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Mike Judge’s triumphant return to the office

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:18:00 +0000

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

Wed, 27 May 2009 10:27:00 +0000

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?

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"?

Office Space

Fri, 19 Feb 1999 20:00:00 +0000

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."