American Job
American Job is a narrative film about Randy Scott, a youth caught in the dismal confusion of living and working in the world of minimum wage. American Job follows main character Randy Scott through a number of low wage jobs: factory worker, fast food dishwasher, third shift inventory specialist, motel room custodian and telemarketer. We live with Randy through these jobs and witness the pain, absurdity and sheer boredom of minimum wage work.
“ **** Truly entertaining.”
John Petrakis, Chicago Tribune
Mr Smith’s deadpan fiction feature is packed with the hard-won, unfakeable detail and dialogue of experience- hilarious, bleak, absurd, numbing - from the front lines of minimum-wage monotony. Easily one of the decade’s best indie debuts, “American Job” sticks by it’s lanky, slack-jawed protagonist (Mr Russell) through a series of shuffling stints at a plastic-mold factory, a fast-food chicken joint, a telemarketing farm, and so on. Faithful to Mr Russell’s point of view with long take scenes, and fleshed out with a lived-in cast of co-workers and bosses, “American Job” rivals comedies such as Mike Judge’s “office Space” as a workplace classic.
NY Sun, Nicolas Raplod
“A miracle of Midwestern ingenuity and economy, Smith’s utterly remarkable first feature... [is] as hilarious as it is depressing.”
A. Taubin, The Village Voice
“American Job is a true delight. Funny, emotionally accurate, and expertly framed and edited, the film upends the TV-endoresed notion that the workplace offers us alienated Americans our surrogate families.”
Scott Macauley, Filmmaker Magazine
“Smith’s biting look at the working world is scathingly funny and surprisingly sad.”
Paul Birchall, Los Angeles Reader
“A stellar and too-little-seen film about, quite simply, what we do for work.”
Elizabeth Pincus, Harper’s Bazaar
“There is little here that won’t ring hilariously and depressingly true. This, finally is the America I know.”
San Francisco Bay Guardian
“Not only one of the best films of the decade, one of the best films ever made.”
John Rush, The Other Paper