Office Space (1999)

Director: Mike Judge

Brilliant satirical comedy of modern cubicle culture, and one that really hasn't aged much at all despite being over two decades old now.

For those who somehow haven't seen it, here's the brief summary: computer programmer Peter (Ron Livingston) is burned out with his cubicle job. After he has a mental snap brought on by a hypnosis session gone awry, he becomes magically apathetic towards the job, ignoring bosses and blissfully drifting through his day doing whatever he wants. He soon hatches a scheme with two friends and highly disgruntled co-workers to rob the company with a computer program of their own design. Things do not go as planned, sending the trio scrambling to solve the far greater problem which they've created for themselves.

That summary does zero justice to just how hilarious and witty this movie is. Written and directed by Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead, Idiocracy, Silicon Valley, Tales from the Tour Bus, and others), this was one of the all-time great comic indictments of cubicle and corporate culture that really crystalized in the 1990s and ran right up through the following decades. To this day, over 20 years later, there are dozens of characters, lines, and situations that people know as well as any comedy or classic drama in film history. Whether it's the boss Bill Lumberg's detached, "yeah..." or a reference to "flare" or the gangster-style beatdown of a copy machine, this movie had so many great, brilliantly-executed comic ideas that they were bound to live on for many, many years. This, despite the fact that it was a box office flop.

Many of the quietly miserable sad sacks that work at Initech -
a bland, soul-sucking company that drives several of its
employees to go off the rails in myriad ways.

And like Mike Judge's other works, especially Idiocracy, Office Space has some very smart commentary about work, detachment, and the dynamic between employers and employees - a dynamic that has weirdly morphed into something more like what was present during the 1930s and '40s than what began happening in the '60s and '70s. By the late 1990s, large companies had begun growing far larger, only exacerbating the distance between managers and the front-line employees. This is very much where so many of the gags in Office Space are born, which is why the movie holds up so well. While certain elements have changed in terms of how big businesses operate, there still exists in many of them infinite layers of middle-management and socioeconomic disparity that anger and resentment from lower-level employees has only intensified. Peter, as goofy and ill-advised as his decisions can be, embodies a lot of that frustration here, and he cracks us up while doing it.

I don't know that this movie will ever really get old. I go back to it every few years, and while it will never be quite as fresh or funny as it was the first time I watched it two decades ago, it's still among the all-time greats.