CORNER OFFICE***

Joachim Back's directorial debut is a dark comedy that satirises the pre-pandemic office worker hell that is the open-plan floorplate staffed with irritating coworkers in cubicles.  Adapted from Swedish novelist Jonas Karlsson’s The Room, the movie has a low-key dystopian vibe with a deadpan voiceover from Mad Men's John Hamm, playing our protagonist Orson. Dressed as a schlubby middle-aged secret Machiavel, Orson holds his colleagues in contempt while treating them with a scrupulously minimum-required-amount of politeness.  "I just wanna do my job" he protests. "What do you think we're doing?", Danny Pudi's colleague responds. "I can't say with any certainty."  The condescension is cathartic for the viewer.  Orson's work-life is transformed when he discovers a secret office that is luxurious in its furnishings, but most of all in its silence and distance from other humans. Orson schemes to take possession of it, a task made all the harder by the fact that his colleagues won't acknowledge its existence. Others might be destroyed by this Kafkaesque denial of his truth, but Orson prevails. Is his thick-skin, and belief in the room, psychopathic? Or is he the last bastion of common sense in an insane world? 

I loved everything about this film - the acting, cinematography, production design, dry with - other than its length. It feels like it might have been better made as an hour-long episode of Black Mirror. The conceit is just too dry for a feature length movie. 

CORNER OFFICE has a running time of 101 minutes and is rated PG-13. It played Tribeca and Raindance 2023 and opened in the USA earlier this month.

VIJAY AND I

VIJAY AND I is a risible and borderline offensive farce in which a disillusioned actor (Moritz Bleibtrau) exploits the mistaken announcement of his death to see what his family and friends really think about him. With the help of his north Indian friend (Danny Pudi - COMMUNITY), the actor browns-up, gets a beard and a turban and starts to court his apparently grieving wife (Patricia Arquette).  Clearly, it's absurd to think that a woman could sleep with a man and, despite some waxing, not realise it's her husband. But we have to give any kind of farce the benefit of the doubt, as we would with TOOTSIE or MRS DOUBTFIRE. No, where this film fails is in its lack of real laughs and lack of real insight.  Both those films saw genuine emotion in their relationships and proper guilt-ridden conflicts. By contrast, "Vijay" seems petulant and spoiled - quite content to cause distress in order to get more respect, and indeed pussy, as a respected Indian man than as an actor playing a children's cartoon character. The problem is that the tone is ambiguous.  The directors should've gone for zanier farce or real relationship depth or something truly dark and depressing (DEATH TO SMOOCHIE style).  Instead we just have something very very odd, very unfunny and at times simply wince-inducing.   In fact, seeing the wonderful Patricia Arquette trying to play it straight - as though she were in a real drama - was the most painful thing of all. Avoid at all costs.

VIJAY AND I was released last year in Germany and Belgium and earlier this year in Italy and Hungary. It is available to rent and own.