Get a Job

Year 17, Day 268 - 9/25/25 - Movie #5,151

BEFORE: OK, I'm forced to use my skip day because I've been so busy - out late last night working that screening, came home and was only able to catch up on posting, not watching - so Wednesday's gone, and the Wednesday film has to now be the Thursday film. But this is why we HAVE free days, for when the work schedule gets too crazy. Seems appropriate for a film all about working, obviously this would have made a great Labor Day film but that just didn't work out, still it made it into the right month, so that's something. 

Greg Germann carries over from "Bigger than the Sky".

THE PLOT: After college, Will is having problems getting a good, lasting job, as are his roomies, his girlfriend and his just-fired dad. 

AFTER: This is one of those "whatever can go wrong will" movies, or you know, a movie. The idea here was to show everything that could possibly go wrong when looking for a job. Somebody promised you that your internship would turn into a paying gig, and then it doesn't. Somebody promised you a pension, and then fired you. Somebody hires you to be a middle school chemistry teacher and then you end up coaching the basketball team, too. The problem with all of this is that none of this is particularly humorous, and allegedly this is supposed to be a comedy. Well, you could have fooled me.  

Maybe it's the fact that I just spent five months job-hunting myself, and I had interviews that didn't turn into jobs, applications that didn't turn into interviews, and sure, I responded to a bunch of internet postings that turned into nothing at all. I get it, that's life, and I expected a high ratio of time-wasting endeavors to productive ones, but the process is really ridiculous, because sometimes it seems like nobody gets the job they want, and some people don't even know WHAT they want, so they respond to everything and work for a bunch of different jobs and are bad at all of them. Which is why I took the job at the sports arena, because it seemed to be real and nobody was fooling me about there BEING a job at all, and before you know it, I was giving them my bank account number for direct deposit and picking days for orientation and training. But the basketball season starts in late October, it turns out (who knew?) so it's really been a process of "hurry up and wait". But let me just say that if you're job-hunting, I recommend looking for some situation where a whole bunch of people are getting hired at once, the start of a sportsball season is one example, and the movie theaters re-opening in fall 2021 was another one that I took advantage of. 

Someone also attempted to find humor here in an older man's situation, being fired from a long-term job, trying to promote himself via an executive placement service that charged, for their premium package, more than he could possibly afford. So he starts hanging out in a Starbucks-like coffee shop where there's free wi-fi as well as coffee, and calling it his "office" as he seeks out employment via a laptop. Yeah, umm, still waiting for the funny part, guys. That's the plight of Will's dad.  

Will's story is a little different, but he gets a job making "video resumes" for that very same executive placement company (what are the odds of that?) because he has experience making funny YouTube videos. But he can't really apply those skills to the job, because there's a very strict set of guidelines concerning how they want those videos to look, they don't really want to be innovative or ground-breaking or make any videos that go "viral", so already I don't think Will is a very good fit for this company. Later he gets contacted by a company that makes a product called "Sweat" - is it a fragrance, a sports drink, a surfboard wax? I'm just not sure. They want to hire Will to make those ground-breaking, weird, funny videos that he's known for, so yeah, it's not too hard to see that Will's foray into corporate videos is not going to be a prolonged one. 

Will has three roommates and they all get stoned together and play video-games - Charlie gets that job as a chemistry teacher, but most of his lab experiments involve the kids making snacks for when he gets "the munchies" after free period, Luke gets a job as a "clerk" for an investment company but didn't realize that the orders they want him to process all involve getting coffee and sandwiches for the real brokers, and Ethan doesn't have a job at all, but he's created an app that lets you stalk your loved ones via their phone to find out if they're cheating on you and he hopes to get Warren Buffett to invest in it. Well, I knew there were reasons to hate on millennials, and here are three of them. 

Along the way, Will's girlfriend Jillian manages to lose her high-paying job, they never say exactly WHY though, but she certainly regrets spending so much money on shoes and her high-rent apartment, as she's forced to move in with Will and his co-slacker roommates. Well, maybe if you do get a high-paying job you should pay down your debt first rather than spending so much of your salary on clothes, just saying. In lieu of being funny, another way to go would be to have all of these events add up to something, to speak advice to the masses or reveal some greater truth, for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts - but nah, that doesn't happen either, really it's just a bunch of random happenings that don't add up to much of anything. 

But somebody thought they cracked the code on what's wrong with kids in the 2010s, it all stems from the fact that everybody gets participation trophies now, and therefore they get rewarded for LOSING, and this carries over into other aspects of their life and makes them all soft and entitled. Well, this isn't wrong exactly, but it's perhaps overly simplistic and the problem runs a bit deeper, so you can't just take away the trophy-giving process and fix everything, because those kids are going to get special treatment in other ways from their helicopter parents and the problem is going to remain, sorry. Also it can't be true that parents are somehow too lenient and also not lenient enough at the same time, those things are contradictory and you have to pick one. 

Across the board, there are really no repercussions for bad behavior here, and that's something of a problem. Look, it worked in "Animal House" but it really hasn't worked since, unless you count "Superbad", "Pineapple Express" and every film with Will Ferrell. But if the point is to demonstrate that it's all going to work out in the end, even if you just try to cruise through life and let your career happen to you, but come on, that's a very dangerous message to put out into the world. This film was made in 2012 but sat on a shelf and didn't get released until 2016, so somebody knew. Then when it was in theaters, it only made $24,000 so maybe keeping it on that shelf was actually the smarter idea. 

Directed by Dylan Kidd

Also starring Miles Teller (last seen in "That Awkward Moment"), Anna Kendrick (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (ditto), Bryan Cranston (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), Nicholas Braun (last seen in "Saturday Night"), Brandon T. Jackson (last seen in "The Year of Spectacular Men"), Alison Brie (last seen in "The Rental"), Marcia Gay Harden (last seen in "The Daytrippers"), Jorge Garcia (last seen in "The Wedding Ringer"), Mimi Gianopulos (ditto), Bruce Davison (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), Parker Contreras, Megan Gallagher (last seen in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith"), Jay Pharoah (last seen in "Ride Along"), Ethan Dizon (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), John C. McGinley (last seen in "A Midnight Clear"), Aaron Hill (last seen in "The Night Before"), Chester Tam (last seen in "Scream" (2022)), Ravi Patel (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Michael C. Mahon, Seth Morris (last seen in "The Dictator"), David Carey Foster, Marc Maron (last seen in "To Leslie"), Jeryl Prescott (last seen in "The Birth of a Nation"), Jackie Benoit (last seen in "Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2"), John Cho (last seen in "The Oath"), Cameron Richardson (last seen in "Alvin and the Chipmunks"), Murray Gershenz (last seen in "The Onion Movie"), Jamie Denbo (last seen in "Daddy's Home"), Nik Tyler (last seen in "batteries not included"), Jack Knight (last seen in "Ted 2"), Michael Mantell (last seen in "The Night We Never Met"), Sean O'Bryan (last seen in "Babylon"), Maximiliano Hernandez (last seen in "The Yards"), Oscar Magana Jr., Alizabeth Hamer

RATING: 3 out of 10 career tips from a stripper