Office Space

Office Space is a 1999 dark comedy starring Peter Livingston, David Herman, Ajay Naidu, Gary Cole, and Jennifer Aniston. The movie involves Peter Gibbons, a software worker at the company Initech, who works a mind-numbing job until he eventually has enough and stops caring. Which, is completely relatable to most people. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there with mind-numbing jobs and would like to just give up and stop going, but you can’t for obvious reasons. This classic comedy tells a story of what that might look like if it happened. 

The movie is based off of a character that Mike Judge created for several animated short films called “Milton”, who is one of the characters in the movie. A short, mumbly office worker obsessed with his stapler and always getting pushed around. He has a small role in the film, but a pivotal one. He’s played by the always impressive Stephen Root, who plays any character incredibly well. Mike Judge managed to take his short animated cartoons and turn them into an entire movie, with the main character, not even being the main character of the movie. That’s impressive. 

Very few of the actors were big names at the time. Jennifer Aniston was probably the biggest name in the movie, because she was on Friends. Stephen Root was on NewsRadio, but not a lot of people remember it. And of course, John C. McGinley was on Scrubs, but it didn’t come out until 2001. Everybody else was lesser known when Office Space came out in theaters. So, the names of the actors didn’t really help sell the movie. 

It didn’t do well in the theaters either. It came out at a time when big movies like Titanic and other epic movies were all the rage. Studios were trying to capitalize on that trend. Something like Office Space wasn’t exactly what movie executives were looking for. So when it didn’t make huge numbers on the opening weekend, they pulled it from a lot of the theaters, and didn’t give it the chance to keep going. But after it came out of home movies and DVD is when it became the cult classic that it is now. Everybody bought it and word of mouth got it around, and it started playing on channels like Comedy Central. And then, it took off, becoming the hit that comedy fans know today. 

And it’s amazing how a movie like this can be so unpopular when it first gets released, but it’s only when people get the chance to see it on their own time that they actually get a chance to appreciate the full capacity of what the filmmakers were trying to do. I don’t think movies have that anymore. At least, I haven’t seen that in a while. I can’t remember the last time I went to the movies. It’s been a while. The market is saturated. 

So, yeah. Go and see Office Space. It has a lot of quotes that you probably have heard before, but don’t know where they came from. It has a lot of lines that you might not have heard before, but are incredibly funny. And it has three men commit physical violence on a printer. Where else can you see that? And as always, keep on watching, with a smile on your face…