Clockwatchers (1998)

If you're going to make a dark comedy about the trials of being a corporate temp, you'd do well to ensure that the job's litany of pesky, dehumanizing irritations — the bureaucratic paper-pushing, the leering bosses — doesn't turn the audience into clockwatchers, too. In Jill Sprecher's oddly benumbed state-of-the-office satire, Iris (Toni Collette), a frumpy young woman with the gaze of a wary sheep, signs up as the latest worker-slave at Global Credit, where she falls in with a clique of fellow losers: guy-crazy Paula (Lisa Kudrow), boring conventional Jane (Alanna Ubach), and hostile, alcoholic Margaret (Parker Posey), who serves as the group's smirky rebel ringleader. There's a wisp of a plot (who could the office klepto be?), but most of Clockwatchers is as empty of drive and imagination as its poor-little-victim heroines, who never seem more than sulky, overgrown high school girls. D