Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/06/18

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, September 6, 2018

Office Space (Mike Judge, 1999)

Stephen Root in Office Space

Peter: Ron Livingston
Joanna: Jennifer Aniston
Michael Bolton: David Herman
Samir: Ajay Naidu
Lawrence: Diedrich Bader
Milton: Stephen Root
Bill Lumbergh: Gary Cole
Tom Smykowski: Richard Riehle
Anne: Alexandra Wentworth
Bob Slydell: John C. McGinley
Bob Porter: Paul Willson
Chotchkie's Waiter: Todd Duffey
Drew: Greg Pitts
Steve: Orlando Jones

Director: Mike Judge
Screenplay: Mike Judge
Cinematography: Tim Suhrstedt
Production design: Edward T. McAvoy
Film editing: David Rennie
Music: John Frizzell

The floppy disks and the Michael Bolton jokes make us realize that Mike Judge's Office Space was produced 20 years ago. But no one who has ever worked in a cubicle or waited tables at a fern bar will call its satire on marketing gimmicks like "flair" and management busywork like "mission statements" dated. Some things don't change in corporate America. Judge's first feature film reveals his inexperience as a director, but his screenplay still hits a nerve, and he has gone on to a more up-to-date and more sharply satirical view of the tech business in his TV series Silicon Valley. Office Space is not as loosey-goosey as either of Judge's animated series Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, partly because of tension between Judge and the executives at 20th Century Fox. It benefits mostly from skilled performers like Ron Livingston, Jennifer Aniston, Stephen Root, Gary Cole, and other members of its ensemble.