He Was a Quiet Man

An unhinged office worker who planned to go on a shooting spree at his workplace struggles with his newfound status as a hero after he ends up stopping a shooting spree instead. A troubled loner, Bob Maconel, imagines blowing up the tower in Los Angeles where he works. He takes a revolver to his office intent on killing colleagues, and then himself. At home, he holds conversations with his fish, who encourage him to do it. His supervisor picks on him. As he's screwing his courage to the sticking place, he drops a bullet; while on the floor looking for it, another colleague does exactly what Bob has been planning. Bob emerges a hero and the one colleague he likes, a woman with a bright smile, is severely wounded. Can Bob help her through despair and find himself and joy in life? Or, as everyone says, is this impossible for a man like him? —<jhailey@hotmail.com> In Los Angeles, the lonely and paranoid Bob Maconel is a complete loser: at home, in spite of living in the same place for five years, his next door neighbor ignores his existence and he only talks to his alter-ego golden fish in his aquarium; in the office at ADD company, he is abused and humiliated by his colleagues and nobody has ever asked an opinion of him or invited him to happy-hour. Every now and then Bob imagines shooting his coworkers or blowing up ADD's building. When the man in the next cubicle has a breakdown and shoots his colleagues, Bob kills him with five shots and becomes a popular local hero. His boss Gene Shelby moves him from his cubicle to an office and makes him the VP of Creative Thinking as the substitute for Vanessa Parks, who has become quadriplegic with one bullet in her spine. Bob visits Vanessa in the hospital and after the initial rejection, she asks him to help her to commit suicide. Instead, they become close and Bob falls in love with Vanessa. But the mistreatment in the past and lack of confidence of the quiet Bob haunt him, driving him toward insanity. —Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil