Haiku Tunnel

Jacob and Josh Kornbluth adapted Josh's comic monologue "Haiku Tunnel" to serve as a screenplay for the new film of the same name, but they didn't adapt it enough. This is obvious from the opening seconds of the film, which are devoted to a painfully unfunny explanation of the legal stance that the film is about fictional people, not the real people on whom the fictional people are based.

"Oh, hi!" star Josh says, turning to the audience with a more expansive brightness on his face than really should be there. "I'm Josh Kornbluth. You know, we tried to screen the audience, to keep out, you know, lawyers..." He continues in this vein for what seems like an hour, drawing out words that seem especially funny to him, indulging himself numerous unusual but not amusing facial expressions, and generally talking to the camera as if it were a distant audience of dim faces.

But the camera is a lot closer to Josh than any audience ever was, and the mugging and overenunciation which might reach the dude at the back of the club come across variously as overbearing, self-satisfied, and just plain tedious on camera. It's an insufferable beginning to what, despite occasional funny moments, ends up being a truly insufferable film.

"Haiku Tunnel"'s failure is unfortunate, because it fitfully explores the wonderful world of temp work, a comic territory as fertile as it is unplowed. Josh Kornbluth plays someone identified in the credits as "Josh Kornbluth," with the quotation marks, who has been temping in the beautiful fictional city of "San FrancLisco" (yes, that's a "joke") for some time. He revels in the freedom temping brings, he takes pride in his work, and he finds time to work on his novel. But he also feels a gnawing psychological pain stemming from the lack of permanence in his life, and ends up "going perm" at a law firm called Schuyler & Mitchell (S&M for short - you see the level we're working at) when the company offers to pay for his therapy.

Unfortunately, Josh's work ethic disappears as soon as he becomes perm, and complications begin piling up, particularly relating to seventeen letters which Josh just can't seem to bring himself to deliver. Should he return to the bliss of the Haiku Tunnel temp project he left for this job? Or should he go through a series of bizarre neurosis-induced plot contortions that have progressively less and less to do with anything amusing? He picks the wrong one.

The really maddening thing is that "Haiku Tunnel" is extremely funny for about twenty minutes when the Kornbluths are actually concentrating on office life as it is lived by temps, the lowest of the low, and the perms who work just one rung above them. "The Simpsons"'s Harry Shearer has a hilarious cameo as the orientation leader we've all had who seems to think that no one can possibly comprehend how to unjam a copier unless he explains it very, very slowly. The insane grinding repetitiveness of office breaktime chatter serves as the source of much hilarity. And of all the times Josh stops the plot to deliver momentum-destroying monologue snippets, the only laugh-inducing moment is when he heatedly extols the virtues of the Faber-Castell Uni-Ball Micro pen, a truly quality product beloved by temps and perms everywhere.

But the Kornbluths can't seem to concentrate on office life, and instead run "Josh" through the plot contortions mentioned earlier. These, incidentally, portray "Josh" as not only the luckiest guy in the world but a man deserving of that luck, even as the audience is less and less inclined to believe it. (A subplot where he becomes an object of instant sexual desire is, to say the least, highly unrealistic.) And through it all, Josh continues his tiresome performance, glibly exaggerating his every word and movement, presenting his annoying antics as if they are endearingly quirky, and generally acting like he really believes he's the funniest thing since W.C Fields. That's the kind of painful misconception that'll get a film laid off from a theater near you.

SOMEONE MAKE A GOOD DAMN TEMP MOVIE ALREADY

Look, I've worked as a temp, and in a couple jobs so degrading that they might as well have been temp jobs, and there is enough quiet desperation, grating indignity and pointless busywork in any temp's life to inspire a good comedy. Not that my last temp posting, at the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, was anything at all painful; there are three people from there on this list, so you know they have some truly outstanding staff. But come on, filmmakers! One of the eternal principles of making good comedy is that people will always laugh at their own pain when it happens to someone else. There are more temps in America than there have ever been now, and the vast majority of them feel to some degree or another like disposable, shunned afterthoughts. There's your market. Bring on the temp comedies.

MORE THAN 17 SYLLABLES

Which reviewer do I admire and attempt to emulate, not necessarily in opinion but in writing style and outlook? Which reviewer do I respect but not really like?

"Apart from intermittent groans of exasperation, the Haiku Tunnel press screening that I attended was as silent as a wake. An hour into the movie, someone in the center of the theater made a sound that could have been interpreted as a titter. Incredulous faces turned in his direction only to discover that the hapless reviewer was merely suppressing a cough. Despite an overwhelming impulse to flee, I remained seated through the final frame. That's what I did for you this week, reader. Now what are you going to do for me?" - Joel E. Siegel, Washington City Paper

"Now…[Man] spends his weary days in torture chambers called 'offices,' undergoing various torments, treacheries, obliquities and improprieties, pickling in the briny absurdity of it all. Is any man or woman - excepting, of course, film critics, who have obscenely pleasant lives - happy in an office? Possibly nowhere on earth, and Josh Kornbluth's witty quasi-movie Haiku Tunnel is an incisive examination of the sicknesses that four walls, one window, a desk and a pile of work amid a crowd of allies and competitors engenders. ... One solution to all these problems is for all humans in the world to become film critics; failing that, I can only suggest 90 minutes spent with the observant Kornbluth. It'll make your misery ache a little less." - Stephen Hunter, Washington Post

I didn't agree with Hunter, but he was being a lot more generous and less self-important than Siegel here. Hunter has been getting a little snotty lately (2003), but I hope he'll pull out of it. I have a lot more hope for that than I do that Siegel will pull out of his arch dismissiveness, anyway.

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