Joe's View

It’s hard to believe that we’re coming up on the tenth anniversary of the debut of Mike Judge’s hilarious workplace comedy, “Office Space.”
The movie was a bust in theaters when it opened on Feb. 19, 1999, but a cult began to form when the picture appeared on video six months later.
In the new century, “Office Space” picked up more traction after it became a cable TV favorite and fans started passing DVDs around to their friends. 20th Century Fox wound up with one of the very few “flops” that has become a financial blockbuster strictly from non-theatrical sources.
Tonight, I’ll be hosting a screening of the comedy as part of the monthly “Martini and a Movie” series at the Fairfield Theatre Company.
It seems to me that the film’s view of workplace anxiety is even more relevant now than when “Office Space” came out a decade ago (just before the dot.com bust of the turn of the century).
Stress levels have been going up in offices all over the country during this recession or New Depression or whatever-it- is that began last fall and that seems to be picking up momentum all over the country. Few workers these days are able to shake off their employment woes during their leisure hours, so I think the time is perfect for us to get together and try to find some humor in our predicament.
Mike Judge was ahead of a few movie trends in 1999 — he anticipated the “bromances” of Judd Apatow and the low-down contemporary satire of the best Will Ferrell comedies (Gary Cole, who is so funny as the manipulative boss in “Office Space,” joined the Ferrell troupe for “Talladega Nights” in 2006).
As happy as I was to see “Office Space” find a large home video audience, this is the sort of raucous comedy that should be seen with an appreciative audience.
(The “Martini and a Movie” event will start at 7 p.m. Admission is free. The Fairfield Theatre Company is at 70 Sanford St. in Fairfield Center.)

The French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard seems to be as popular as ever with urban art-house audiences — including those who are 25 and under.
Thanks to the Criterion Collection issuing several key Godard pictures on DVD in recent years, and Rialto Pictures distributing beautiful new prints, I keep running into young movie buffs who are eager to talk about “Contempt” (1963) and “Pierrot le Fou” (1965) and “Band of Outsiders” (1964).
Godard’s 1960s innovations filtered down to U.S. directors such as Arthur Penn and Robert Altman and Quentin Tarantino, so his mixes of romance, politics, music and stunning wide-screen color compositions still seem fresh all these years later.
Back in the day, Godard was often eclipsed by other French directors like Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol who worked in more traditional storytelling styles. Godard combined Hollywood gloss with radical 1960s politics and black comedy, producing films without an ounce of sentimentality.
The nonprofit Film Forum in Manhattan has played a major role in the Godard resurgence by sponsoring the debuts of many new Rialto prints before they went out on the U.S. museum and non-profit circuit. Right now, they are showing a Godard film from 1966, “Made in U.S.A.,” which was never commercially distributed in this country because the director used a book by American crime novelist Donald E. Westlake without buying the rights to the material.
Westlake won an injunction that stood for more than 40 years.
Last year, before Westlake’s death, a settlement was made and so we now have a “new” Godard from his peak years. I saw “Made in U.S.A.” on Saturday at the Film Forum, with a rapt audience (equally split between young and old), who were spellbound by the French director’s send-up/appreciation of Hollywood crime dramas.
Inspired by “The Big Sleep” — with its famously incomprehensible plot — Godard constructed a crazy thriller in which a female Humphrey Bogart (played by Godard muse Anna Karina) tries to get to the bottom of her lover’s disappearance and death.
Each new scene seems to negate the previous one, as Karina goes from place to place threatening and being threatened by gangsters, politicians and reporters involved in a vast conspiracy behind the crime. Godard references the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories which were then just heating up, so in some ways “Made in U.S.A.” anticipates the American paranoid thrillers of the 1970s (“Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View” foremost among them).
Karina and Godard were breaking up when the film was made, but the actress was never more radiant or more deserving of intense close-up scrutiny by Godard’s genius cameraman Raoul Coutard.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had some interesting conversations with friends who have seen the new movie version of the 1961 Richard Yates novel, “Revolutionary Road,” about life in the Connecticut suburbs in 1955.
The book and the film are both basically meant to be devastating critiques of what Yates viewed as the sterility of suburban life and the way it changed the hopes and dreams of the young people who moved there after World War II. Women were pushed into housekeeping and child rearing positions and many men locked themselves into dull business careers in the city that paid for the suburban lifestyle.
A middle-aged pal who grew up in a New Jersey suburb in the 1950s and 1960s saw “Revolutionary Road” as a horrifying reminder of the way of life she believes had a devastating impact on her parents and which stifled her own possibilities during her teen years.
But, I’ve talked to some financially strapped twentysomethings in Manhattan who have only half-jokingly suggested that there is something to be said for the job and home security of the young marrieds played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in “Revolutionary Road.”
Now that we are in a new age where recent college graduates face the anxieties of a life without job security and affordable housing, the supposed soul-crushing suburban lifetsyle of a half-century ago is starting to look better and better.
Imagine making enough from one job to pay for a house and kids and to allow for the wife and mother in the relationship to devote herself to family life, one young pal who recently lost his job said to me after seeing “Revolutionary Road.” (Not to mention having enough disposable cash to entertain mistresses in the city!)
A lot of my young friends — who have never lived in the suburbs but see them as oases of comfort and leisure — remind me of that character played by Tina Louise in the first version of “The Stepford Wives” in 1975.
Unlike her feminist girlfriends Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss — who feel imprisoned by the suburbs — the Tina Louise character, Charmaine, sees her new home in Stepford, Connecticut, as a refuge from her previous penny-pinching life as a single model and actress in New York.
In her first scene in the movie, Charmaine looks ecstatic as she shows off the new maid to her friends: “Isn’t Nettie marvelous? She’s a German Virgo — their thing is to serve.”
“So that’s why we won the war,” Prentiss replies.

