Mind Poison

There will be no notes on In Good Company, because I just composed the post, and Blogger ate the post entirely when I tried to publish it, for the third or fourth time. Hitting back did not preserve the text, so we are just screwed. (Can Blogger please cook up some Javascript to automatically copy your post to your clipboard when you hit "Publish"? Thanks.)

To give you a few of the highlights:

Claire and I were walking around NYU just hours before we saw the movie, which takes place partially on the campus. We didn't know this ahead of time, of course, so it was kind of amusing to see the characters standing and talking right across the street from where we'd just been that same day.

The movie, as Claire says, is very retro. It is bewildered by the modern work environment, with people switching jobs willy nilly, and people getting fired for underperforming instead of the previous comfortable welfare system that a company used to be. "Cross-promoting our magazine with other companies in the conglomerate that owns us?! The perversion!" it says. The magazine the characters work for has no internet presence at all, as far as we can tell, and seems to see it as "the competition" which its crazy customers are momentarily confused about and embracing. The whole movie, from its characters' male-female relations to its bewilderment at this modern world of cellphones and corporate mergers, is very old-fashioned.

Topher Grace and his character are just about the only interesting things in this movie.