Judge is also, of course, the creator of TV's "Beavis & Butt-Head" and "King of the Hill," as well as the director of the disappointingly flat 1996 "Beavis & Butt-Head Do America" and the beloved cult fave "Office Space" (1999), so his crackpot credentials are pretty well established. Even so, considering that so much movie entertainment these days comes to us pre-chewed, the appearance of "Extract" in these last days of summer feels like a gift. Jason Bateman is Joel Reynold, the owner of a business he built from the ground up, a food-flavoring enterprise called Reynold's Extract. Joel has a nice office at work and a beautiful home complete with a built-in swimming pool. He also has a very bored wife, Suzie (Kristen Wiig), who has lost interest in having sex with him. (Joel has cottoned to the fact that if he gets home from his workday even one minute later than 8 p.m., she's already changed into her comfy sweat pants for the night. And if the sweat pants are on, all bets are off.)

Joel is a capitalist, though not the worst kind: He believes in the product he created, and he tries to run a reasonably fair workplace. But, as he laments to his soulful, laid-back bartender friend Dean (a bearded and very funny Ben Affleck), he isn't very happy. Unfortunately, he has nothing but misadventures ahead of him: They involve an employee, Step (played by the always wonderful Clifton Collins Jr.), who suffers a highly unfortunate workplace accident, a dishy grifter named Cindy (Mila Kunis) who roars into town intent on making trouble, and a not-very-bright but heartbreakingly sweet gigolo named Brad (Dustin Milligan), who's built like Adonis but who processes verbal information with the speed of a garden slug.

There's also an excruciatingly annoying neighbor, Nathan (David Koechner), but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Summarizing the outlandish goings-on of "Extract" is beside the point: What's really remarkable is how much mastery Judge has over its tone. Early on, I feared that "Extract" might be coated with a facile, misanthropic sheen: At one point Joel's second-in-command, Brian (J.K. Simmons), points to a dunderheaded heavy-metal-head worker on the factory floor and snickers at his inability to operate a forklift: "That's his whole career, driving that forklift. You'd think he'd want to learn how." But it quickly becomes clear that Brian is that easily identifiable workplace type -- the guy who thinks he knows everything -- and that Judge feels the same degree of affectionate, jaundiced frustration toward him as he does toward the poor loser who can't keep control of the forklift.

"Extract" is all about that frustration. This isn't a misanthropic picture; its true subject is the way love for our fellow human beings is so often thwarted by their actual behavior -- and still, stupidly perhaps, we just won't give up on them. "Extract" demands that we navigate a sea of shifting sympathies. Sometimes Joel is the buffoon, the fat-cat company owner who doesn't know how good he has it, compared with his employees. But when Brian refers to several employees, in quick succession, as "Dinkus," Joel points out, diplomatically, that he never has any idea whom Brian is talking about -- perhaps he might take the time to learn the employees' names? And one of the floor workers, a gossipy, pinched-looking woman named Mary (Beth Grant), continually complains that no one else in the plant ever does any work; she makes these pronouncements while standing around with her hands on her hips, as her own responsibilities drift by on the conveyor belt before her. When her purse is stolen -- and this is after our grifter friend Cindy appears on the scene -- she points her bony finger at one of the dutiful, silent Mexican workers Joel employs. Again, Mary is a recognizable type -- but Judge uses her as a way of pinpointing what's so often wrong about the way we look at the world, the way the easiest conclusions are often the wrong ones.

Judge gives his actors a rich playground here: Kunis is a sexy, hardhearted little charmer; Wiig, as always, is terrific, toning down her deadpan wackiness just a bit in a way that serves her role. And Bateman, whose performances in recent pictures like "Hancock" and "State of Play" have been consistently pleasurable to watch, is wonderful here: His face is always ready to register pleasure, befuddlement or sometimes both at once; he's the ultimate well-meaning Everyman, stumbling every other step on his way to what he perceives as human perfection, or at least human OK-ness.

"Extract" is a terrible title for a movie, but it makes more sense if you think of it as both a noun and a verb: In the latter sense, it might refer to the necessity of removing yourself from an outmoded way of thinking about life, or of drawing out the poison that can build up inside of us when we're not paying attention. I want to make sure I don't paint "Extract" as some sort of beatific, feel-good exercise. There's no redemption in "Extract." Bad characters don't miraculously turn good; truth-telling isn't rewarded with warm, fuzzy feelings or even a sense of relief. But somehow I left "Extract" feeling better about the world -- a feeling that managed to outlast even my subway ride home.

That's saying something, considering that when I reached the platform, I was greeted by an almost perpetual high-pitched screech, emitting from a child of around 2 strapped in a stroller. Everyone turned to look, partly out of curiosity (this was a very big sound for such a little guy) and partly to make sure everything was OK, which it seemed to be. The mother, who also had two little girls in tow, was patiently trying to hold the situation together as best she could. The sympathetic West Indian woman standing next to me surveyed the situation and suggested that perhaps this was the child's only way of communicating -- he didn't seem to be able to speak.

