8. Office Space (Mike Judge, 1999)
Mike Judge, the mind behind Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, wrote and directed this, his first live action film about programmers at the fictional software company Initech. When corporate needs to cut expenses everyone becomes nervous about downsizing.
Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), is sick of his job and starts ignoring orders and stops working in an attempt to get fired. Corporate consultants interview everyone and instead of firing Peter, they fire his two hard-working friends, Michael and Samir, and promote Peter because of his bold attitude. The three then plan to siphon fractions of pennies from Initech, over time earning money but so that the company will not notice.
This film does not focus on corporate workers itself, but instead analyzes how the white collar workers interpret management, which in this case in anything but flattering. Their boss, played by Gary Cole, is slimy and condescending and the company does not seem to reward actual hard work.
Aside from the work commentary, the film is a hilarious and endlessly quotable cult classic, appealing to anyone who’s ever had a job they haven’t liked.
7. Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992)
Based on the Award winning play by David Mamet, who also wrote the screenplay, this ensemble drama an electric, gripping tale of four real estate agents, sinking to any level to sell property. Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon star as two rival salesmen, Ricky and Shelly, whose careers are threatened when the corporate offices send a spokesman, played by Alec Baldwin, who tells the agents that only the top two sellers can stay.
Ricky and Shelly, as well as two others, played by Ed Harris and Alan Arkin, must try to bribe, cheat and steal their way to make sales and schmoozing their grumpy boss, Kevin Spacey.
This intensity of this film is remarkable, reflecting the stress that corporate management can cause its workers. In order to maintain their careers, the workers are driven far past their normal ethical boundaries, unavoidably ending in despair for some.
While Foley does an adequate job directing, the most brilliant parts of the film are the smart, calculated script and the tour de force performances from the ensemble cast. A masterclass in acting, storytelling and the human breaking point, Glengarry Glen Ross is an intense gem that is not to be missed.
6. Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987)
This iconic portrait of 1980s excess and greed stars Charlie Sheen as an ambitious rookie stockbroker Bud Fox who is relentless in making name for himself. In a bold move, Fox arrives at Wall Street legend Gordon Gekko’s office with cigars to try and force him to listen to his ideas. When his planned stock options do not impress Gekko, Fox desperately provides insider information which he received in passing from his union father, played by his real life father Martin Sheen.
Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, then employs Fox, making him spy and find more insider information, causing both of them to make vast amounts of money. As their process continues, however, Fox starts to grow a conscience and the SEC starts snooping.
Wall Street was one of the most successful and influential movies of its era. Its influence, however, was not related to film but instead caused a surge of people to go to Wall Street to become brokers. This ironically was the exact opposite of Stone’s intended effect of the film.
Douglas’s cool and confident performance as Gekko, particularly his “Greed is good” speech, made him a role model in the eyes of some, rather than the despicable villain that the film showed. Regardless of the real world effect it had, Wall Street is an exciting film showing the dangerous allure of corporations and wealth.
5. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
In Playtime, French comedy legend Jacques Tati’s ambitious masterpiece, Tati plays his iconic bumbling character Monsieur Hulot, but unlike in his other films, there are no central characters or strong narratives in a traditional sense. Instead, the complex landscape of modern Paris and its inhabitants as a whole comprise the content of the film.
Although over two hours long, Playtime basically only has six scenes which are intensively choreographed and lengthy. These scenes are run on visual gags and the visual splendor of the design, with the dialogue mostly being distant and unintelligible.
While plotwise, the film may seem like a loose, unrelated story of Hulot walking around Paris, causing various problems, thematically there is a strong cohesion of the scenes. With Playtime, Tati lampooned the modern corporate-industrial world that had taken over his beloved city of Paris, bewildering him with its maze of similar looking buildings and scenery.
The film also comments on the over-complication of work and how it can make people lose touch with themselves. Hulot acts as an outside observer, unfamiliar with the complexities of urban life, who tries to implement aspects of a more fun loving atmosphere into the environment.
4. The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)
This harrowing real-life tale of the founding and development of Facebook is one of the most well written and brilliantly executed films of the 21st century. Jesse Eisenberg stars as Mark Zuckerberg, an intelligent Harvard student who with his friend Eduardo Saverin, played by Andrew Garfield, start “thefacebook”, which is initially only open to Harvard students.
