journal features

movie review - In Good Company

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2005.03.18

This is a movie about a senior executive who winds up, through some kind of corporate restructuring, with a boss from a very different corporate culture who's in his late twenties. The younger man then starts dating the daughter of the main character.

This is two movies in one. First, there's an accurate accounting of what the corporate world has gotten like recently, with nonsensical (and destructive) shenanigans intended to "extract value", and others designed to create bizarre alliances so that no one can tell what they're supposed to be doing or who their customer even is. Then there's a clumsy second story about the young couple and the awkward nature of the younger man being the older one's boss. Which frankly I suspect they thought was going to be the driver for this thing. But with two charming male leads that seem unable to maintain any sense of rivalry or conflict, it fails to take off.

Not recommended.

rand()m quote

Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

—T.S. Eliot