This is definitely one of those days where, instead of trying not to watch the clock, I take percentages of what's left in my day, and watch that.
I start with 1% of the remainder of my day. When I hit that, I go to 2%, and so on. I'm up to 7%, and it's moving, albeit very slowly.
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Jason Mraz - Mr. A-Z
Mr. A-Z is the sophomore album released by singer-songwriter Jason Mraz. The album was released in July 2005 spawning only two singles. The album peaked #5 in the US and did not chart outside of the States. The album reached gold status in the US as well.
Track List:
Life Is Wonderful
Wordplay
Geek In The Pink
Did You Get My Message?
Mr. Curiousity
Clockwatching
Bella Luna
Plane
O. Lover
Please Don’t Tell Her
The Forecast
Song For A Friend
My Top Five Picks:
5th Place - Please Don’t Tell Her
4th Place - Clockwatching
3rd Place - Bella Luna
2nd Place - Geek In The Pink
1st Place - Mr. Curiousity
Picture Gallery:
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speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil with parker posey, lisa kudrow and toni collette filming clockwatchers, 1997
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Parker Posey in Clockwatchers, 1997
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Movie Review | Clockwatchers (Sprecher, 1997)
I think this movie really gets the alienation of the young, inexperienced contract worker. The way that the rules of the workplace, explicit or unspoken, are wielded against you by those with a modicum of power, real or perceived. The way that your only real friends are the other young, inexperienced contract workers, and the way you bond over your disaffection and disdain for office bullshit, even if forming your clique makes you the target of the rest of the office. Moments like the protagonist being told to wait, left unattended for hours, and then being chastised for waiting unattended for hours, are funny because they’re accurate, and maybe sting a little if you’ve been put through similar indignities.
If you want a bit of storytime, my first “real” job after graduating was as a contractor for a project. Like in this movie, my only real friends at the job were other contractors on the same project. And because the project had us embedded with other teams to execute the project, which would enforce a relatively minor change on one work artifact they had to produce, the people in those teams decided to take it out on me by booking my desk out from underneath me (as a contractor, I didn’t have access to the booking system), and was kicked out of the free desks by a more senior person complaining that I was typing too loud. So I learned pretty early just how childish people could be in a professional setting and the way that the setting enabled such pettiness. So the ambient feelings here certainly rang true, even if the specifics differed from my experience and these characters didn’t seem quite as desperate to find or hold onto their jobs as I think people seeking entry level jobs are these days.
And I think the movie nicely realizes these sentiments into the tactile experience of being in the office. The deadening false cheer of the ugly coloured walls. The fascistic geometry of the furniture, where having a cubicle, let alone an office, is wielded as a status symbol over those with more open desktops. In my current job we’ve recently started to have to book our desks in advance, which is much more painful than anyone realized. I’m pretty sure some of my coworkers would kill for even the crappy open desks the protagonists have here.
I do think this is a relic of the ‘90s, but not necessarily in a bad way. I imagine a more recent take on this premise would more explicitly spell out the conditions of late capitalism that result in such a work environment, something that no doubt would be articulated as leadenly as possible given the state of modern cinema. Here, the movie makes room for introspection with respect to the heroine’s career prospects, which makes it a sort of companion piece with Office Space, even if the latter movie has a more pronounced absurdist streak. (And if you want some reading material to go alongside your double feature, The New Me by Halle Butler hits satirical similar notes and is a nice and breezy read to boot.) And the performances here are quite strong, although as you can guess from its inclusion in the Criterion Channel’s Parker Posey series, Parker Posey steals the show.
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