Movie Description
This geeky 1999 office comedy starring Ron Livingston as a corporate Everyman instantly gained cult status for its unabashed caricatures of office personalities, and its theme of corporate sabotage. Peter Gibbons (Livingston) is a typical middle manager living a mundane life amid a gray maze of cubicles. Everything in his life reeks of mediocrity, from the mid-size car he drives to the chain restaurant, Chotchky's (read: TGI Friday's), where he eats lunch every day. Even his apartment, a cookie-cutter duplex with walls so thin that he can chat with his next-door neighborhood through the plaster, is totally lacking in personality. The company where he works is peppered with ambitionless drones who blindly comply with the condescending requests made of them by their Porsche-driving CEO (Gary Cole). Then one day, Gibbons snaps. As a team of experts is brought in to enact large-scale layoffs, Gibbons simply stops trying and adopts an attitude of total disinterest. That is, he's only interested in dating the blond waitress (Jennifer Anniston) at the local restaurant, and putting in place a devilish scheme for some corporate payback.
OFFICE SPACE's writer-director Mike Judge (BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD), scares up some A-list laughs with this film, while also making an excellent parody of corporate culture. Released just as the dot-com boom began to go bust, with massive trends in corporate downsizing on the horizon, it could not have been better timed. Thus, while viewers will delight in the absurdity of the ultimate office loser Milton (Stephen Root), they will also identify with some frighteningly realistic aspects of the film.
| Credits | | Producer: | Daniel Rappaport | | Cast: | John C. McGinley, Richard Riehle, Ron Livingston, Stephen Root |
| Details | | Edition: | 2-Disc Set; Canadian; Digital Copy; Sensormatic; Widescreen |
Editorial Reviews
"...Viciously wry humor....Hilarious....OFFICE SPACE is ruthlessly funny stuff..."
Box Office - p.235 - Wade Major
"...[Judge] possesses an eye for the uncensored truths of our daily lives....If you've ever had a job, you'll be amused by this paean to peons..."
USA Today - p.13E - Susan Wloszczyna
"...Sharp and funny....Bristling with shrewd observation, inspired humor and all-around smarts, OFFICE SPACE is a winner..."
Los Angeles Times - p.F6 - Kevin Thomas
"...OFFICE SPACE is a comic cry of rage against the nightmare of modern office life....The movie's dialogue is smart..."
Chicago Sun-Times - p.30 - Roger Ebert
"...Almost painfully comic..."
Sight and Sound - p.64 - Danny Leigh
"[O]ften screamingly funny."
Uncut - Michael Bonner (01/01/2004)
"[A] pic in which even tiny performances are gems..." -- Grade: B+
Entertainment Weekly - Chris Willman (11/04/2005)
3 stars out of 4 -- "[I]f you don't know how many pieces of flair you should be wearing or why the Swingline stapler is so much better than the Boston, then by all means skip happy hour tonight and get to watching."
Premiere - Claire Evans (12/01/2005)
Ranked #17 in Rolling Stone's "Top 25 DVDs Of 2005' -- "[T]he new disc has eight deleted scenes to up the fun quotient, which was already high."
Rolling Stone - Peter Travers (12/01/2005)
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