Actors and actresses who are chasing after Oscars have to be very careful about new movies that might be debuting while the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are pondering their votes.
Two years ago, Eddie Murphy appeared to be on track to win an Oscar for his strong supporting performance in “Dreamgirls,” but he and his management failed to factor in the impact of “Norbit” opening during the run-up to the awards balloting.
The grotesque winter of ’07 flop featured Murphy at his worst, mugging in multiple roles, including a drag act as a hugely obese woman.
The posters for the film, prominently featuring Murphy in a fat suit in a skimpy bikini, went up on billboards all over Los Angeles just as the “Dreamgirls” Oscar campaign was hitting the home stretch. Many industry people believe the “Norbit” fiasco convinced voters the actor was unworthy of a gold statuette. Murphy went home empty-handed the same night that Jennifer Hudson won the best supporting actress Oscar for “Dreamgirls.”
Anne Hathaway’s Oscar campaign for her very well received dramatic performance in last year’s “Rachel Getting Married” has just been hit with a big PR torpedo in the form of “Bride Wars,” a ghastly comedy that opened last Friday, about two New York City friends-turned-enemies who try to ruin each other’s weddings.
Hathaway and Kate Hudson both come off terribly in the shrill retrograde comedy that seems designed to make us recoil from the two stars.
Even those Academy voters who are wise enough to avoid going to “Bride Wars” have probably seen the trailer showing Hathaway after she is subjected to a hideous spray-on tan by her “friend” and the two women getting into a full-blown fistfight — in their wedding dresses — at the Plaza Hotel.