The train arrived, and the mother and her troupe entered the car, where the noise was only intensified -- no one could ignore it. Two beefy white guys in their mid-20s sitting across from me, who might have been considered good-looking if they didn't have such mean little eyes and tight little smiles, started in with their wisecracks: "Shut that kid up!" said one. His buddy smirked and rejoindered, loud enough for everyone around him to hear, "I'll shut it up -- I'll smother it."

Considering I'd just come out of a strange and sweet picture that takes such a forgiving view of mankind's considerable flaws -- and one that had made me laugh, as opposed to being constructed like some boring civics lesson -- I felt as if I'd just been returned to Earth via crash landing. It never ceases to amaze me how eager some people are to present their ugliest side to the world. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the scene around me -- including the screaming child, the frustrated, embarrassed mother, the kindly bystander and the thuggish boneheads -- could have been drawn from a Mike Judge movie, and that if nothing else, the ideas Judge flirts with in "Extract" might provide a kind of permeable armor for navigating the world. People can be horrible; none of us should be surprised by that. The flip side of that certainty is that, thankfully, people can and do surprise us -- it's their job, after all.

Those days are gone. Today, being a true, card-carrying liberal is a serious pain in the ass. Or, as Helen Goode of ABC's new, animated half-hour comedy "The Goode Family" (premieres 9 p.m. Wednesday, May 27) proclaims, "Being good is sooo hard!" Helen repeatedly finds herself in the tough spots that most of us do, trying to balance our higher consciousness against the fact that sometimes we need toxic insecticides to kill the mass insurgence of bugs attracted to our compost piles. This locally grown, organic, low-hanging fruit has been ripe for the picking for some time now, and who better to take on the task than Mike Judge, the man who brought us middle-American fables "King of the Hill" and "Office Space"?

The comedy here isn't character-driven so much as theme-driven ­-- relentlessly so. The show's pilot episode begins with a trip to the local "One Earth" grocery store, where Helen and other shoppers are urged to "Check out the big board to see how you can limit the impact of your existence!" The board includes moving tickers that add up "Acres of Rain Forest Lost Per Minute" and "Area of Ice Cap Melting Per Minute," along with lists that tell shoppers which kinds of seafood are eco-friendly. (In typical confusing fashion, "Farm Raised Catfish" flashes between the "Good" and "Bad" categories without settling under one or the other.)

There is a loose plot underneath all those p.c.-baiting jokes, formed around Helen's misguided desire to make her daughter, Bliss, talk to her openly about sex. Bliss responds by insisting on attending a creepy pro-abstinence father-daughter dance, where, in something closely resembling a wedding ceremony, fathers give their daughters "abstinence rings" symbolizing their virginity. Liberals may be unnervingly touchy-feely, Bliss learns, but conservatives can be downright twisted.

Helen and Gerald are besieged by their unwieldy ideals once again when their adopted son, Ubuntu, learns to drive. Sure, he is only taking the family hybrid, with its unholy eggbeater-meets-microwave purr, out for a spin, but he still can't resist his testosterone-driven urge to drag race.  Afterward, he apologizes to his dad for wasting so much gas. "That's OK," Gerald replies. "What's important is that you feel guilty about it."

Meanwhile, the Goodes' supposedly vegan dog, Che, is starving and out for blood. Local pets in the neighborhood have been disappearing, but when Che drools and chases a squirrel up a tree, Gerald tells the neighbors, "Look, Che is trying to warn his squirrel friend to be careful!" While repeated jokes about the stink of organic fertilizers and confusion over what to call African-Americans might feel a little obvious after a few episodes, the more subtle observations of wishy-washy, unsustainably idealistic attitudes will likely constitute the meat and potatoes --­ or tofu and kale --­ of "The Goode Family" affair. Take the Goodes' squeamish liberal parenting style, insisting that they're close with their kids while reality lags far behind their utopian visions. The couple is armed with typical rationalizations at every turn. When Bliss blows off her mother's attempts at talking, Gerald assures her, "Don't worry, if you weren't close, she wouldn't feel comfortable ignoring you like that."

Later, Gerald tries to lure Helen out of her bad mood by telling her, "'The View' is on. The pretty one is saying crazy stuff again!" Of course, it's not just liberals who share in Gerald's sport of right-wing rubbernecking, pointing to one of Judge's major strengths as a writer: sharpening our focus on the absurdities that surround us, whether it's paying $9 a pound for relaxed, spiritually balanced chickens or tolerating the enforced cheer of restaurant chains like "Office Space"'s fictional bar and grill, Tchotchke's. Just as "King of the Hill" started out as a show about middle-class Texans and slowly evolved into a twisted take on mainstream suburbia and family life at large, "The  Goode Family" should eventually transcend the boundaries of its original premise (if the writers are given free range, that is).

