Dumped insomniac Ben (Sean Biggerstaff), an aspiring artist, takes a job at a supermarket to fill the hours once spent sleeping or mooning over his ex. There, he meets the motley crew and fills the empty hours with imagination. In a lengthy segment that formed the Academy Award-nominated short version of this film, Ben imagines everyone frozen in place. Two male employees are stuck midway through a prank, the cashier is about to scan something, and the (female) customers become nude artists models. (It’s erotic, but not smutty.) The sequence is visually striking, like much of the movie, if slightly pretentious. It’s as if Ingmar Bergman had gotten ahold of the Employee of the Month script and reworked it, saving just the bits about the crazy coworkers and the thread of the competition for the night shift’s lone female. Although it’s very funny in parts—and indeed, funny in the ways that the Dane Cook-Jessica Simpson comedy strived to be but rarely was—it has an existentialist layer as well, with a little magical realism thrown in. The characters, especially Ben, are strong. British writer-director Sean Ellis is one to watch.
IMDB link
reviewed 7/23/07
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