Product: Office Space (1999)
Rating: 5.0
Michael Bolton Fans unite!
This movie is like a time capsule from before the fall in the garden of Eden--I mean, a movie about software engineers, set in 1999--and the words "IPO", "World Wide Web", "Start-up", or "DOT-COM" are never spoken? **sigh** simpler, happier days, because neither are the words "stock-market crash", "bubble", "9-11", or "terrorism" uttered. Nothing here disturbs the serienity of our hero, and his quest to do absolutely nothing, in the hopes that it wiil be everything he thought it would be.....Watching this movie, about engineers in their mid-20's, brings back so many memories of how it was for me being an engineer in my mid-20's, trying my best to adapt myself to corporate lifestyle, clumsily chasing women, and trying desperatly to enjoy the last shreds of my fast-fading youth.There are so many priceless scenes in this movie--Ron Livingston is on a date with Jenifer Anniston, when she askes him the dreaded question "what do you do for a living?" What software engineer can't help but cringe along with our hero? Just exactly how are software engineers supposed to answer that question? Heck, our bosses can't even comprehend what we're doing. Any attempt to explain will inevitably make us appear geeky and then boring, but we can't just lie, can we?On the topic of lying--my wife (who works in P.R.) claims that engineers are incapable of lying--and that is what is holding them back :-) This movie of course has to document the inevitable doom which falls upon our hero when he boldly tries to lie like no engineer has lied before...But the best metaphor of the movie, IMHO, is poor Milton, who, at a corporate birthday party for the boss, has to keep passing along slices of birthday cake to everybody else--the cake, symbolising the rewards gotten from submitting yourself to corporate life--the cake passing right under his nose. He can see it--he can almost taste it--and he has earned it, by submitted to the endless humilliations, both large and small, of corporate life. But the cake keeps going, going, right under his nose, passing him by, untill its all gone. Just like my lousy stock options.Buck up, Milton's of the world! Corporate birthday cake tastes as lousy as sour grapes, anyways :-)