What are some movies that provide true insight into a job or situation?

North Dallas Forty with Nick Nolte probably came as close to portraying the life of a journeyman football player as any medium has ever come to portraying any job.

Battle for Haditha is a look at the Iraq war from the viewpoints of US Marines, Iraqi families and insurgents.

RottenTomatoes.com has links to a couple of dozen reviews.

Dead Man Walking does an excellent job of chronicling what death row is like, not only for the felon – but also for the spiritual advisors and the correctional officers.

All of the clips I have seen of the new George Clooney movie, “Up in the Air” really resonated with my life when I was a corporate road warrior. I plan to see the film to see if it lives up to the trailers.

Office Space hit the nail on the head for me.

A Beautiful Mind shows a professor’s life

Oh, and speaking of Office Space, I always loved the movie and related to it, considering that I’ve always worked in an office setting…I’ve had the loud talking co-worker who says the same thing over and over and who thinks it’s cute to say things like “Someone’s got a case of the Mondays”...I’ve had the passive/aggressive boss who thinks he can be your buddy to get you to do things, I’ve had pointless TPS-like reports to file, I’ve had multiple bosses who would come down on you for something stupid, I’ve worked with people who are clearly in the wrong line of work, I’ve worked with people who act as if they’d just as soon set the building on fire, I’ve worked in situations where they’ve brought in outside consultants to tell them to fire the best workers. It’s all there. But the thing that resonated the most to me was in the special features.

I worked at a Fortune 500 company a couple years back, and my boss made all her employees put a white board in their cubicles, and I was talked to a few times about how if I’m going to be away from my desk for more than a couple minutes, I needed to write exactly where I was going to be on that board, because someone might need to find me. It was like basically if someone come to my desk to ask me for something and I wasn’t there, they wouldn’t leave me a note, they wouldn’t wait a couple minutes, they wouldn’t come back later, they would go to a co-worker and make them drop whatever they were doing to help them, and then they’d go to my boss and say I wasn’t at my desk and they “couldn’t find me”, and my co-worker would also be “solicited” for “feedback” by my boss, at which time she would also hear about how I wasn’t at my desk and how they had to drop everything because I couldn’t be found. And maybe I was just in the bathroom, it’s like, I didn’t want to put “taking a dump, be back in 10 minutes’ on my white board, but that was almost the level of detail I was asked for.

So, when I finally got Office Space on DVD and watched the deleted scenes, I saw this scene where Lumberg goes to Peter and says something to the effect of, “yeah, where were you at 10 am last Tuesday?” Peter of course didn’t know exactly where he was, and Lumberg pushed, so he said, maybe I was in the bathroom, and Lumberg countered by asking him about his shoes, saying he looked under the stalls and didn’t see Peter’s shoes. I swear I was having flashbacks, I actually did have my boss ask me where I was at a certain time on a certain day and only thing I could think is maybe I was in the bathroom, and though I never to my knowledge had anyone come into the bathroom to look for me, but I was once tracked down when attending a company program. I was SO glad to be laid off from that job, but Office Space really helped me put it in perspective.

My kids, who worked the food service industry, laughed hard during Waiting , a movie about restaurant table service workers. Don’t fuck with the people who handle your food.

Nobody’s mentioned It’s a Wonderful Life. There’s no better film about man’s (“Or woman’s”) meaning in life. And espcially this time of year.

@dalepetrie I had a boss who would track guys down in the men’s room to “chat”, while they were trapped in the stalls. He once told me that I would not advance much further in the company because the important business was transacted in the men’s room. When I spoke to a male peer about it, he told me he had had to begin going to the bathroom on another floor of the building, because of the boss tracking him down every day!

@Marina You worked for Senator Craig?!

@jaytkay lol. well earned lurve for you!

the rainmaker – insurance companies

@jaytkay You made me laugh out loud! Thanks. I don’t know if there was any tapping in this case, because I was not allowed in the men’s room.

LBJ used to make his assistants converse with him while he was using the toilet.

28 Days. It portrays the ups and down of rehab (and to an extent mental hospitalization)well.

It’s not a movie, but if you combined all the Kathy with a K and Cathy with a C secretaries sketches from The Kids in the Hall, you’d practically get an hour long video about that world. They’re funny because they’re true, as I know as a former administrative assistant. For example, there are just some things about a secretary’s environment that is absolutely necessary for its proper functioning.

@Marina – that’s just WRONG.

Smart People was a pretty accurate portrayal of an academic’s life.

Working Girl.

The movie “Waiting”, With Ryan Renolds, is shockingly close to what behind the scenes in a restaurant looks like. People laugh, but I have actually seen most of the incidents portrayed, happen.

@Ghost_in_the_system – even “the goat”?

yup. Think on that the next time you eat out.

“The Lives of Others” – this won Best Foreign Film a couple of years ago, and though the occupation might be a tad obscure (some government official whose job is to listen to bugged conversations back before the Berlin Wall fell).