James Groover I fully and completely refuse to Be subjected to services provided by Indian people. the bad thing is American people Have become lazy so they subcontract these companies from overseas to answer telephones when they should be paying Americans who need jobs to answer phones.I make a phone call The Indian operator answers. And I would hang up on his a**. I don't have to be subjected to a person who is supposed to know how to speak English answering a telephone for company that is supposed to have American English speaking answering services and get the Indian version can't even make a decent Sentence, much less be able to understand anything that I have to say about anything that I need to contact the company about.My suggestion is start boycotting anything that has to do with any company that wants to use an Indian operator because I absolutely refuse to speak to most companies and I will boycott till the end of my days.

arcdanku The explosion of call centers in India is an intriguing topic for a documentary, & I had heard a lot about this movie. Unfortunately, it just didn't work for me. The characters were just not that engaging, & in no case it went really deep into the call center life. In one case, a woman spends a lot of time explaining she is a natural blond. Now that's typical in an Indian call center! I would have liked to know more about where these people come from. What's their education. Their family. I also think it was centered on one city, and on sales only, whereas call centers also have tech support, customer service, market research & a whole lot of other activities. There were these shots of Mumbai that seemed to scream "look at me, I'm so artsy!" Further, overall the drudgery of call centers didn't really some through. Also, I would have liked to see the management side, how they react to the callers. I would have liked to see someone who got burnt-out (which is very common in call centers). There were some sequences that were very competent, but overall it felt it just didn't form a satisfying story, which is what a documentary should be.

mamlukman We wanted to see this in Toronto in Sept. 2005, but it was sold out. So we saw it at the DC Filmfest April 23, 2006. Some people will see it as rather boring and uninvolving. However, I thought it was impressive on several levels. As you go through the six sketches about the call center workers, it takes a while to realize that once you've left a character, that's it, you're not going back to see what happened to them. Enough is shown about each character to show you the essence of what makes them tick, but not enough to get you too emotionally involved. No matter what attitude you bring into the movie (mine was "the call centers are probably exploiting these people and overworking them"), your attitude will change during the movie. Certainly the first character, Glen, summed up what my feelings would probably be--trapped, hates the job, but see no way to escape. But that's Glen. As you go on, you see that the others really love their jobs and their lives, and that their lives have been transformed at a much deeper level by the job and the environment. I think for the real meaning of the movie you have to go back to the opening narration--it's a virtual life, with real people trapped in it. Some of them begin to see this virtual life as reality. Whether that's good or bad, I'm not sure--is it better to see the world completely realistically? Wouldn't you just commit suicide?--but to some extent we are all in the same boat, and that's what makes this movie much more than a documentary about a call center in Bombay.

paterfam001 'John & Jane' is a documentary about the outsourcing of telephone soliciting jobs to India, which has a large pool of underemployed young people who speak good English. Now it's not exactly big news in North America that telephone soliciting is a hateful job -- a traditional bottom-of-the-barrel for students needing extra money and those without marketable skills or work-history. Given this, the director of 'John & Jane' needs to make some further point, uniquely relevant to his culture, and I think he fails to do this.There is a good case to be made for the opinion that phone-soliciting is innately useless, and long sequences of perky young Indian girls pestering lonely old Texans with cheap long-distance phone plans might have made it. There is a case to be made for the soul-desiccating quality of the work, or for the inherent dishonesty of the companies who employ these young people, for the huge gap between the aspirations they arouse and the rewards they grant. There are good points to be made with the materials in this movie, and the director probably thought of them all, but frankly, he didn't make any of them with any conviction.The reason for this is, I think, mostly artistic, though perhaps diffuse and contradictory attitudes are behind the artistic failure. If the director had had a coherent point-of-view or a strong opinion, he might have edited the sequences of his various characters to some effect. As it is, they come in random order, and build toward no climax or point. Why would you put the sequence featuring the most rebellious, anarchic, foul-mouthed and colourful characters first? Why does the sequence with the self-deluded would-be billionaire come where it does? Why is the hopeful and naive religious girl placed where she is? The sequences -- the word is a misnomer -- have no sequence, no direction, and hence the points that might have been made are lost.Timing is also a problem, and this too is a problem of editing the material. The individual sequences go on too long. Tightly edited, this documentary would not remotely approach feature-film length. It could be edited to the forty-or-so minutes of a TV hour, and be very much better, artistically, for the cuts.It is possible that we saw a work-in-progress at Toronto Film Festival. I hope so, but I don't see this as a feature documentary, but as a TV hour, and a worthy one, if properly edited.