Poehler’s documentary feels as though it’s being narrated by Lucy and Desi themselves, with the help of rare home movies and cassette audiotapes the couple made over the years, and insightful and touching interviews with, among others, their daughter Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill, Desi Arnaz Jr., Norman Lear, Carol Burnett, Charo, and Bette Midler. But things get out of hand when Peter, Samir, and Michael’s scheme to bilk Initech out of thousands of dollars backfires leaving them all fearing for their futures.Īmy Poehler’s stunning love letter to legendary television power couple Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz digs deep with Poehler gaining access to some never-before-seen footage of the pair to help tell the incredible story of their rise to entertainment royalty. In the middle of a hypnotherapy session to get him out of his funk, the doctor keels over and dies, leaving Peter stuck in a permanent state of blissful don’t-give-a-shit-ness, that he brings with him to the office with joyful audacity - he even finds the courage to ask out the cute waitress at the nearby restaurant (Jennifer Aniston) he’s had a crush on. Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) is a disgruntled software programmer at the vapid and grey-cubicled company Initech, where he works and commiserates with his work friends Samir Nagheenanajar and Michael Bolton (no relation). Okay, so we know that Apple TV’s Severance has taken the office space to a whole weirder level, but more than 20 years ago Mike Judge ( Beavis and Butthead, Silicon Valley, Idiocracy) nailed the drudgery of office culture right on the malfunctioning printer with this classic workplace comedy. This organized underground club for fighting that the pair creates spreads like wildfire across the country and quickly spirals out of control as Tyler’s anarchist agenda threatens to go too far. How do they achieve this enlightenment? We can’t really talk about it, but it involves angsty men beating each other bloody in the basement of a bar. Until he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a slightly unhinged soap salesman who teaches our unnamed narrator how to break free of the corporate machine, shed his capitalistic belongings, and feel again. Edward Norton’s narrator is one such minion, stuck in a dead-end job with a boss he hates and so broken that he becomes a support-group tourist just to treat his unrelenting insomnia. When David Fincher’s Fight Club punched its way into the mainstream at the turn of the millennium, it fed directly into the psyche of post-’90s dudes still raging against the machine and grappling with their life choices to sit in a cubicle for eight hours a day.
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