Normal life, its mediocre details hovering right at the border between reality and satire, is a scarce product at the movies. Mike Leigh’s version of England, in “Life is Sweet” and “High Hopes,” his characters eating dinner on plates on their laps or smoking on tiny balconies in ill-fitting sweaters, nails it.

Fellow top realist in film Terry Zwigoff dips his toe just over the edge into his comic book source material in 2001’s “Ghost World,” his extraordinary-life-craving lead character plodding along a main drag of fast food places and big box stores that could just as easily be Ft. Lauderdale as Tucson or Mason City, Iowa, as does mockumentarian Christopher Guest, especially in 2000’s “Best in Show.”

The reigning modern Americana masterpiece, though, is Mike Judge’s “Office Space,” whose vision for the quotidian is positively transcendent. “Extract,” which takes a management view of drudgery, is not as funny as “Office Space,” but it’s a decent follow up. That means a lot when you’re trying to make a boss, in “Extract“‘s case Joel, played by “Arrested Development“‘s Jason Bateman, sympathetic.

In “Office Space,” the conflict was between the middle class protagonist and his soulless job and his stress-free, idling-brained boss Bill Lumbergh (played, to deliciously, evil vanilla perfection by Gary Cole). In “Extract,” Judge, the creator of “Beavis and Butthead” and “King of the Hill,” whose work proved itself to be more and more subversive the dumber the general public thought it was, shows us a world where the boss of its blue-collar flavor-extract plant, despite his BMW 7-series, isn’t doing much better than the workers.

For one thing, his neighbor, the desperately boring and needy Nathan (“The Office“‘s David Koechner), is always leaping over hedges to try and get Joel and his wife to come to a $55 per plate Rotary charity dinner. Then, there’s the possibility that his thrash-core forklift driver will cause a hideous accident at work. Worse, once Joel’s wife (Kristin Wiig, of “Saturday Night Live,” who, like fellow “Extract” actress Mila Kunis, of “That 70’s Show,” and Jennifer Aniston in “Office Space” does far funnier work when she’s toning it down under Judge’s direction) puts on her sweatpants at 8 p.m. and settles in to watch “Dancing With the Stars,” Joel has no chance at sexual congress.

This is where friend Dean (Ben Affleck, as a wonderfully sleazy, shaggy, Ketamine-distributing bartender) comes in, offering to hire a gigolo pool boy to seduce Joel’s wife, leaving Joel free to seduce Kunis. Except she’s really a “criminal drifter” playing on her looks for everything from high-end guitars to million-dollar personal injury settlements won by “bus stop bench” lawyer Joe Adler, a Brian “The Strong Arm” Loncar-like personal injury lawyer, played by a steely Gene Simmons (yup, that one) in a wig that looks like Javier Bardem’s “No Country For Old Men” bowl-cut recreated as a $10 plastic wig from Hasting’s.

Apart from his 2006 film “Idiocracy” — a brilliantly executed and therefore incredibly depressing movie that imagines a world 500 years in the future populated by the real-life equivalent of Topix/online commentators, hearts hammering with equal parts conspiracy theory and mob-mind — Judge’s films leave one with sort of a benevolent acceptance of regular life. It’s not complacency, but rather a delusion-less contentedness.

In Joel’s eyes, his problems would be solved if he just sold his company — at least he would get home before the impenetrable sweatpants came on. But just as “Office Space“‘s Peter doesn’t end up doing nothing, neither does his middle-management counterpart in “Extract.” In real life, Joel would probably end up taking his problems to the sad, blue and green velour booths of his local sportsbar with Affleck, just as “Office Space“‘s Peter would probably have his rough days on the job site.

The real message that comes out of these seemingly cynical flicks is the desire to do some kind of meaningful work — whether grunting behind a shovel or managing a factory floor. And if any filmmaker these days can say he walks the walk on that note, it’s Judge.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore.