Eric and others,
Here is another movie you may find interesting. Whether to
encourage or discourage your students to watch it is up to you.
Best,
Sabri
http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1999/02/021903.html
Peter: Ron Livingston
Joanna: Jennifer Aniston
Milton: Stephen Root
Bill Lumbergh: Gary Cole
Michael Bolton: David Herman
Samir: Ajay Naidu
Tom Smykowski: Richard Riehle
Lawrence: Diedrich Bader
Anne: Alexandra Wentworth
Written and directed by Mike Judge, based on his Milton
animated shorts. Running time: 90 minutes. Rated R (for language
and brief sexuality).
BY ROGER EBERT
Mike Judge's Office Space is a comic cry of rage against the
nightmare of modern office life. It has many of the same
complaints as Dilbert and the movie Clockwatchers and, for
that matter, the works of Kafka and the Book of Job. It is about
work that crushes the spirit. Office cubicles are cells,
supervisors are the wardens, and modern management theory is
skewed to employ as many managers and as few workers as possible.
As the movie opens, a cubicle slave named Peter (Ron Livingston)
is being reminded by his smarmy supervisor (Gary Cole) that all
reports now carry a cover sheet. Yes, I know, he says. I
forgot. It was a silly mistake. It won't happen again. Before
long another manager reminds him about the cover sheets. Yes, I
know, he says. Then another manager. And another. Logic suggests
that when more than one supervisor conveys the same trivial
information, their jobs overlap, and all supervisors after the
first one should be shredded.
Peter hates his job. So do all of his co-workers, although one of
them, Milton (Stephen Root), has found refuge through an
obsessive defense of his cubicle, his radio and his stapler.
Milton's cubicle is relocated so many times that eventually it
appears to have no entrance or exit; he's walled-in on every
side. You may recognize him as the hero of cartoons that played
on Saturday Night Live, where strangers were always arriving to
use his cubicle as storage space for cardboard boxes.
Mike Judge, who gained fame through MTV's Beavis and Butt-Head,
and made the droll animated film Beavis and Butt-Head Do
America (1996), has taken his SNL Milton cartoons as an
inspiration for this live-action comedy, which uses Orwellian
satirical techniques to fight the cubicle police: No individual
detail of office routine is too absurd to be believed, but
together they add up to stark, staring insanity.
Peter has two friends at work: Michael Bolton (David Herman) and
Samir (Ajay Naidu). No, not that Michael Bolton, Michael
patiently explains. They flee the office for coffee breaks
(demonstrating that Starbucks doesn't really sell coffee--it
sells escape from the office).
Peter is in love with the waitress at the chain restaurant across
the parking lot. Her name is Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) and she
has problems with management, too. She's required to wear a
minimum of 15 funny buttons on the suspenders of her uniform; the
buttons are called flair in company lingo, and her manager
suggests that wearing only the minimum flair suggests the wrong
spirit (another waiter has 45 flairs and looks like an exhibit
at a trivia convention).
The movie's dialogue is smart. It doesn't just chug along making
plot points. Consider, for example, Michael Bolton's plan for
revenge against the company. He has a software program that would
round off payments to the next-lowest penny and deposit the
proceeds in their checking account. Hey, you're thinking--that's
not original! A dumb movie would pretend it was.
Not Office Space, where Peter says he thinks he's heard of that
before, and Michael says, Yeah, they did it in `Superman III.'
Also, a bunch of hackers tried it in the '70s. One got arrested.
The movie's turning point comes when Peter seeks help from an
occupational hypnotherapist. He's put in a trance with
long-lasting results; he cuts work, goes fishing, guts fish at
his desk and tells efficiency experts he actually works only 15
minutes a week. The experts like his attitude and suggest he be
promoted. Meanwhile, the Milton problem is ticking like a time
bomb, especially after Milton's cubicle is relocated to a
basement storage area.
Office Space is like the evil twin of Clockwatchers. Both
movies are about the ways corporations standardize office
routines, so that workers are interchangeable and can be paid as
little as possible.
Clockwatchers was about the lowest rung on the employment
ladder--daily temps--but Office Space suggests that regular
employment is even worse, because it's a life sentence. Asked to
describe his state of mind to the therapist, Peter says, Since I
started working, every single day has been worse than the day
before, so that every day you see me is the worst day of my
life.
Judge, an animator until now, treats his characters a little like
cartoon creatures. That works. Nuances of behavior are not
necessary, because in the cubicle world every personality
