Office Space (1999)

Editor's Note 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.

	Jennifer Aniston
	Stephen Root
	Gary Cole
	Ron Livingston
	David Herman
	Ajay Naidu
	Richard Riehle
	Alexandra Wentworth
	John C. McGinley
	Michael Rotenberg - Producer
	Mike Judge - Screenwriter
	Tim Suhrstedt - Director of Photography
	Daniel Rappaport - Producer
	Ice Cube - Additional Music/Songs
	John Frizzell - Composer
	Guy Riedel - Executive Producer
	Mike Judge - Director

Box Office
"...Viciously wry humor....Hilarious....OFFICE SPACE is ruthlessly funny stuff..." 04/01/1999 p.235

USA Today
"...[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..." 02/19/1999 p.13E

Los Angeles Times
"...Sharp and funny....Bristling with shrewd observation, inspired humor and all-around smarts, OFFICE SPACE is a winner..." 02/19/1999 p.F6

Chicago Sun-Times
"...OFFICE SPACE is a comic cry of rage against the nightmare of modern office life....The movie's dialogue is smart..." 02/19/1999 p.30

Sight and Sound
"...Almost painfully comic..." 01/01/2000 p.64

Uncut
"[O]ften screamingly funny." 01/01/2004 p.141

Entertainment Weekly
"[A] pic in which even tiny performances are gems..." -- Grade: B 11/04/2005 p.58

Premiere
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." 12/01/2005 p.182

Rolling Stone
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." 12/01/2005 p.98