Office Space

[Guest ScarletKnight41]

A friend loaned us the DVD this weekend, extolling it as being hysterically funny.

It's stupid. Absolutely stupid. And not at all funny.

[Frayed Knot]

I didn't think much of it either.
Maybe partly because I just stumbled on it on cable one night and it was censored in various parts (y'know, if you're not going to show the movie as is, then don't schedule it!) - but it was mostly stupid.
What it's become is a bit of a cult movie, especially among 20-something techies or others with similar jobs at suburban office parks. That's the source of much of its appeal.

[Willets Point]

Mmm yeah, I'm going to have to disagree with your review of this movie. I gave it a 7, mmm-kay?

[RealityChuck]

Mediocre at best. The only good scenes are those with Stephen Root; I understand they were part of a short animated film that was pretty good. It looks like Judge took that and padded it out into feature length by showing a dumb story (Hypnosis as a plot mechanism? How cliched can you get? I mean, that was old when the Three Stooges were doing it; Hitchcock refused to do a sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps because it has hypnosis in it) and dragging the few jokes out until they stopped being funny.

It was probably a 20-minute short's worth of jokes, not a feature.

[seawolf17]

I gave it an 8. It's one of my second-tier "Favorite Movies Of All Time." I laugh my ass off every single time.

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

Agree with Chuck that it was a lot of movie for limited stuff, but at its heart was amusing and unique. Judge's great skill IMO is creating funny characters -- I don't think there's a single one on the underrated show "King of the Hill" who isn't hilarious in their own right.

I like that there's a character cursed with the name "Michael Bolton." That's funny!

[Guest Rotblatt]

I loved it. My first post-college cult movie, which hit right around the time I had my first cubicle job.

An amazingly cathartic movie for me at the time, and one which I'm still quite fond of.

Plus, the scene where they trash the printer? Classic. I love it when he turns around to take another swing at it and they have to hold him back.

[Guest Rotblatt]

burn them all to the ground

[Centerfield]

I have almost no memory of this movie other than the annoying boss, but I remember really liking it at the time.

[Willets Point]

ScarletKnight41 wrote: A friend loaned us the DVD this weekend, extolling it as being hysterically funny. It's stupid. Absolutely stupid. And not at all funny.

Looks like somebody has a bad case of the Mondays.

[Guest ScarletKnight41]

And that was on Saturday!

[Centerfield]

I wonder if it's one of those movies that was funny at the time, to a select group of people, but one that is neither universal nor timeless.

[Edgy MD]

Judge said he hated making this movie, because studio suits kept telling him how much they hated the rushes.

The incredible plainness of setting a movie in office parks, strip malls, and a cheap slapdash apartment complex creates such a painfully non-descript look, and they probably reacted to that. They gave him a famous glamorous actress, and he gives them back a movie that looks like an Office Depot commercial.

As a depreesed white-collar shnook feeling my thinning hair scraping a glass ceiling, with no ambition to climb over it anyhow, answering to too many bosses I don't respect, I found the commentary on contemporary office culture really incisive.

I gave it nine staplers. Subtle small shots like them walking across the grassy drainage depression to go from Initech to Chotchkie's were worth a stapler or two in itself. I gave it nine staplers and then I burned the theater down.

[Vic Sage]

i just saw it on late night cable (uncut, no commercials). Maybe i was punchy, but i laughed alot. The cast is great, the characters unique, the situation ripe with real anger. When they destroy that machine, there is a palpable rage being vented.

The movie feels like a postively Marxist response to the depersonalization of work in the industrial (and post-industrial) age. When Ron Livingston starts to literally dismantle his cubicle, tells the "efficiency experts" the truth, asks the waitress out, comes up with a scheme, and ultimately chooses to accept non-satisfying work that at least doesn't choke his soul (working with his friend, outdoors, with his hands), and to instead seek his satisfaction in his personal life, the story has lead us to an absolutely empowering and redemptive conclusion. It rejects all the basic assumptions of the modern world about our relationship to our work.

The hypnosis bit is just the wacky mechanism by which he reaches his epiphany. It didn't bother me as a device because of how absurd it was. The notion that we can only really see the circumscribed world we live in and react to it appropriately, without fear or assumptions or continued inertia, is to be literally out of our heads is funny, sad and almost profound.

I totally get why this has become a must-watch cult-comedy and i expect it will continue to touch a nerve in subsequent generations of 20-somethings blindsided by the awfulness of working in corporate america.

[Edgy MD]

Even with the three-stapler gap between the likes and the like-nots, we're sitting at 7.87 staplers on a ten-stapler scale.

[soupcan]

Vic and I were watching this last night at the same time.

Good cast, good characters, some funny parts. I was expecting more based on what I'd heard about it.

Liked Gary Cole, Diederich Bader (always like him), and thought that '15 pieces of flair' were more than enough.

[Edgy MD]

Yet, your vote brings us down to 7.69 staplers.

I'm going to burn your house down.

[nymr83]

and i'm going to recover the money, my crime hidden by the fire

[soupcan]

Edgy DC wrote: Yet, your vote brings us down to 7.69 staplers.

Because I expected more. Gave it 5 Swinglines.

[Guest attgig]

one of my favorite movies. it's hysterically funny if you've worked in an office with cubes and annoying bosses...

[soupcan]

This is quite funny....