The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015. Remaining movies: 177 Days to go: 179
Movie #200: Office Space
Back when Mike Judge was mostly known for animation like Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, and back before Ron Livingston was Berger, breaking up with Carrie Bradshaw via post-it note on Sex and the City, there was Office Space. Office Space is the ultimate white-collar workplace fantasy film. But it’s not a fantasy about having a perfect job, it’s a fantasy about being able to shove it, to tell off your boss, to vent your frustrations, to pull one over on the whole damn company.
You see, there are these tiny little fractions of a penny …. Wait. Let me back up.
Livingston plays Peter Gibbons, a dissatisfied drone at some faceless tech company that’s a carbon copy of every other tech company in the area. In actuality, it’s a carbon copy of every other office, even The Office, both the US and the UK versions. It’s an Every Office, with its bland cubicle walls and its impersonal decor, with its bureaucracies and its redundancies and its idiosyncratic routines. There are multiple annoying bosses, a bunch of cloying goody-goodys, and way too many inappropriate jerkwads. None of the printers work. All the door handles are brimming with static electricity. The goddamn fluorescent lights buzz. Honestly, the place deserves to be burned to the ground.
Of course, Peter can’t burn the place down. He’s the good guy, ostensibly. That’s why it’s so awesome this office has a nut job, and Milton (Stephen Root) is his name-o. Milton was told he could listen to his radio at a reasonable level. Milton still hasn’t received his paycheck. Milton always has to pass the cake. Milton doesn’t want to be moved into the basement. And Milton sure as hell doesn’t appreciate you taking his stapler. That’s a red Swingline, for God’s sake.
Peter is in this dead-end job, trudging through his dead-end relationship with his dead-end girlfriend, when things start to happen. He and his girlfriend break up, so he works up the nerve to ask out the waitress Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) from the local TGIFridays-ish establishment. Joanna makes him feel alive again. And he realizes the thing that was making him so unhappy for so long was his job. He doesn’t quit, though. No, instead of quitting, he sabotages it. He shows up late, he doesn’t adhere to dress code, he doesn’t come in on weekends, he leaves early, he deconstructs his cubicle so he can see out the window for once, and when two “efficiency consultants” come in to see who they can fire to save the company costs, Peter tanks the interview spectacularly.
This is a workplace fantasy, however, not a film about the grim realities of corporate competition and pressure to make the grade, so Peter’s confession of his “screw it” attitude gets him a promotion instead of a severance package. He’s a straight-shooter. A go-getter. A real asset. But his two work buddies Michael “Not That One” Bolton (David Herman) and Samir Nagheenanajar (Ajay Naidu) (it really isn’t all that hard to pronounce!) are set to be laid off and replaced with cheaper resources straight out of college. They’ll be completely screwed. So Peter finds a way for them to screw the company back, and that’s by rounding off these tiny little fractions of pennies from various online transactions and siphoning them into a separate account. Nobody will ever notice and in two years’ time, they’ll have hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There’s just one small glitch: Instead of taking years, the plan only took a weekend and that money was sure to be missed.
Who hasn’t wanted to help yourself to a little extra, though? You’ve earned it.
Who hasn’t wanted to tell their own personal Lumbergh (Gary Cole) to go jump in a lake? The smug bastard.
Who hasn’t wanted to kick the ever-loving shit out of a printer? “PC Load Letter” doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Who hasn’t wanted to burn the place down once or twice?
“Damn, it feels good to be a gangster.”
Viable Option 