Flick Pick

Wage slaves, unite! Mike Judge's Office Space, released in 1999, combines the terrors of Franz Kafka with the hopeless workaday fatigue of Dilbert in a pointed satire about cubicle life. The beleaguered hero, Peter (Ron Livingston), is tormented by a parade of identical supervisors; his co-worker Milton (Stephen Root) wards off madness with a lunatic defense of his radio and his stapler; in the chain restaurant across the street, a waitress named Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) is required to pin a minimum of fifteen pieces of "flair" onto her uniform as a display of company spirit. Creator of the subversive pre-teen TV hit Beavis and Butt-head, Judge has his finger on the pulse of youthful anxiety, and the scene in which his frustrated workers smash an out-of-sorts copying machine with a baseball bat is pure catharsis.

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• Stephen Root
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Office Space screens Saturday, August 27, in the wide-ranging Saturday Midnights at the Esquire series. Landmark's Esquire Theater is at 590 Downing Street. For information, call 303-352-1992.