The Age of Commercialism

An Exercise In Nonsense

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Well, this movie was a near complete waste of time.Employee of the Month tells the story of David (Matt Dillon), a man who loses his job at a bank and his fiancée in the same day and heads back to work with a gun stuffed in his pants. And it's a comedy. Along the way we meet David's Bachelor friend Jack (Steve Zahn), one of those crazy guys who rants about everything. We also stop by a strip club for some gratuitous nudity, watch Jack steal jewelry and money off of dead accident victims, meet David and Jack's gay friend who's lost his dental license (Dave Foley), find out David is cheating on his fiancée Sarah (Christina Applegate) with her best friend Wendy (Andrea Bendewald), meet an extremely accommodating hooker (Jenna Fischer), watch a completely inexplicable dream sequence about David foiling a bank robbery, learn why David is badly burned on the left side of his body and suffer through a massively out-of-left-field twist ending that just goes on and on and on and on.Employee of the Month is an example of one of the great banes of the modern viewer. Production values on films are so high, they all look and sound so good, you've actually got to pay attention to them to realize how bad they are. But the more you focus on them, the worse they are to sit through. If you just sort of half pay attention to this movie, it might not seem so terrible and you might actually be caught off guard by the big twist at the end. But the more closely you watch it, the worse it gets.Firstly, Matt Dillon is horrible in this film. There's only one single moment in the entire story where he makes David seem like a remotely real person, and it comes way at the end while you're already being assaulted by the awesome WTF quality of the twist.Secondly, the writing isn't nearly as smart as it thinks it is. The story is all about making you think David is one sort of person, then literally telling you that he's just been pretending to be that person, then "shocking" you with the sort of person David actually is. But instead of making the character a puzzle the audience has to gradually figure out, the filmmakers just cheat. They simply throw new information about David into the story without building up to those revelations or connecting them to anything else. And the twist ending is one of those bad twists which doesn't make you look at everything you've seen in a different light. instead, it says "Hey! There was actually a bunch of stuff going on that you didn't see and it completely invalidates what you've just watched! Sure, it doesn't make any sense…but it's so clever!" There are a couple of good things in the film, namely the performances of Steve Zahn and Christina Applegate. Zahn gets to chew the scenery with gusto as Jack and Applegate manages to be the most believably human character in the entire story.Employee of the Month isn't just a bad film. It is one of those movies that when it's over, you will say out loud (even if no one else is around), "Why did I waste my time with this thing?" I had to stick it out to write this review. Trust me, you don't need to bother.

We've never heard anything about this movie. My wife and I saw "Employee of the Month" on the TV guide, and thought it was the movie with Dane Cook and Jessica Simpson and decided to watch it. After realizing that it wasn't that "Employee of the Month", and that nothing else was on we decided to watch the movie, and we are very glad that we did. From start to finish a great movie, the acting was very good. The story line was easy enough to follow, while still jogging around enough to keep the movie interesting. Towards the end of the movie the story line almost gets hard to follow, I'm not sure if it is the twists or the fact that you need to keep picking your jaw off the ground, but the ending keeps up with the rest of the movie for sure.

This flick must be really edgy, original, and entertaining...If you haven't been exposed to any film before, say-- 1998.What seemingly held the promise of being an off-beat, independent, semi-obscure B-Movie gem winds up a straight-to-DVD feeling, poor man's pulp fiction copied copy with the usual, check-the-reference-box filthy-wit run-on sentence dialogue, charactery characters and the regularly-paced twist within a twist cues that read like a connect-the-dots game on a fast food placemat.I can't say it was all bad-- there were a few bright bits sprinkled about, and I can't figure out how exactly Dave Foley suddenly showed up in the movie, but there he was.I couldn't decide if he was playing a character I was supposed to be interested in and wanted to know more about or if he was merely performing an old unused Kids In The Hall skit and won some crazy drunken Texas Poker game with the filmmakers and to square the bet they wrote the sketch into the script they just happen to be shooting that weekend.There were a couple of half-decent moments, a nicely calculated editing payoff here and there, some near-interesting if should have been truncated sequences, and even a chuckle or three, accidentally trapped inside the movie-- like an enemic colony of semi-talented honey-bees frozen in amber-- but somebody couldn't stop cut-and-pasting in these heavily soundtracked music video 'tone poems' that separated the parts of the movie where actors spoke and interacted and "story" happened, coming in at regularly paced intervals where I suppose the commercials will be placed in later when it runs on some triple-digit cable channel at three-thirty in the morning.I did noticed a few lucky good castings (mostly the cameos by Paul Dooley and Peter Jason) and I kinda half-expected Quentin Tarantino himself to appear in the film at some point, playing some creepy, scatalogically-mouthed Coroner's Office worker telling some colorful and convoluted dirty jokes or some equally weird and creepy strip club patron.Quentin's always playing some type of a creepy guy character.I think he's just kind of a creepy-looking dude.

David Walsh (Matt Dillon) has a perfect life: a gorgeous fiancée, Sarah Goodwin (Christina Applegate); a beautiful house; a fancy car; a job of manager in a bank. On the day he expects to be elected "The Employee of the Month", he is fired; Sarah finds that he had an affair with his colleague Wendy (Andrea Bendwald) and calls off their engagement; and a hooker sent by his friend Jack (Steve Zahn) to stay with him in a motel steals his car. On the next day, in his farewell, there is a heist in the bank and he is abducted. But his fate before reaching Nirvana has not finished yet.While watching "Employee of the Month", I was feeling the story very unpleasant, mostly because of the disgusting character of Jack, and also because of the jinx of David. But suddenly, the story twists with an outrageous and surprising plot point, becoming the perfect bad day of David a masterpiece of black comedy. When I first saw Matt Dillon partially burnt in the beginning of the movie, I believed the actor had had some accident, and only later it was disclosed that the scars were part of his character. The unknown Andrea Bendwald is really a very beautiful woman and has an important participation in the conclusion of the story, inclusive along the credits. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "O Dia Perfeito" ("The Perfect Day")