Who's In It: Sean Biggerstaff, Emilia Fox, Shaun Evans, Michelle Ryan, Stuart Goodwin
The Basics: When you're in college, and your girlfriend breaks up with you and you become depressed and sleepless, what do you do? If you're the guy in this movie, you decide to get a job in a wacky 24-hour supermarket where you spend the graveyard shift pretending your life is a Michel Gondry film, one where you have the power to stop time and get hot chicks naked. It's just that no one ever tells you that all the nudity in the world can't make a tired coming-of-age story interesting.
What's the Deal? How come all the drudgery-filled, crushingly boring college jobs I had only involved washing dishes or flipping Quarter Pounders at the world's most evil McDonalds? Why wasn't I surrounded by fascinatingly eccentric characters who spent their shifts devising elaborate, logistics-challenging pranks while still getting their work done and never getting fired for their antics? And is it impossible to make a movie with something to say about the mundane nature of late adolescence that doesn't involve stuff like this? Will anyone make one better than Clerks? I'd rather watch Career Opportunities again than this …
Where It Comes From: U.K. director Sean Ellis; plus, this used to be a short film with the same title, nominated for an Oscar in 2004. That one was about 20 minutes and mostly about the fight against boredom on the job. This attempt to supersize the idea takes a cutesy premise, ups the goofiness and adds puddle-deep emotional jabbering about time and beauty and love. Stoner college students might find it fascinating, but that's about it.
Where You've Seen (and Will See) the Actors: Biggerstaff is Oliver Wood in the Harry Potter series. Meanwhile, Ryan is about to know what it's really like to be on a set with rage-issue-having Hollywood folks like Isaiah Washington when she stars as The Bionic Woman this fall on ABC.
For Fans Of: Middlebrow Brit-coms on BBC America. And naked ladies.