After watching "In The Company of Men" it left me with an awful taste in my mouth. But at the same time it was a great movie watching experience as we examine the more lower depths of how inhumane we can really be as a society and yet still somehow manage to get with doing our actions. The strange irony is that this film runs at very unreasonable levels. The two leading male characters are couple of hateful humans that it in-spite of their wicked demeanour, I still seemed quite intrigued as what will transpire between these characters. Neil LaBute who wrote and directed this film gave freedom to the movie to just let things flow and avoids it from being preachy or overly moralizing. To me it makes this comedy all the more darker and at the same time more effective too.This tale focuses on a businessman named Chard (Aaron Eckhart), who without hesitation brutally confesses to his friend Howard (Matt Malloy) how much he despises all that is female. So then Chard persuades Howard into a scheming plot in which they're lead on a vulnerable woman and eventually when all is said and done, he will dump her. Chad's reason is a vicious plot at revenge due to the ways women have treated men. Chad assumes that their six-week hiatus to a satellite office is the perfect facility to carry this cruel scheme and while at that take the time to make a mockery on this poor victim at her expense. Howard himself goes along with the scheme feeling that this master-plan will backfire and through self-obligation, sides with Chad to see what will transpire. The plan starts to materialize as the lab rat for this scheme is a naive, shy secretary named Christine (Stacy Edwards) who works at the satellite office who is also deaf. The whole film, Chad and Howard take turns charming Christine, while that's progressing, their scheme starts to get out of control and takes its turns in expected turn of events.The manipulative schemes the men have on poor Christine are very deceitful that it's hard to watch at times. In the case of Chad, the plot is an attempt to emerge victorious as a ploy to further express his disdain to the female gender. Howard feels this scheme is unlawful, it more like to be aware of what's inside looking out instead of vice-versa. The audience and even Hoawrd himself know this plot will not work out. In most movies and T.V. shows they never do. But it's still intriguing in how this plan will come crashing down on them. And we hope that there might be a small fragment of humanity between Chad and Howard. Sure the outcome is predictable, but it's still fun to watch how it will backfire. The reason for dark comedy isn't the jokes or the action by the leading stars, but the laughter rests in the vicinity of what lengths people will go to to express how hateful we as human race truly are.The character-driven film scores high points in terms of depth. In addition to that it makes us reconsider our actions by what we say and do I'm glad that Mr. LaBute ended the film with a moral lesson or a perfectly wrapped happy ending. In the end in this case, the antagonist comes out the winner. And in the real world, bad people usually end up victorious in many situations. Granted Chad is a handsome individual and can wow the ladies with his charm quite easily. But at the same time time he's hypocritical, obnoxious and quite the condescending person who looks a nice person you want to punch in the mouth with. But he is still easy to identify with. There are a lot of Chad's out there And yet you feel sick to your stomach because you understand the psyche of this character so in the end I'm the jerk that has the egg on his face. The whole Chad, Howard and Christine love factor has some noteworthy things of interest here. You have two to put it loosely gentlemen of contrasting backgrounds. You have Chad, the handsome, suave ladies man, and then you have Howard who comes across as socially awkward who like most people of his kind in society are the one's who never come out on top (me included). And it's obvious Christine chooses the suave one over the awkward one. Matt Malloy was excellent portraying Howard. At fist he come across as an introverted individual. However, in the pivotal scenes in the end, it's a breath of fresh air when he lashes out when his buttons are pushed.Once the dust settles, we find these two jerks madly in love with Christine being the unlucky victim due to her being deaf. Both fall victim to the metaphoric love potion. Chad is at a loss of words to admit he loves her while Howard feels short that lost in a situation where he should have won. But in spite of the shortcomings within the characters, it is a wonderful character-driven story that might be hard to swallow in some situations.

