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230
Office Space
Mike Judge |
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Theatrical: 1999
Genre: Comedy
Rated: R
Duration: 90
Languages: English, French, Spanish
Subtitles: English, Spanish
Picture Format: Widescreen
IMDb: 0781021
Starring: Jennifer Aniston, Diedrich Bader, Joe Bays, Josh Bond, Gary Cole, Todd Duffey, Jennifer Jane Emerson, David Herman, Ron Livingston, John C. McGinley, Kinna McInroe, Michael McShane, Ajay Naidu, Greg Pitts (II), Richard Riehle, Stephen Root, Linda Wakeman, Alexandra Wentworth, Paul Willson
Summary: Ever spend eight hours in a "Productivity Bin"? Ever had worries about layoffs? Ever had the urge to demolish a temperamental printer or fax machine? Ever had to endure a smarmy, condescending boss? Then Office Space should hit pretty close to home for you. Peter (Ron Livingston) spends the day doing stupefyingly dull computer work in a cubicle. He goes home to an apartment sparsely furnished by IKEA and Target, then starts for a maddening commute to work again in the morning. His coworkers in the cube farm are an annoying lot, his boss is a snide, patronizing jerk, and his days are consumed with tedium. In desperation, he turns to career hypnotherapy, but when his hypno-induced relaxation takes hold, there's no shutting it off. Layoffs are in the air at his corporation, and with two coworkers (both of whom are slated for the chute) he devises a scheme to skim funds from company accounts. The scheme soon snowballs, however, throwing the three into a panic until the unexpected happens and saves the day. Director Mike Judge has come up with a spot-on look at work in corporate America circa 1999. With well-drawn characters and situations instantly familiar to the white-collar milieu, he captures the joylessness of many a cube denizen's work life to a T. Jennifer Aniston plays Peter's love interest, a waitress at Chotchkie's, a generic beer-and-burger joint à la Chili's, and Diedrich Bader (The Drew Carey Show) has a minor but hilarious turn as Peter's mustached, long-haired, drywall-installin' neighbor. --Jerry Renshaw
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231
An Officer and a Gentleman
Taylor Hackford |
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Studio: Paramount
Theatrical: 1982
Genre: Romance
Rated: R
Writer: Douglas Day Stewart
Duration: 124
Languages: English, French
Subtitles: English
Picture Format: Widescreen
IMDb: 0084434
Starring: Richard Gere, Debra Winger, David Keith, Robert Loggia, Lisa Blount
Summary: Richard Gere plays an enrollee at a Naval officers candidate school, and Debra Winger is the woman who wants him. That's pretty much it, story-wise, in this romantic drama, which is more effective in a moment-to-moment, scene-by-scene way, where the two stars and Oscar-winner Louis Gossett Jr.--as Gere's tough-as-nails drill instructor--are fun to watch. Sexy, syrupy, with occasional pitches of high drama (Gere having a near-breakdown during training is pretty strong), An Officer and a Gentleman proves to be a no-brainer date movie. --Tom Keogh
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232
On the Waterfront
Elia Kazan |
Studio: Sony Pictures
Theatrical: 1954
Genre: Crime & Criminals
Rated: NR
Writer: Malcolm Johnson
Duration: 107
Languages: English
Subtitles: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Georgian, Chinese, Thai
Picture Format: Pan & Scan
IMDb: 0047296
Starring: Martin Balsam, Don Blackman, Rudy Bond, Marlon Brando, Lee J. Cobb
Summary: Marlon Brando's famous "I coulda been a contenda" speech is such a warhorse by now that a lot of people probably feel they've seen this picture already, even if they haven't. And many of those who have seen it may have forgotten how flat-out thrilling it is. For all its great dramatic and cinematic qualities, and its fiery social criticism, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront is also one of the most gripping melodramas of political corruption and individual heroism ever made in the United States, a five-star gut-grabber. Shot on location around the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, in the mid-1950s, it tells the fact-based story of a longshoreman (Brando's Terry Malloy) who is blackballed and savagely beaten for informing against the mobsters who have taken over his union and sold it out to the bosses. (Karl Malden has a more conventional stalwart-hero role, as an idealistic priest who nurtures Terry's pangs of conscience.) Lee J. Cobb, who created the role of Willy Loman in Death of Salesman under Kazan's direction on Broadway, makes a formidable foe as a greedy union leader. --David Chute
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233
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Milos Forman |
Studio: Warner Home Video
Theatrical: 1975
Genre: Drama
Rated: R
Writer: Lawrence Hauben
Duration: 133
Languages: English, French
Subtitles: English, Spanish, French
Picture Format: Widescreen
IMDb: 0073486
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, William Redfield, Michael Berryman, Peter Brocco, Dean R. Brooks, Alonzo Brown, Scatman Crothers, Mwako Cumbuka, Danny DeVito, William Duell, Josip Elic, Lan Fendors, Nathan George, Ken Kenny (II), Mel Lambert, Sydney Lassick, Kay Lee, Christopher Lloyd, Dwight Marfield
