Extract

This movie opens with a con: An attractive young woman is shopping for a guitar for an absent relative. Mila Kunis (“Max Payne” and “Tom Cool”) plays the smartest character in the entire cast. She is a con woman, a crook, a seductress and the spark plug that starts the entire plot rolling.

Maybe I was just tired, but this clever little comedy slipped under my defense shields and won me over. Of course, I always like Jason Bateman (“Juno," “Hancock” and the upcoming feature film “Arrested Development") and J.K. Simmons (“Burn After Reading” and “Post Grad”), or maybe I was in the mood to see something about an earnest man running a small business and dealing with realistic trials and tribulations as he tries to keep his doors open after a minor industrial accident (well ...MAJOR to the employee who suffered a groin injury), which could wipe out their livelihood for dozens of people.

Bateman is a former bartender who devised a formula that is the backbone of his extract bottling plant. Ben Affleck (“Hollywoodland” and "State of Play") is a bearded stoner who still tends bar at their old watering hole. His character proves that free advice is worth quite a bit less than it costs!

Bateman’s plant is filled with familiar faces, one of whom caught the attention of my sharp-eyed companion (I missed it). She knew he looked familiar and when I checked him out, I was very impressed by his body of recent work: Clifton Collins Jr. plays one of the plant employees, mousy mustache, mullet and all (he is the victim of the aforementioned accident). We have recently seen him as a one-armed Hispanic in “Sunshine Cleaning,” a high-performance car driver in “Crank” 2009, and a Romulan in “Star Trek” 2009. And that’s just a teeny sample of his recent work!

If I have any complaint, it is to see Hollywood’s smug impression of small town people. As a small town émigré I take exception to this, but then again, I’ll admit that I’ve been in some small towns… In addition, I recoil from on-screen drug use, although the zany results of this particular event make the movie an excellent cautionary tale about the pitfalls of narcotics, legal or not. If I add that Dustin Milligan (LOTS of TV) plays a dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks gigolo, I might be giving away too much of the plot…so I won’t…smile…