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Runtime: 92
Language: English
Country: USA
Color: Colour

Director: Jill Sprecher
Cast:
Toni Collette … Iris Chapman
Parker Posey … Margaret Burre
Lisa Kudrow … Paula
Alanna Ubach … Jane

Description: “Clockwatchers” is a wicked, subversive comedy about the hell on earth occupied by temporary office workers. Hired by the day, fired on whims, they’re victims of corporate apartheid: They have no rights or benefits and can’t even call their desks their own. They’re always looking at Polaroids of someone else’s family.

This is a rare film about the way people actually live. It’s about the new world of security cameras, Muzak, cubicle life and hoarding office supplies. “Try not to make too many mistakes,” a new temp worker is told. “These forms are expensive.” When she botches some forms, she throws them out in the ladies’ room to hide her crime. The toilet, indeed, is the only sanctuary in a big office: the refuge, the retreat, the confessional. Only when your underwear is off can you find a space to call your own.

“Clockwatchers” was written by two sisters, Jill and Karen Sprecher, and directed by Jill. I don’t have to be psychic to know they’ve worked as office temps. The Coen, Hughes and Wachowski brothers make movies about crime and passion, and so do the Sprecher sisters, but their violence is more brutal and direct, like stealing the precious rubber-band ball of Art, the anal-retentive guy in charge of the office supplies.

The movie stars Toni Collette as Iris, the new temp. Frightened and insecure, blinded by the buzzing overhead fixtures like a rabbit in the headlights, she’s taken under the wing of Margaret (Parker Posey), a temp who knows the ropes and has a healthy contempt for the office, her bosses and temp life in general. When she answers someone else’s phone, she doesn’t take a message; she just leaves the caller on hold until he gets bored and hangs up: “By the time they find out, you’re long gone.” At lunchtime, Margaret leads Iris to the lonely Formica tables in the corner of the cafeteria, where the temps sit huddled together. None of the permanent workers mix with them; it’s as if they have a disease. Jane (Alanna Ubach) tells Iris, “I used to work in a bank. There was this button on the desk and I kept looking at it every day for a month and finally I just pushed it. It was the alarm. They never tell you anything because they’re afraid you’ll take their stupid jobs.” Boredom hangs low over the office like a poisonous fog. It’s the kind of place where you carve “I was here” into the desk, but don’t sign your name. Paula (Lisa Kudrow), another temp, is given a business card by a male co-worker and it’s the same card she’s always finding left in the ladies’ room, as if the guy’s pathetic title and embossed little name would make him sexually irresistible. A new girl is hired, and the temps try to figure out how she got the job as the boss’ new permanent assistant. At quitting time, every eye is riveted to the wall clock: They’re like third-graders, waiting to be dismissed, so that they can go to nearby bars, smoke cigarettes and be lied to by half-looped junior executives.

Something interesting happens. There is a crime wave. Office supplies and little doodads are missing from people’s desks. Who is the thief? Eyes narrow. There’s lots of whispering at lunchtime. Security cameras are pointed at the temps’ desks: Yeah, like they’re going to steal from themselves. One of the girls is fired and gets the last word: “How can you fire me? You don’t even know my name!” I take hope when I see a movie like this because it means somebody is still listening and watching. Most new movies are about old movies; this one is about the way we live now. “Clockwatchers” is the kind of movie that can change lives by articulating anger; a few of the people who see it are going to make basic changes because of it–they’re going to revolt–and 10 years from now the Sprecher sisters will get a letter from one of them, thanking them.

There’s that, and then there’s also the way the movie is so mercilessly funny, because it sees stupidity so clearly. Take Iris’ first day on the job, when she’s told to sit in a chair and wait, and sits there for hours until the office manager says, “Why didn’t you tell me you were here?” Like it’s her fault. Like Iris knew who the stupid office manager was. Like it’s not the office manager’s job to see if anyone is sitting in the stupid chair. Like at the salary level of a temp, it makes any difference how long she sits there.

Like maybe someday, with hard work, good luck, patience and timing, she can be a big shot like Art, and have her own stupid rubber-band ball.

