2009 wasn’t a great year for movies, but it was pretty good for DVDs. My favorite films from last year not called House Of The Devil or Inglourious Basterds—including Adventureland, Funny People, Humpday, The Girlfriend Experience, Moon, In The Loop, Racing Dreams, and The Informant!—were either talky thinking-man’s comedies that daintily picked apart the intricacies of human relationships, or muted dramas that daintily picked apart the intricacies of human relationships. Both kinds of movies tend to work better at home, where you don’t need the death-grip of a plot-driven narrative to keep you from noticing how uncomfortable your carpet-covered plastic seat is. There’s nothing like sitting in the same ol’ dip in the couch to make you appreciate a movie where likeable characters just sit around and say clever, insightful things about real people for 90 minutes.I’d add Mike Judge’s Extract to the list of my favorite DVDs of 2009 after finally catching it over the weekend. Judge, after all, is the leading DVD auteur of our time, routinely turning out films that fail miserably in theaters only to find their proper homes at home. (By “routinely” I mean every five years or so.) Like Office Space and Idiocracy, Extract is a more collection of well-observed minutia than a cohesive film—but what minutia!
One of my favorite things about Extract is the soundtrack, which finds Judge trading the Geto Boys tracks from Office Space for ass-kicking (yet also tender) ’70s country, one of my favorite genres. Over the opening credits is Johnny Paycheck’s 1971 hit “(Don’t Take Her) She’s All I Got,” a personal favorite since it was included on the first really mushy mix CD I made for my wife. Over the closing credits is Waylon Jennings’ “Rainy Day Woman,” a chugging monument to the brilliance of steel-guitarist extraordinaire Ralph Mooney.
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