Fired!

Fired! (2007)

** (out of 4)

After being fired from a play by Woody Allen, actress Annabelle Gurwitch turned the experience into a stage play as well as this documentary that takes a look at what it's like to be fired. Gurwitch tells her story and we get appearances from other famous people who share their stories of being let go from their jobs. Some of these people include Tim Allen, Andy Dick (shock), Illeana Douglas, Sarah Silverman, Fred Willard, Andy Borowitz, Fisher Stevens, Jeffrey Ross and Richard kind. I think there might have been a good idea somewhere in the story but sadly FIRED! isn't nearly as funny or charming as it thinks it is. I think there are several problems with the biggest one being that the film bounces back and forth between silly, over-the-top comedy and then it tries to take some sort of serious look at being fired. At just 72-minutes the film seems to go on even longer because we get some pretty boring and silly scenes like when Gurwitch is talking to her Rabbi about being fired by Woody Allen and we get another bit where she talks to a grief councilor. Towards the end of the film we start to get more dramatic tellings including the issues in Detroit where thousands of people have lost their jobs to save companies money yet the companies give their CEOs raises. The entire film just feels very uneven and the mix and comedy and drama doesn't work. Plus, it doesn't help that the majority of the time the comedy doesn't work. We basically get celebrities talking about what they did to get fired and while watching most of them I kept asking myself why I should care. Even the main story, Gurwitch getting fired, seems to be a forced issue because if it wasn't Woody Allen who fired her then she really wouldn't have a story or a message. It's because she got fired by a famous person that allowed her to make this. It's too bad she couldn't have interviewed Allen.

Annabelle Gurwitch has a certain amount of sadsack charm, but that's not enough to carry an entire film that is mostly about comedians and other performers who regale us with their ever-so-funny experiences about getting fired.

This is a one-trick pony of a film that somehow pretends to have much deeper import -- i.e. 'downsizing in America,' which is a truly devastating problem affecting many millions of people in the U.S. and other Western countries. It's isn't light-hearted hilarity to be driven to the sidelines of society, perhaps never to return.

I think Gurwitch means well, but I kept wondering how many of the stories in this film were actual or imagined. Call me cynical (which I am, of course), but performers are trained (and paid) to be 'on,' to pretend they're someone else.

There's too much 'padding' in this film. The segments with the truly irritating Andy Dick, as just one example, should have been excised or at least shortened. Somebody, somewhere, once told Dick that he was funny and, alas, he took it seriously. And I've never seen Fred Willard, Jeff Garlin and Harry Shearer so UNfunny. How is that possible?

Nice try anyway.

This is my first ever comment on a film and I was compelled by my conscience to sign up and post this as a penance for having watched this film.

I found nothing entertaining , remotely funny, or even watchable in this mess. In fact it made me feel like my existence must be pathetic for actually spending part of my time watching this drivel.

The only reason I attempted to watch it was the title and quite frankly I feel cheated. I could think of several interesting treatments of being fired but this one was the most disappointing of my movie watching experience (1287 to date). It makes my top ten worst films ever list at #1.

It really amazes me that people invested in this and didn't pull the plug before they lost all their money.

I'm kicking myself for watching as much of it as I did.

Definitely glad that I've never been fired. I just . . . stop working, I suppose. I guess I never realized how many documentaries I own until this movie. Probably quite a few more than normal people . . .

This can declare it's a movie as much as it wants to and that doesn't change anything. This is nothing more than a special to air between movies on the Sundance channel. If that's true, it's more than an hour too long.

As for what this is about: The lead gets fired from a Woody Allen play and needs the support of her friends support to move on. That's understandable but it's also a great setup for a bad sitcom. However, those friends are minor celebrities which might be somewhat interesting but it just ends up being annoying. All of the friends (as well as the lead) are trying to play the "pay attention to me" game. To make matters even worse, they're just complaining about their first jobs in such a way that you might think they don't know a lower class exists.