cologne. Ever.”).
Read the full story here, or click through for the Times‘ Rob Walker’s attempt to make sense of it all, after the jump.
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On Friday, Danny Leigh at the Guardian linked to and excerpted from my post about Brawndo, the fictional scourge of mankind from Idiocracy, which Fox has allegedly inked a deal to produce as a real-life energy drink. Admittedly, the story does seem a little too future-world-y, irony-oblivious, Baudrillard-rolling-in-his-grave-y to take at face value, and the Guardian commenters expressed doubts.
“Er, hang on a second, is Brawndo really really real?” asked commenter JohnCooperClarke. “Have a look at the manufacturer listed at the bottom of the page - it’s Omni Consumer Products. From Robocop. A fictional big nasty corporation. Mind you, I had to Google to make sure that somebody hadn’t opened a real OCP…”
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Ben Affleck will probably star
Baby Mama
