Word: joel
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...lead character of Mike Judge's quietly hilarious Extract, clean-cut Joel Reynolds (Jason Bateman), is decency incarnate. He loves his wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig). He's good to the employees of the company he built from the ground up, a factory that produces flavoring extracts of all sorts, from cookies and cream to root beer. Unlike his gruff business partner Brian (J.K. Simmons), he knows all of them by name, from shrill Mary (Beth Grant) to Step (Clifton Collins Jr.), an earnest goofball who aspires to be floor manager. Because of Joel, Reynolds Extract is the coziest factory around...
...Joel's life is not without frustrations. There's the one-man gauntlet he has to run in order to enter his spacious suburban home in the evenings, a persistent, needy neighbor, Nathan (David Koechner), whose desire for dull chitchat is matched only by his obtuseness. And if Joel has any hope of enjoying marital relations with Suzie - his most fervent desire - he must escape Nathan's clutches and get into the house before she puts her sweatpants on, a nightly ritual that happens...
...Office Space is a cult favorite in the workplace-comedy genre, frames Suzie tying the drawstring of her sweatpants in dramatic close-up, with the kind of musical fanfare that might accompany a gun coming out of a holster in a western. It's a door slamming shut on Joel's manhood, and he's as helpless at opening it as he is at closing one on the tedious Nathan. He is hog-tied by his own amiability. (See the all TIME 100 movies...
...protagonist like Joel is a sitting duck about to have his world upended; think Jeff Daniels in Something Wild or another sexually frustrated Joel, the one played by Tom Cruise in Risky Business. From the first frames of the film, in which a kittenish con woman named Cindy (Mila Kunis) is introduced in the midst of a deft act of shoplifting, we know this Joel is headed for trouble - girl and, likely, financial. After Cindy reads about an industrial accident in which Step loses a component (and a half ) of his manhood and stands to gain an insurance and lawsuit...
...Whenever Joel is stymied by Suzie's sweatpants, he ends up at the sports bar at the nearby Marriott, the aptly named Sidelines, where his old pal Dean (Ben Affleck, shaggy as a bear) tends bar. Dean believes Xanax is the cure for everything, including the common cold. Their conversations head in absurd directions - Dean thinks Joel should hire a gigolo to seduce Suzie so he can sleep with the alluring Cindy guilt-free, a suggestion that ultimately does more damage than Cindy does - but at the same time have a real naturalism. Imagine Pulp Fiction's Jules and Vincent...