Clockwatchers

Clockwatchers is female camaraderie in the big city before there was Sex & the City. I got a VHS tape from the library thinking that it could be a chick flick from the eighties that I can mindlessly watch (or not watch) on our old TV while I sorted thru' two weeks worth of laundry. It turned out that it deserved more than mindless watching.

It follows four female friends at work. Work means temping at a big Corporation where nobody knows your name but will admonish if your a stitch on your hemline is off because you are damaging their corporate image. Toni Collette, Parkey Posey, Lisa Kudrow and Alanna Ubach are the corporate serfs, each following a dream of their own, trying to get out of their monotonous existence.

The movie could also be seen as a female version of Office Space where you deal with emotions in the raw form, rather than making fun of it like in Office Space. A more serious look at a similar issue, although I would not call it same. The end destination of both the movies was to give an unexpected blow to the corporate entity that was eating away the life of the characters. While Office Space achieved it with on your face "fire", ClockWatchers uses a more subtle and understated route to reach the destination. And I was wrong thinking it was an eighties film, it was from 1997, two years before the underground hit Office Space came out. Kudos the director Jill Sprecher.