My preference would have been to consult my list of 2024 movies I still have to watch in the next month-plus, but that often involves doing an iTunes rental (something I initiate from my computer) and I could not be bothered at this point to go into the other room and do it. So instead I hopped on Amazon Prime, noting that there would likely be a new movie I'd never heard of that immediately struck me as something rank-worthy to watch.
True enough, there was: Joachim Back's Corner Office, an office satire staring John Hamm. It had the 2024 release year and everything to prove it.
Thirty minutes in, I was enjoying this movie so much that I went to check Wikipedia on my phone. I figured, if the release were just in the last week or so, I could actually write up a review -- possibly as soon as tomorrow morning. (Otherwise, this would be a full work week bereft of reviews. I did actually write a review for Better Man, but that's not coming out until December 26th, so I won't post it yet.)
So imagine my disappointment when the first thing I saw on Wikipedia was that Corner Office was listed as a 2022 movie. Not even 2023, but 2022.
That was when it first appeared at Tribeca, anyway. I quickly checked just to be sure it hadn't had a circuitous route to rear its head for the next time on Amazon Prime, but no, it was released in the U.S. August of last year.
Just to confirm a second time, I checked my friend Don's 2023 movie list, and there Corner Office was, ranked at #242. (That may sound like a particularly bad rating, but Don ranked 436 movies last year. He didn't like it as much as I did, in any case.)
Darn.
It's always a good experience when you see a movie you like. But in the month of December, I've gone from ahead of my previous pace to -- well, not quite behind it, but struggling to keep up with my ever-growing watchlist, and conscious of the days ticking away. Yesterday was the 12th day of December and yet I have seen only four films in December that qualify for 2024. (And don't forget, I still have to watch that Survivor finale.)
Amazon has gotten me this way before -- or, I should say, nearly gotten me until I avoided calamity at the last moment.
There's a certain subjectivity to their release years. They're not so deranged that they list the release year as the year it first streamed on Amazon Prime, though in the case of Corner Office, those would be one in the same. Really what I think it is is that the release years are at least, to some degree, customized by country, and I believe it's an Australian version of Amazon Prime I'm getting. (Even though rentals I purchase through Prime are charged to me through iTunes, somehow, because that's where my Apple TV is, and I have a U.S. Apple TV. At least I believe that's how it works.) It seems likely that the actual Australian debut of Corner Office was in 2024, and that's the explanation for the year. That doesn't help me in terms of my year-end rankings, though, since I go by U.S. release year.
It does resolve one problem for me, though -- a problem that has been accentuated by Don's middling ranking of the movie. As I was watching, I was having a hard time deciding just how good the movie was, but it was somewhere between really good and great. Because at this time of the year, I'm always willing to give a new movie a chance to blow up my current top ten, I was trying to decide if Corner Office was that good. Now, I don't have to worry about that.
It is, however, the third movie I've watched this year in which Hamm's history playing Don Draper was somehow invoked. You may recall from this post that back in May, I saw two movies in one weekend in which both Hamm and John Slattery appeared, one not invoking Mad Men in any explicit way other than the pairing, the other featuring a direct riff on their characters from that show. Corner Office was a bit more like the latter, as the premise is that Hamm's character, a socially awkward office drone, discovers an unused room in his dystopian high rise that resembles the best corner office that series might have ever created, with perfectly appointed mid-century furniture and other luxurious details, which helps his character become more focused and get ahead at work.
It certainly shouldn't surprise us to see someone like Hamm excelling in that environment, given the hours he toiled in such an environment as Don Draper.
No comments:
Post a Comment