For smarter audiences… THE SEARCH FOR JOHN GISSING

In a rumbling, tumbling, stumbling economy that shows as much hope for revival as THE BLONDE IN THE THUNDERBIRD (Suzanne Somers’ one-woman Broadway debacle) perhaps it’s time we start adopting some coping skills rather than hoping wills can triumph over (a) greater depression.

THE SEARCH FOR JOHN GISSING was released in 2001 — and just now on dvd — yet it serves as a strategic plan for our individual responses to myriad professional threats. Alan Rickman (TRULY MADLY DEEPLY), the highly-sought title character, is not lost, but lurking in the shadows of his company, determined to keep his job at all costs, as a rank Yank (Mike Binder) threatens to steal his thunder, his desk, his paycheck… unwittingly. The sublime yet subprime Rickman mortgages his conscience, taunting and entrapping his American colleague in an amusing, escalating sequence of spousal peccadillos and accounting imbroglios designed to scapegoat the gullible interloper. Complicating three-ring Binder’s circus is his wife, Janeane Garafolo, whose sardonicism catalyzes hubby’s evolution from grindstone-weathered brown-noser to back-stabbing blackguard, a necessary corporate progression and obvious moral regression. Whether he’ll ever reverse course is the potential payoff for investing your time in this richly comic tale.

Writer/director/star Mike Binder (MAN ABOUT TOWN) is Albert Brooks by way of Conan O’Brien; he’s a self-loathing Jew with a Goyish, boyish love of silliness. THE SEARCH FOR JOHN GISSING leads to unexpected findings; reminding viewers to reconsider career ladder-climbs before scaling up… or bailing out.

For THE SEARCH FOR JOHN GISSING‘s trailer and more info, please visit: http://mikebinder.net/.