Movie Scene
Little rhyme, or reason, in this 'Haiku'

By Mike Clark
Gannett News Service

HAIKU TUNNEL Stars: Josh Kornbluth, Warren Keith, Helen Shumaker and Amy Resnick Director: Jacob Kornbluth and Josh Kornbluth Rated: R, with rough language and some sexuality Length: 92 minutes Rated: * * 1/2

More audiences than not approach them with a nodding "been there" attitude, a gift to filmmakers trying to get strangers to identify with their characters.

Haiku Tunnel, a San Francisco-based comedy, squanders this advantage. Idiosyncratic but slight, it wouldn't seem very funny even if 1999's Office Space (growing as a cult movie) didn't exceedingly outpace it in laughs. Co-writer/co-director Josh Kornbluth (his brother, Jacob, also contributed to the script) plays a transplanted, affable New York bundle of nerves -- also named Josh Kornbluth -- who is temping at a law office.

Hearing Schuyler & Mitchell referred to as S&M is as biting as the screenplay gets.

Bald and overweight, Josh has just broken off his relationship with a super-trim mountain bicyclist, which comes off as the filmmaker's only-in-a-dream-world set-up.

The movie isn't about much beyond Josh's inability to mail 17 of his new boss's "very important letters," his date with a woman who thinks he's a lawyer, and his headaches with a computer-support guy while trying to write a novel on company time.

The movie gets it right that these people control every office worker's life.

Kornbluth has an irritating habit of interrupting the story to lecture us in front of a blackboard, needlessly reinforcing every mild comic idea we've just seen. The device must add 15 minutes to a 90-minute movie, which is already too long.

It makes you want to start moving globs of dirt to tunnel out of the theater as the movie ends with the famous theme to The Great Escape.