Office Space

Nine-to-five jobs have never been looked at the same way since Mike Judge’s hilarious ode to white collar disaffection. Based on his 1991 animated short Office Space (also known as the Milton series), the live-action comedy adaptation stars Ron Livingston as Peter, a disgruntled programmer who is left in a seemingly permanent state of blissful ambivalence after his “occupational hypnotherapist” puts him in a trance and then promptly dies of a heart attack. Peter then decides to stop working but his supervisors—mistaking his new behavior for superiority—promote him. Office Space is something like Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” with a money laundering scheme and Geto Boys needle drops, but its thesis remains as timely and funny as ever: sometimes doing nothing is the most radical form of rebellion.