efficiency
9 films tagged with “efficiency”
Sorry to Bother You
The film opens every transaction with an apology, and the apology is the business model. Sorry to bother you is what Cassius says because bothering people is precisely what he has been hired to do: to interrupt strangers…
Hidden Figures
The title is doing structural work. The figures are mathematical — orbital trajectories, launch windows, re-entry angles — and they are hidden in the ordinary sense that the calculations these women performed were not at…
Snowpiercer
The train is a closed system, and Bong Joon-ho organises his film as a traversal of it. Curtis Everett starts in the tail section — dark, cramped, fed on gelatinous protein bars whose ingredients nobody asks about — and…
WALL-E
The first thirty minutes of WALL-E contain almost no dialogue and constitute one of the most precise depictions of work ever put on film. A small robot wakes up, charges his solar panels, puts on his treads, and goes to…
Office Space
The TPS report entered the language because it names something with no other name: work whose only consumer is the process that requested it. Peter's error is not omitting the report but omitting the cover sheet for the…
The Hudsucker Proxy
The premise of The Hudsucker Proxy is a board of directors deliberately installing an incompetent man as CEO in order to crash the company's stock price, and the comedy depends on the viewer recognising that this is not…
Rollerball
The premise of Rollerball sounds like a parable, and Jewison treats it like a procedural. In 2018, corporations have replaced governments, eliminated war, assigned populations to energy, food, transport and luxury conglo…
Soylent Green
The film's most famous line is its least interesting element. Everyone knows the reveal — Soylent Green is made out of people — and the sentence has entered the language as shorthand for a terrible secret, but the secret…
THX 1138
George Lucas made this film in 1971, before Star Wars, before Industrial Light & Magic, before merchandising became his real product — and the fact that the same person made THX 1138 and then built one of the most vertic…