They soon leave school when they meet the smart but sleazy Napster founder Sean Parker, played by Justin Timberlake, who sees huge potential in the company. When Zuckerberg moves to California with Parker in order to develop Facebook further, Saverin stays back in New York to create connections, which leads to him being effectively shut out of the company.
Interspersed with the main narrative are scenes from depositions where Saverin, as well as the Winklevoss Twins who went to Harvard with Zuckerberg, are suing the young businessman for theft of intellectual property and unfair practices.
This tells the viewer from early on what will unfold, adding to the message that this is not a story of the corruption of corporations, but rather showing what qualities are necessary to become a successful business person. Led by strong direction from Fincher, a terrific script from Aaron Sorkin and powerful performances all around, The Social Network is a modern masterpiece of success, greed and betrayal.
3. Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)
Visionary director Terry Gilliam’s crowning achievement set in a dystopian future satirizes the mindless repetition of labor and management, as well as the strength the corporations hold on society. Jonathan Pryce plays Sam Lowry, a worker for the bureaucracy who is in charge of investigating a typo that caused the execution of Archibald Buttle instead of the terrorist Archibald Tuttle.
He soon becomes roped up in an ant-corporation plot with the actual Tuttle, played by Robert De Niro, and falls for Buttle’s neighbor Jill, played by Kim Griest, making Lowry a wanted man in the eyes of the company. Running for his life, he finds himself being chased by his old bureaucratic friends and family.
The central corporation in Brazil seems to control almost every aspect of the future people’s lives, and have transformed the world into an industrial, metallic landscape. In order to maintain control, they keep unfavorable information hushed up, such as the central typo which they refuse to publicly acknowledge.
While obviously exaggerated to fit the science fiction setting, the commentary of Brazil matches the widespread view of corporations, oppressing lower workers and silencing their less respectable actions. An imaginative and visually dazzling film with important social connotations, Brazil is a must see even for those who don’t usually enjoy science fiction.
2. American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000)
This disturbing, hyper violent satire, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, is as powerful socially as it is bloody. Christian Bale stars as Patrick Bateman, a narcissistic and detached banker in New York whose life is controlled by the social norms of his elite upper class. In his formulaic daily life, strictly organized and regimented, things begin to take a violent turn.
Over a petty fit of jealousy over a coworker’ s superior business card, Bateman starts killing, sending him on a spree while he becomes more and more desensitized to his actions and grows increasingly distant from his perfect life.
One of the most critical and dark portraits of corporations on this list, Ellis’s tale is unrelentingly stark and depressing. Bale plays Bateman with incredible dedication, playing the calculated and unemotional shell of a man, formed by what corporate society dictates.
The flawed priorities and values set by the shallow business culture, including greed and public image, are pushed to absurd proportions in order to show what is wrong with the system in question. Now a cult classic, American Psycho is a dark, comic masterpiece led by Bale’s disturbing performance.
1. Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
The second Kurosawa film on this list takes a different approach to the bureaucratic world than The Bad Sleep Well, focusing on the internal impact of corporate life and featuring much less exciting plot. Takashi Shimura, the less famous but equally talented actor associated with Kurosawa, plays an aged man Kanji Watanabe who has devoted his entire life to work and papers, and he is often unhappy as his wife has died and his son does not pay him any attention.
After he is diagnosed with cancer, he realizes that he must do something to enjoy the last bit of life that he has. Trying to find solace in nightclubs, booze and women he discovers that helping others and making a positive difference on the world is the key to the happiness he longs for. To the surprise of everyone around him, Watanabe becomes passionate about his work and starts in on a new project to transform a swamp into a children’s park which he completes right before his death.
Arguably Kurosawa’s most emotionally powerful film and certainly among his greatest masterpieces, Ikiru is an in depth examination of an old man’s life and how it was almost pointless from working it all away. Kurosawa shows that the mindless signing of papers is no way to spend one’s entire life.
Watanabe’s pathetic existence is uncomfortably similar to most common people’s, acting as a reminder to enjoy life and that it is never too late to change your life into something more substantial. Headed by Shimura’s incredibly touching performance and Kurosawa’s poignant direction and imagery, Ikiru is a cinematic masterpiece of human emotion and the dangers of the loss of personality in modern society.
Author Bio: Matthew Benbenek is an undergraduate Mechanical Engineering student at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He has a passion for film, music and literature and, when not watching movies, is an amateur director and violin player.