Summary: One of the key movies of the 1970s, when exciting, groundbreaking, personal films were still being made in Hollywood, Milos Forman's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest emphasized the humanistic story at the heart of Ken Kesey's more hallucinogenic novel. Jack Nicholson was born to play the part of Randle Patrick McMurphy, the rebellious inmate of a psychiatric hospital who fights back against the authorities' cold attitudes of institutional superiority, as personified by Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). It's the classic antiestablishment tale of one man asserting his individuality in the face of a repressive, conformist system--and it works on every level. Forman populates his film with memorably eccentric faces, and gets such freshly detailed and spontaneous work from his ensemble that the picture sometimes feels like a documentary. Unlike a lot of films pitched at the "youth culture" of the 1970s, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest really hasn't dated a bit, because the qualities of human nature that Forman captures--playfulness, courage, inspiration, pride, stubbornness--are universal and timeless. The film swept the Academy Awards for 1976, winning in all the major categories (picture, director, actor, actress, screenplay) for the first time since Frank Capra's It Happened One Night in 1931. --Jim Emerson
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234
One, Two, Three
Billy Wilder |
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Studio: MGM
Theatrical: 1961
Genre: Satire
Rated: NR
Writer: Ferenc Molnár
Duration: 110
Languages: English, French, Spanish
Subtitles: English, French, Spanish
Picture Format: Widescreen
IMDb: 0055256
Starring: James Cagney
Summary: Hardly ever mentioned in the category of lightning-paced comedies--the His Girl Friday and Preston Sturges kind--is this breathless cold war farce from the great Billy Wilder. Adapted from a one-act play by Ferenc Molnár, Wilder and collaborator I.A.L. Diamond's hilarious screenplay is a whirlwind collection of one-liners, gags, and double-entendres, anchored for the cameras by Jimmy Cagney's cagey and frenetic performance (one of his best), and, under Wilder's direction, executed with diamond-like precision. The gangster-movie icon plays a Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin (the film's 1961 release put it squarely in the middle of the world's laserlike focus on East vs. West tensions) who has parlayed expanding American consumerism into a chance to break through the Iron Curtain and sell "the pause that refreshes" to thirsty comrades. But when his Atlanta boss's visiting 17-year-old daughter (Pamela Tiffin), a boy-crazy Southern tornado, reveals that she has secretly married an American-hating German Commie (Horst Buchholz), Cagney's big-American-fish-in-a-European-pond lifestyle is threatened, especially once Daddy hops a plane to Germany. As the plot accelerates, the lines literally spit out of the cast's mouths--the title refers to Cagney's character's rapid-fire rattling off of lists of tasks--and Wilder's penchant for urbane nastiness is perfectly measured by the order of the whole crazy circus. This movie takes gleeful potshots at both sides of a conflict that terrified audiences in its day, but has aged beautifully to become a fascinating time capsule, an exhilarating litany of zingers and a potent blueprint for razor-sharp political satire. Cagney would retire after this movie for 20 years (returning for 1981's Ragtime), and it's hardly any wonder: he has the energy of 10 performances in this one film. --Robert Abele
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235
Ordinary People
Robert Redford |
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Studio: Paramount
Theatrical: 1980
Genre: Drama
Rated: R
Writer: Nancy Dowd
Duration: 124
Languages: English, French
Subtitles: English
Picture Format: Widescreen
IMDb: 0081283
Starring: Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch, Timothy Hutton, M. Emmet Walsh, Elizabeth McGovern, Dinah Manoff, Fredric Lehne, James Sikking, Basil Hoffman, Scott Doebler, Quinn K. Redeker, Mariclare Costello, Meg Mundy, Elizabeth Hubbard, Adam Baldwin, Richard Whiting, Carl DiTomasso, Tim Clarke, Ken Dishner
Summary: Robert Redford made his Oscar-winning directorial debut with this highly acclaimed, poignantly observant drama (based on the novel by Judith Guest) about a well-to-do family's painful adjustment to tragedy. Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland play a seemingly happy couple who lose the older of their two sons to a boating accident; Timothy Hutton plays the surviving teenage son, who blames himself for his brother's death and has attempted suicide to end his pain. They live in a meticulously kept home in an affluent Chicago suburb, never allowing themselves to speak openly of the grief that threatens to tear them apart. Only when the son begins to see a psychiatrist (Judd Hirsch) does the veneer of denial begin to crack, and Ordinary People thenceforth directly examines the broken family ties and the complexity of repressed emotions that have festered under the pretense of coping. Superior performances and an Oscar-winning script by Alvin Sargent make this one of the most uncompromising dramas ever made about the psychology of dysfunctional families. There are moments--particularly related to Mary Tyler Moore's anguished performance as a woman incapable of expressing her deepest emotions--when this film is both intensely involving and heartbreakingly real. No matter how happy and healthy your upbringing was, there's something in this excellent film that everyone can relate to. --Jeff Shannon
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