Friends have been telling me for years that I had to add Val McDermid to my list of must-read crime writers.
I knew they were right — McDermid’s reviews and sales have been excellent on both sides of the Atlantic for many years — and I even went so far as to buy one of her books.
But, there was always a new Lee Child or Lisa Scottoline or James Lee Burke novel that moved to the top of my pile, and the copy of McDermid’s “Killing the Shadows” that I bought a few years ago gathered some serious dust.
So, I was happy to hear that the Scottish crime writer was kicking off the U.S. book tour for her new novel “A Darker Domain” (HarperCollins) in Westport on Feb. 9 and that I would be doing an interview with the author yesterday for a feature that is running in this Sunday’s Connecticut Post.
The assignment pushed me to read the novel — I don’t like to interview authors unless I have time to read their new book — and I spent two long nights earlier this week happily devouring “A Darker Domain.”
The novel is my favorite sort of mystery/thriller — character-driven and more about how crimes happen than a standard whodunit.
“A Darker Domain” is slightly reminiscent of the work of the great contemporary English mystery writer, Ruth Rendell, who produces tough and frequently unsettling examinations of the unexpected connections between people that result in violent explosions.
The new McDermid book cuts back and forth between two seemingly separate cold cases in contemporary Scotland — a kidnapping of the daughter and grandson of a very rich man, and the mysterious disappearance of a striking coal miner.
“A Darker Domain” mixes present tense sequences in which police inspector Karen Pirie and newspaper reporter Bel Richmond dig into the old cases with scenes set in the mid-1980s when Margaret Thatcher’s crackdown on unions caused terrible labor confrontations, particularly in the coal mining industry.
McDermid juggles past and present with great skill and generates tremendous suspense as we wonder how the two cases will merge.
Karen Pirie’s longing for a personal life as interesting as her police work figures into the narrative as well. The publisher describes “A Darker Domain” as a “stand-alone” novel rather than the first in a new series for McDermid, but I think readers will demand more books about this compelling protagonist.
I’m very happy to have that unread “Killing the Shadows” still in my possession and to know that there are 23 other backlist McDermid titles to choose from.

Several years ago, I met one of the major media barons of the late 20th century and in the course of a long and rather wearing interview — he shouted the answers to every question — I asked him what his plans for the next five years were.
“I don’t think about the next five years!,” he thundered. “I think about the next five million years!”
My God, I realized, this rich joker doesn’t believe he is going to die!
My memory of that noisy and grandiose encounter came back to me this morning when I read the extraordinary February cover story of “Conde Nast Portfolio” — “Redstone’s War,” a long profile of the 85-year-old media titan Sumner Redstone who tells his interviewer flat out that he plans to live forever.
Men like Redstone and Rupert Murdoch and that jackass I interviewed have built enormous global media and communciations empires — and have acquired riches and lifestyles of excess that would make the emperors of Rome green with envy.
For all of the knowledge they and their minions possess, however, these masters of the universe live with the delusion that they are exempt from that winding down of energy and influence other mere mortals have to face.
Here’s a key paragraph from Lloyd Grove’s devastating profile:
“Yet he (Redstone) refuses to acknowledge anything approaching failure, much less the prospect that he’ll run out of time before he can reverse his (current financial crises). Redstone frequently claims that he looks like a man less than half his age, and he’s open to the prospect of dating new women once (soon-to-be ex-wife) Paula is out of the picture. ‘I intend to live forever!,’ he told me…But surely he will someday die, won’t he? ‘I won’t! I’m telling you I won’t!,’ he shouted, and it wasn’t entirely clear he was joking. He compared himself with the title character of ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,’ the movie about an octogenarian who ages in reverse that was co-produced by (Redstone’s) troubled Paramount Pictures. ‘Your headline,’ the old mogul suggests,‘should be ‘The Curious Case of Sumner Redstone.’”
Indeed!

