I've been fired from a few jobs in my 36 years of life. There was this time I got canned from Tile City for 'purposely' breaking ceramic tiles. There was another time I was escorted off of a construction site for cursing off the foreman. It was so bad I was removed from the IBEW! Seeing as I had my experiences with losing my job, I figured it would be fun to watch Fired! and see how other people reacted when they got kicked to the curb.
The movie starts off simply enough: Annabelle Gurwitch is being told by Woody Allen that her voice is too high pitched and that she looks like a retard when saying her lines. Ultimately, he wouldn't be needing her for his new play. So after wallowing in her despair for a few days, Gurwitch decides to seek solace by talking to her friends, then ordinary people and policy makers. Through it all, she realizes that, as with all traumatic experiences, making fun of it and ultimately finding humor in it helps one cope. Hell, you can even make a living off of it . . .
But let's cut to the chase. The problems with Fired! are tri-fold. First and foremost, Annabelle Gurwitch is one annoying lady. Woody Allen is correct when he said her voice was painful to the ears. I found it very distracting and it actually made the movie seem so much longer than the 71 minutes it is (this is very bad for a documentary). Secondly, Gurwitch tries like hell to be funny in the same vein as the mock interviews done so brilliantly in shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. She fails miserably. Lastly, I felt only an egotistical whiner would make a spectacle about themselves getting fired. I felt zero compassion for her — hell, she's an actor for Christ's sake! If you decide to pursue that as a career, you should expect to be unemployed or at the very least be prepared for some major setbacks.
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1 - neal
If anyone is interested, Annabelle Gurwitch wrote a guest post on the Movielink blog, where she talks about the filming of Fired!