Neil Labute's "In The Company of Men" stars Aaron Eckhart and Matt Malloy as Chad and Howard, a pair of mid-level corporate executives sent to a boring regional branch for six weeks on a short term project. Frustrated, recently burnt by women, stuck in a career rut and high on corporate testosterone, the duo hatch a plan. "Let's hurt somebody," alpha-male Chad says. Pretty soon they're cooking up a Machiavellian scheme to locate an insecure woman, date her simultaneously, and dump her in the most vicious way possible. The woman they set their sights on is handicapped co-worker Christine. Christine has a speech impediment, but what she says doesn't matter to Chad anyway. Denied a voice, Chad handles her like an object to be acquired, traded, owned and discarded.Labute is heavily influenced by David Mamet. Most of the film finds Chad spewing corporate maxims, strutting about like a Master of the Universe and forcing co-workers to grovel at his feet. Eventually its revealed that Chad's scheming extends even to his "friend" Howard. He's your classic Extreme Sociopath, charming but endlessly manipulative. Everyone's his puppet. And as with Mamet's "workplace flicks", Chad's less a character than an extreme manifestation of a corporate logic whose drive for profit, ownership and expansion slowly infects how everyone around him thinks, acts and feels. Eventually Chad becomes both a norm and standard to aspire to. He's the new hypermasculinist ideal, for whom humiliation, domination, degradation, exploitation and suffering conflate with success. It's not only that aggressive competition in business affects masculinity, romance and sexual behaviour, but that corporate logic magnifies power, the ego and sanctions what is essentially various forms of rape. This stance is the opposite of how contemporary ideology is (mis)perceived, in which "business" is seen to be "neutral" and "mutually beneficial".Chad's a character who's popped up in many films and stories. More interesting is Howard, a fairly meek guy who is corrupted and made to do things even more horrible than Chad. The real world is made up of Howards. Chad's the anomaly, existing always more as spirit or underlying drive.La Bute penned "The Shape of Things" as an attempt to reverse the gender roles of "Company". Arguably his best film, it's also part of a tight trilogy by Labute about people's perceptions of physicality ("Fat Pig", "Reasons to be Pretty", "Shape of Things"). Massive spoilers ahead."The Shape of Things" initially unfolds like a conventional romantic comedy. We're introduced to a dishevelled English Literature student called Adam, played by the always likable Paul Rudd, and an attractive art student called Evelyn (Rachel Weisz). The film then becomes a modern version of Adam's seduction by Eve. Eve ensnares Adam, manipulates him into becoming "fit", "attractive" and "healthy", and then reveals that she has never had romantic feelings toward him; she was merely using Adam as a sort of living art installation, a clay puppet, deceptively sculpting and moulding his mind and body. When Eve reveals her scheme to Adam – she invites him to an art installation in which he is quite literally presented as an exhibited object, her gaze now likened to the masculinist gaze of "In The Company of Men" - he's dumbfounded. Eve's tricked him into getting cosmetic surgery and altering his personality and physique. She's reconstructed him. Treated him as a chunk of malleable flesh.Unlike "Company", we're then invited to work our way through the messy ethical minefield of the victimiser's actions. For while Chad deservedly gets no sympathy in "Company", the relationship in "Things" is much harder to work out. Is Adam now a better person? Was Eve's love, no matter how virtual, beneficial to Adam? Was it ever real? How much authority should be given, or do we give, to artists? How much ethical responsibility do they hold or exercise? How do power relationships within romantic couples overlap with the power we grant artists? Don't Eve's actions echo the sexism of "Compny"? What is acceptable artistic material? Do the means, in art, justify the ends? At what point does creation become manipulation, is manipulation ever justified and at what point does creation destroy (see "Vertigo")? Is Adam now a beautiful work of "art" despite Eve's actions? How do Eve's actions differ from other vampiric artists, who take from and/or abuse outside sources? What does the film say about romance and the lover's desire to alter their partner? Art may be made by monsters, but what about the audience who enjoys? And on and on it goes.The film features a shot of the sentence "There is no morality in art". The quote's by Chinese novelist Han Suiyin, and is stencilled over Eve's art gallery. Throughout the film Eve articulates a similarly postmodern stance: "it's all subjective", she says, "moralists have no place in an art gallery". The firm itself is structured, we think, as an artist's apologia. Its first scene portrays Eve as an iconoclast who thrice breaks the rules, stepping over a rope at a museum, taking an illegal photograph of a sculpture and painting a penis onto a statue which has been censored by uptight museum curators. "You stepped over the line, Miss," curator Adam prophetically says when he firsts meets her. But as Eve makes clear, there should be no lines. We agree with her for much of the film. Afterall, hasn't she liberated Adam? By the film's end, however, we're asked to reconsider Eve's stance. Labute himself reconfigures Han Suiyin's quote. It's not that "there is no morality in art", in the sense that morality should not apply to art, but more literally, that "there is now, no longer, morality in art". Artists have no ethical compass, social feeling or attachment toward world, community or fellowman. Such art doesn't only exist in a vacuum, but is inherently selfish and nihilistic. You know, like Chad. 8/10 - Worth one viewing.

Almost every line and every scene in this tight, aggressive film is purposeful. Aaron Eckhart's performance as Chad is relaxed, controlled, and indifferently sadistic without being brutal. Matt Malloy's performance as Howard is absolutely necessary to the success of the film. The audience is never supposed to respect Howard, and Malloy commits unflinchingly to the role.Howard, in the end, discovers that he has been purposelessly led by his own weakness to want vindication for his ego--instead, he becomes a pathetic imitation of a romantic hero for a moral purpose he pretended to ignore.Some of the script suffers from believability. The beginning of the film, when Howard is slapped for asking a woman the time, is pretty unreasonable. If the film is (even an implicit) argument that women provoke men to be cruel, it proceeds from a false premise.The story boils down to the simple logic that Chad can manipulate and destroy Howard because Howard believes he's able to manipulate and destroy someone else.I envision Chad as a kind of false Satan--a man who pretends to be against God and morality solely for the purpose of seducing and destroying the lives of characters who believe in him."How does it feel to really hurt someone?"

In an attempt to strike a blow for every man that has been wronged by a woman, Chad and Howard plan to seduce the same woman and then simultaneously break her heart........Bleak in its satirical portrayals, In The Company Of Men has proved to be a highly debatable and controversial movie. Splitting critics right down the middle, it's been called everything from a misogynistic rant to an astute modern day masterpiece, the truth is that it's neither of those things. Tho the crux of the story suggests misogyny is its central axis, both men here are painted in less than favourable light, and in fact the central female of the piece {wonderfully played by Stacy Edwards} is far stronger than most female characters in modern day cinema. Cheaply made and set in some nameless corporate company, director Neil LaBute crafts what is in essence a black comedy about corporate suits who backbite with carefree abandon, the men versus women arc is merely a strand in LaBute's intriguing picture.It's a film that most definitely is memorable, if not just for Aaron Eckhart's portrayal of Chad, one of the 90s most despicable characters, but also for its cheeky and unexpected finale. The performances are strong and those who enjoy a dialogue driven pictures will revel in what is on offer here. It also serves as an interesting reference point to LaBute as a director, this being his debut feature, it showed a great deal of promise, but has that promise been realised? Nurse Betty, Possession and the ill advised remake of The Wicker Man suggest LaBute may need to stick to the basics of his talent, I shall be an interesting observer of Lakeview Terrace & the upcoming Death At A Funeral. 7/10