Swimming with Sharks

Guy takes a job as assistant to a powerful studio executive in Hollywood. Buddy Ackerman humiliates him over everything from the sugar in the coffee to which ring of the phone he answers on, shouting and grinding him down systematically. The film runs in two times: his first days on the job, and the night he ties Buddy up in his own house and takes revenge. George Huang wrote it out of his own experience working at Columbia Pictures, after leaving that job in 1993. That is where the harshness comes from. The humiliation scenes read as testimony rather than exaggeration. Kevin Spacey plays Buddy, Frank Whaley the assistant, and Michelle Forbes the producer between them. Its flaw is that the explanation in the last act shrinks a piece of social sharpness into a personal story, and the torture scenes run longer than they need to. Who it is for: viewers who like Hollywood satire and hard dialogue. Who it is not for: anyone looking for someone to like.