Office Space: Special Edition With Flair

 
Fox, color, R, 90 min. plus supplements, Dolby Surround 5.1, widescreen, Street: Nov. 1, $19.98; First Run: W, May 1999, $10.8 mil.

A favorite among office workers who hate their jobs, Office Space is a somewhat sloppily structured satire that still hits the bull's-eye more often than it misses. Writer-director Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill, clearly served time in a hellish office to have fashioned such a precise attack on corporate behavior, but strangely that issue isn't directly addressed in this disc's original featurette, "Out of the Office." Judge mentions his first "engineering job," but neither he nor the several cast members who were interviewed for the featurette reflect on having inhabited a "cubicle farm." Judge does discuss the film's genesis as a cartoon short about one of his ex-co-workers, a simpering soul he named "Milton," but the ever-so brief clips from the short make one wish the whole thing had been included in this package. Instead, we have a fawning set of reminiscences in the featurette about the picture's only name star, Jennifer Aniston (seen here only in archival interview footage). The 30-minute featurette focuses so specifically on the cast and characters that one welcomes the set's other supplement, a collection of eight deleted scenes. Bad news again: The scenes clock in at a mere five minutes. But one of these shards does provide a glimpse at a great gag: The colorful and sublimely irritating boss from hell (Gary Cole) dogging our hero (Ron Livingston) at his next job site.


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