And thank goodness for that, because the only thing more restrictive than a  100% dolphin-safe, wheat-free, dairy-free, organic, non-allergenic, lactose-intolerant lifestyle is a half-hour comedy about it.

Maybe the most startling thing about Judge's first live-action movie (he of course directed the marvelously psychedelic animated feature "Beavis and Butt-head Do America") is how effortless it seems. His satiric vision is as sharp as ever: In the first scene we watch a white guy stuck in traffic, popping and flowing with the gangsta lyrics pumping from his stereo, then nervously rolling up his windows and locking his door as a black flower vendor approaches. So is his ear for the monotonous, petty absurdities of life under capitalism: Within five minutes of Peter's arrival at the sprawling suburban offices of Initech, the woman two cubicles away has chirped, "Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking" at least a dozen times.

But "Office Space" doesn't depend solely on its gags or its near-perfect parodic pitch, as hilarious as those are. Its plot may be a standard-issue office drone's revenge fantasy, but its characters and its nowheresville setting are uncannily realized. ("Office Space" is loosely based on Judge's "Milton" shorts for "Saturday Night Live.") It's not a cartoon in any sense, but an honest-to-God movie with some fine, understated acting and a human heart. Its finest moment, not surprisingly, is a particularly anarchic celebration of doing nothing. When Peter and two other rebellious Initech employees get drunk, haul their hated copy machine out into a field and smash the damn thing to bits, the result is pure, electric cinema, as headlong and wordlessly giddy as anything in Godard and a hell of a lot easier to understand.

We never learn exactly what Initech is or what clean-cut everyguy Peter (Ron Livingston) and his friends do there, except that it's somewhere in Texas and has something to do with bank software. Who cares, anyway? The point of "Office Space" is that none of us actually want to spend our time in anonymous, soul-crushing environments, constantly being told we put the wrong cover sheets on our reports or chided for having "a bad case of the Mondays." Many of us, however, don't have other realistic choices, and so the idea of doing almost anything else -- or nothing whatever -- looms like a vision of paradise. Peter's persecuted colleagues include Michael Bolton (David Herman), the rap fan from the first scene whose unfortunate name provides him with limitless opportunities for humiliation and bitterness; Samir (Ajay Naidu), whose surname no one at the company can pronounce; Tom (Richard Riehle), a 50ish functionary who lives in constant -- and justified -- terror of being downsized; and the fateful Milton (Stephen Root), an impossibly nerdy misfit who is storing up an endless list of grievances behind his Coke-bottle glasses and permanent shaving rash.

When he can escape from his unctuous boss, played with creepy accuracy by Gary Cole in gold-rimmed aviator glasses, a ski-resort tan and a contrasting-collar dress shirt, Peter goes home to a brand new apartment complex so shoddily built that he and his redneck neighbor Seymour (Diedrich Bader) can have conversations through the walls. He has a girlfriend he doesn't really like and spends his breaks brooding in a mall restaurant called Tchotchke's (where the specials include something called "extreme fajitas") fantasizing about a waitress named Joanna (Jennifer Aniston). Judge's script doesn't give Aniston a whole lot to do in this role, but at least she's nowhere near an airhead sex-symbol stereotype. She's entirely believable as an appealing if rather harried young woman trying to make the best of a crappy service-sector job where she's required to wear at least 15 jokey accessories, or "pieces of flair," on her uniform.

When a hypnotherapist's mishap gives Peter an unexpected jolt of confidence, the plot -- an admittedly threadbare merger of "Beavis and Butt-head" with "Dilbert" -- kicks into gear. Peter dumps his girlfriend, asks Joanna to have lunch with him at the restaurant next to hers ("Do you mean Chili's or Flinger's?" she asks) and begins scrupulously ignoring his job, marching blithely in whenever he feels like it to play Tetris or clean the fish he caught earlier that day. This is great as far as it goes, but a pair of evil consultants (one of them the always excellent character actor John C. McGinley) admire his independent spirit so much they decide to promote Peter and fire his pals Samir and Michael Bolton (after determining that he's not related to the real Michael Bolton). From there we lurch into a computer-virus conspiracy that teaches us the dictionary definition of money laundering, provokes Joanna into telling Peter, "You're just this penny-stealing, wannabe-criminal man" and introduces the specter of a lengthy sentence in "Federal Pound-Me-in-the-Ass Prison."

"Office Space" isn't quite the demented, overimaginative comedy that Wes Anderson's "Rushmore" is, but in some ways I liked it better. Anderson's bizarre '60s-cum-'90s amped-up Holden Caulfield universe is entirely his own invention, while Judge is a social satirist making a political and even moral point, and his world is an only slightly exaggerated version of our own. (If you're guessing that the long-abused Milton will get his reward before he goes to heaven, you're on the right page of Judge's script.) In one of these movies, a guy's dream that he can do everything is defeated; in the other, a guy's dream of doing nothing is fulfilled, and it turns out not to be enough. Both of these stories are about growing up, and the logical question for both of these talented young filmmakers is, what happens after that?