Posts
Sincerest apologies for the lack of a revue review this previous week, your humble authour came down with a rather unfortunate case of dropsy-pox. Having recovered a bit and regained a hearty appetite, I am now ready to fulfil my duties in reviewing. In all likelihood, there weren't any quality films last week's-end anyway.
This week's picture, called "Extract", concerns an industrialist fellow named Joel (as play'd by Mr. Jason Bate-Man) who owns a whiz-bang foodstuffs-essence extractor machine plant. Rather than entering it in the world's faire, he fancies selling off his wondrous' facilities to John D. Rockefeller and achieving status as a true robber-baron. However, being a hum'rous picture, situations thusly go awry; Joel's spouse (Kristen Wiig) neglects to sate his marital needs, a mysterious young crumpet (Mila Kunis) weaves her mischief at the plant, and lastly, a lamentable happenstance causes a laborer to lose a certain pair of consequential anotomical organs. The bindles to his stick, as it were.
With so many disastrous events befalling him, our hero turns to a local bar-tender who happens to be his trusted friend and confidant (Benjamin Affleck) for assistance. Mr. Affleck in his ragged appearance and utter lack of grooming seems to be a shiftless hobo, but no mention is ever made of his position as such. Mayhaps the director chose to portrey him with an honorable position peddling booze to show that penniless winos can be reformed, but in my humble opinion, they cannot.
Follies ensue, naturally, and in the end Joel finally learns the true meaning of wooden nickels and exploiting endenture servantude. Or something along those lines.
A problem with this picture is that with the exception of Joel, none of the other players were very agreeable to my admittedly sensitive palate. We are sup'posed to enjoy the antics of a shiftless tramp, a eunuch slubberdoffer and a swindling trollop? I submit that we do not. What happened to simpler pictures concerning stand-up gentlemen and great train robbers? When the Lumiere brothers made a similar picture concerning a machine-plant (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory), it wasn't boggled down with plots about bollocks-disasters.
If anything, I left this picture with a worse imbalance of the humours than when I entered it. If there were more characters on screen like Joel, I might have even been persuaded to stay for the end.
Judgment Being:
2 of 5 Top Hats
