Extract

Mike Judge's triumphant return to the office

Stephanie Zacharek — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 03:18:00 PDT

At an end-of-the-year panel a few years back, my friend and colleague David Edelstein uttered the immortal line, "Treasure the crackpots." He was talking about the idiosyncracies of film critics, but I've come to apply the line more often to filmmakers, particularly those who are still trying to work in that admittedly nebulous category we call the Hollywood mainstream, a world in which any sort of original vision is discouraged -- now so more than ever -- and the grosses of "Transformers 2" are the gold standard against which everything is measured.

Mike Judge's guilty cartoon liberals

Heather Havrilesky — Wed, 27 May 2009 03:27:00 PDT

Finding a car with low emissions that seats five. Affording hormone-free, free-range chicken. Speaking about everything in purely politically correct terms. Handling guilt that's proportionate to the size of your carbon footprint. This modern world is not an easy place for the environmentally conscious to navigate. Remember when it was good enough to plant a tree, give peace a chance, and subvert whatever dominant paradigm was within easy reach?

Office Space

Andrew O'Hehir — Fri, 19 Feb 1999 12:00:00 PST

Good writers of all kinds rely, I believe, on extremely basic observations about human nature. One of the things Mike Judge has noticed is that people -- especially if they happen to be American males -- have a deep-rooted desire to hang out and pretty much do nothing. What is Judge's "Beavis and Butt-head," after all, except a show about two guys doing nothing, aimed at an audience largely composed of guys doing nothing? His next animated show, the far more sweet-tempered "King of the Hill," appears to be about a family that often actually does things. But as much as fate and circumstances force propane salesman Hank Hill to participate in adult life, no viewer of the show would deny that Hank, in his heart, is like the embattled cubicle inmate Peter Gibbons of "Office Space" -- a man with a "dream of doing nothing."