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Video: MPEG4 Video (H264) 656×384 25.00fps 838Kbps [Video 0]
Audio: Dolby AC3 48000Hz stereo 224Kbps [Audio 1]

Length: 01:32:03
Size: 707MB (741472208 bytes)

Runtime: 90
Language: English
Country: UK
Color: Colour

Director: Alan Parker
Cast:
Scott Baio … Bugsy Malone
Florrie Dugger … Blousey Brown
Jodie Foster … Tallulah

Description: At first the notion seems alarming: a gangster movie cast entirely with kids. Especially when we learn that “Bugsy Malone” isn’t intended as a kid’s movie so much as a cheerful comment on the childlike values and behavior in classic Hollywood crime films. What are kids doing in something like this?

But then we see the movie and we relax. “Bugsy Malone” is like nothing else. It’s an original, a charming one, and it has yet another special performance by Jodie Foster, who at thirteen was already getting the roles that grown-up actresses complained weren’t being written for women anymore. She plays a hard-bitten nightclub singer and vamps her way through a torch song by Paul Williams with approximately as much style as Rita Hayworth brought to “Gilda.” She starts on stage, drifts down into the audience, arches her eyebrows at the fat cats (all about junior high school age), and, in general, is astonishingly assured. And her performance seems just right in the film; “Bugsy Malone” depends almost totally on tone, and if you put kids in these situations and directed them just a little wrongly the movie would be offensive. But it’s not, and it’s especially right with Foster.

It tells a gangster story we know almost by heart, about the tough new gang that wants to take over the territory. Da Boss (a kid named John Cassisi who looks like he was born wearing a carnation in the lapel of his pinstripe) recruits hired guns to help protect his turf. Bugsy Malone (Scott Baio in training for John Garfield) is the guy he’s gotta have. But maybe even Bugsy can’t help, because the other gang has a dreaded new weapon. In Al Capone’s day, it was machine guns. In Bugsy’s movie, it’s marshmallow guns. They open up on you with one of these, and you got more than egg on your face. Old-fashioned weapons like custard pies are useless in a one-on-one situation.

Halfway through “Bugsy Malone,” I started wondering how anyone ever came up with this idea for a movie. Alan Parker, who wrote and directed it, claims his inspiration came while he was watching “The Godfather.” I dunno, I think the movie has more insights into kids than into gangsters.

When kids play, it’s real. That’s one of the things we lose when we grow up: the ability to turn the backyard into the OK Corral. The kids in “Bugsy Malone” don’t behave as if the material is camp or a put-on. For them, it’s real — especially the indignity of catching a marshmallow in your ear. And so in an uncanny way the movie works as a gangster movie and we remember that the old Bogart and Cagney classics had a childlike innocence, too. The world was simpler then. Now it’s so complicated maybe only a kid can still understand the Bogart role.

Video: MPEG4 Video (H264) 608×356 25.00fps 911Kbps [Video 0]
Audio: Dolby AC3 48000Hz stereo 192Kbps [Audio 1]

Size: 715MB (750683166 bytes)
Length: 01:29:47

RIP+UP | XviD-1144 | mp3@128 | 688×368 | English (English, French, Italian, Dutch idx+sub in file) | DVD Cover Sticker | 1h49 | 1.0 Gb

USA 15 Dec 1989
Director Sidney LUMET

Cast/Avec Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman, Matthew Broderick, Rosanna DeSoto, Janet Carroll, Victoria Jackson, Bill McCutcheon, Deborah Rush, Marilyn Cooper, Salem Ludwig …

Jessie McMullen (Sean Connery) is a widower, a tough guy and most of all, proud of his past as a career criminal (now semi-retired). He raised his son Vito (Dustin Hoffman) to follow in his footsteps, but Vito went straight once he had a son of his own, Adam (Matthew Broderick). Over the years, Vito became ashamed of his family’s criminal past. He has tried to raise his son right, which in his mind means keeping young Adam away from his deadbeat grandfather. Little does Vito know that this strategy has backfired; the mystery surrounding Jessie has caused Adam to idolize him.

Screenshots with MPC

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