Daphne Uviller is making an auspicious debut with a sexy and very smart mystery, “Super in the City,” that Bantam Books is publishing Feb. 3.
Uviller is a former poetry and books editor for Time Out New York who was superintendent of her family’s building in New York’s West Village for 10 years. The writer has used the latter experience as the jumping off point for her delightfully quirky novel, which I hope is the start of a series.
Uviller’s heroine — Zephyr Zuckerman — is a 27-year-old woman about town who is suddenly pressed into service as the super of the Village townhouse she shares with her parents and several tenants.
Zephyr’s parents are slightly annoyed by their daughter’s ongoing career indecision, after trying medical school for a year and deciding she didn’t want to become a doctor.
When the building superintendent is arrested, Zephyr’s parents force her to take over the job, with a tempting extra incentive — if she empties and cleans up the ex-super’s apartment, Zephyr can keep the rent from the next tenant.
As our heroine gets to know the tenants in the building — and wonders what some of them are really up to — the book becomes a delightful mix of mystery and romance (the romance comes in the form of the building’s exterminator, Gregory Samson).
Uviller is a New York native, so the local color in “Super in the City” is terrific. Zephyr also has a group of girlfriends she went to school with, who are now off doing all sorts of interesting things in the city and keep reporting in on their adventures. These “Sterling Girls” are like a more down-to-earth “Sex and the City” crew.
Uviller’s ability to see the ups and downs, the loves and hates in a circle of friends is one of the strongest aspects of the book.
Here’s Zephyr filling us in on the Sterling Girls:
“Mercedes was as self-assured, talented and stunning as Tag — and looked ravishing in short-sleeved T-shirts over long-sleeved T-shirts, whereas I just looked bundled up — but also exuded a genuine warmth that Tag often didn’t. Lucy, on the other hand, did not have a clear picture of herself or how she came across to others and therefore was never good at gauging men’s responses to her. She was forever hoping for the wrong things to happen with the wrong people, and it was a topic of constant consternation among the rest of us as to how to handle her innate lack of perception. As the years passed, it became increasingly evident that she could not be taught. Should we guide her toward men who were not quite worthy of her, but would look up to her? Would she sense our condescension? Or should we fervently hope that some fabulous man would come along who would be able to see beyond the insecurities, the grating laugh, and the forced expressions she held on her face a moment too long, to the loyal, funny, up-for-anything Lucy behind those deficiencies?”
“Super in the City” doesn’t conform to any of the formulas of modern crime fiction — it is neither “hard-boiled” nor “cozy.” It might be challenging for a bookstore to figure out which shelf is right for the novel, but let’s hope the fresh voice of Daphne Uviller quickly finds a large and appreciative audience.

Like most Caucasian Americans, I am woefully uneducated when it comes to Indian filmmaking (or “Bollywood”).
Although Indian films have a global audience of 3 billion, they are believed to be so culturally specific that they haven’t been marketed to American mainstream audiences in the manner of other Asian cinema — i.e. Hong Kong action films and Japanese dramas and comedies.
Fortunately, the growing community of Indian immigrants and Indian-American families in this country is beginning to break down the cutltural movie barriers.
Yesterday, I spent a fascinating morning and afternoon in Manhattan seeing a forthcoming Bollywood film, “Chandni Chowk to China” and then talking with the two stars, Akshay Kumar and Deepika Padukone (right), and their director, Nikhil Advani.
“CC2C” — as it is called on the Internet movie sites — is the first Indian film to be picked up for wide U.S. distribution by Warner Bros. In another first, the film is debuting in India and all over the world on the same day — Jan. 16.
Warner Bros is focusing the U.S. release on urban areas with large Indian populations — including more than one city in Connecticut — but this wild action comedy/historical drama/romantic comedy/musical might be able to tap into some of the audience for the current Danny Boyle hit, “Slumdog Millionaire” (the Mumbai-based drama that uses some of the visual and musical styles of Bollywood).
In this age of ever-increasing entertainment globalization — which generally amounts to U.S. pop cultural values being adopted everywhere else — it’s fascinating to see a movie that is really “foreign.” You have to adjust your thinking when you watch a picture like “CC2C” because it reflects values, humor, and social conventions that are different from our own. American arthouse audiences have always responded to European cinema because so many of us can trace our roots to Italy and Germany and the United Kingdom. With our melting pot expanding to include so many new cultures in recent years, I think the time is right for Indian cinema to broaden its reach here.
Certainly, the two stars I met yesterday were every but as attractive and personally charismatic as the Hollywood folk I’ve met at movie events over the years.
The press notes for “CC2C” are not indulging in hyperbole when they describe Padukone as “stunning” — it was fun to meet an actress who dressed up for a press event rather than adopting casual street wear in the manner of a young Hollywood actor.
And Kumar is just the sort of buff and handsome male star you might see celebrated for his face and body on a U.S. movie Website like squarehippies.com (the 41-year-old actor has already appeared in close to 100 films!)