Day 8 TIFF

Today’s theme = Jobs

Severance

A bunch of employees for a defense company (aka weapons) goes to Hungary for a team-building trip. Since it’s a horror movie, they went into the wrong route and terrible things starts to happen and people starts to get killed. While the concept was not original, and the movie is not very engaging in the first 30 minutes or so. The ending certainly more than made up for it. Director Chris Smith invented some interesting ways to kill people, and there is some good humor in there. Grade B

Outsourced

A friend of mine used to work in an American company; his entire department was outsourced to India, so some of his co-workers traveled to India to train their replacements. Their training basically consists of learning American Accents and Slang.

The stories I heard are very similar to Outsourced. The culture between the two countries cannot be more different. The movie did a good job in exploring that fact and found a lot of humor in it. I especially like the ones that involve American Slings (the American said to the Indian to ‘Break a Leg’ and the Indian was mortified but then the American explained to him that ‘Break a Leg’ is an expression, it means good luck. So the Indian smiled and said ‘Sir, may two legs be broken’). The movie doesn’t have a distribution deal yet, and I think it would play well in North America. It’s pretty mainstream comedy with a slice of truth in it. I don’t think there are any fiction movies that used outsourcing as a topic, even though it is a reality now. Hopefully, it can find distribution, because this movie is probably better than 90% of what’s out there in the multiplex today. Grade B+