The post title is essentially my capsule review of Firewall. I’m sure others have written about Harrison Ford beginning to have that scruffy/doddery/old-man-spell about him, so I won’t go on about his wife around my age and non-adult kids in the flick. Afterall, Hollywood loves them some May-December casting bullshit.

Nope, what yanked my chain was the part of his administrative assistant. That’s whats got me all wound for days. Harrison is the head of security for a 27-branch bank that’s in the middle of a merger. In other words, he’s an executive with a giant-ass house on the water, expensive car and nicely tailored suits. Quintessentially, LaLa-Land’s depiction of the white-collar working man with a bit of a money clip jingling in his pocket.

Of course, Mr. Alpha-male, white-collar, banking dude has a secretary, who’s clearly the Gal Friday, helps him out of a jam, thinking on her feet, prescient and helpful as all shit type. You know, pretty much every exec’s wet dream of competent, friendly with a sense of humor, just young enough and plain enough to not be his wet dream of dick sticking, ’cause that would be another movie.

So, people who write movies sometimes no shit about the real world, and there’s a pivotal scene where he goes seeking out this admin chick’s help. He rolls on up to her apartment, and the hallway opens to cramped, numbered, thin, wood door portals to a littered, ghetto-reeking hell. The wrong door, the neighbor across the hall, is shrieking poverty immigrant stereotype of anonymous doors in slums across any major city. He hits the right door and begs for a ride, in her beat up, shitbox, he needs to roll down the hill, while she pops the clutch, junkety ass heap of a car.

Fuck you Hollywood. I’ve been doing that admin gig for a bit now and fuck you, you know what? I own a fucking convertible. I own a condo. I rent nowhere near the littered ghettos of housing projects.

Why might all this be? Because, sure, I’ll give you a bit of soul-mashing from making the copies, printing, fetching, filing and whatever bullshit. But, it ain’t frying fries or cleaning toilets.

Check your facts, dudes of movie writing. A bank exec over 27 branches would have someone making his copies probably making more money than the humps on your crew. Yeah, LA PA may be a creative artiste living his/her NYU dreams of someday working for some movie making big deal, but they likely be living lower than the chick at the bank. It might be hell in corporate America, but not that hell.