Director: Gary Burns
Year Released: 2000
Rating: 1.5
Work life and consumer life clash in this 'futuristic' 'comedy' in which employees of a nondescript company make a bet as to who can avoid going outside the longest - the world they happen to inhabit is like a perverted variation on the architectural theories of Paolo Soleri in which the offices and the malls are interconnected (it's kind of like the way some casinos operate, with a separate wing of haute couture shops to 'keep the money in the building'). While this is an excellent concept, the film is smug and aggressively 'hip,' with rapid cutting, jerky camerawork and an annoying blue-screen gimmick in which the lead swims/flies through his environment. The characters, too, are extreme without being funny, like the office worker who is determined to kill himself but resorts to stapling work-hard slogans into his chest or the overly-jittery mall worker and her catatonic boyfriend. I can only hope the 'symbols' - a dead mouse, an ant farm, Superman - weren't meant to be meaningful.
