Barbara Lippert's Critique: HBO's Latest Gem

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This little film, promoting the previously unheralded and unpromisingly named “Water Cooler Association of America,” is hilarious from the opening drip. (Actually, it’s more of a plink-plink-plink sound, which is even funnier.)

A sort of no-budget documentary-cum-industrial-trailer, it opens on the trade group’s sad old buffalo-nickel-style logo (a lighthouse in a circle) and plunges right into how bad business used to be, with a clipped and somber British voiceover telling us that “the American workforce had stopped gathering around water coolers.”

AW+

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