"Any asshole in an Aeron chair, he's a fucking portal." Funny! That is, unless you're Yahoo, which thanks to Google doesn't have much business left besides as a content portal.

Tom (Hartnett) learns of layoffs at Pseudo.com — the real fake company of the era, according to founder Josh Harris.

Yes, that's an Apple Cube followed by an early PowerBook. Not to mention the nice detail of the period sound effects for sending and receiving in Mail.app.

Another actual reference, this time to Charlie Corwin, co-founder of LifeMusicChannel, an streaming video pioneer and early partner of MP3.com.

Yes, the Koosh™ — one of the ubiquitous toys that made working at an Internet company so much cooler than working at IBM, though maybe not if your options were underwater. Also served as handy double entendré for mating pairs looking to hook up after vesting.

In this scene, Rip Torn parrots Ed Bradley in the infamous 60 Minutes moment when RazorFish CEO Jeff Dachis choked on national television.

Here's the Jason Calacanis moment, in case you missed it in my overwrought review. Young Xeni Jardin, Clay Shirky and Rafat Ali all worked for his Silicon Alley Reporter hyping the New York tech scene before it imploded.

"B2B or not B2B." Yes, Howard Rodman manages to work a Hamlet reference into Hartnett's soliloquy.

And last but certainly not least, the scene where Hartnett's Tom finds his employees chuckling as they read LandShark's listing on FuckedCompany — creator Phillip Kaplan went on to found AdBrite, which from rumors we've heard might deserve a listing of its own soon enough.

If you go to see August, the Josh Hartnett vehicle/dot-bomb nostalgia trip, tomorrow night, watch the costar carefully. Adam Scott plays Joshua, a mild-mannered techie who cofounds Landshark with his blustering brother as CEO. "Joshua's not clean, either," Scott told me at last night's preview. Watch closely and here's what you'll spot:

As the Landshark crew head for their climactic meeting with old-money investor David Bowie, Joshua quietly disappears from the action. He claims the moral high ground over his blowhard CEO brother Tom, played by Hartnett: I did my part and built the thing, now it's up to you to sell it. But Joshua's real motivation, says Scott, is he's having his own meltdown. Unable to deal with the failure of the company that had made him worth over $100 million, Joshua quietly flees the office and holes up with family. In the film's first meeting scene, Joshua seems to be in charge over loose-cannon Tom. At the end, he's the one who doesn't show.

The film will appeal to at least three camps: Those for whom Hartnett can do no wrong, anyone who appreciates a "Please, God, give me another bubble before I die" bumper sticker and New Yorkers of a certain age. I can identify on two of the three counts, but still, the film felt like a naked Indiewood appeal for me to consider Hartnett a serious actor. For starters, how did this startup founder know about tight, pegged jeans; skinny, shapeless, twill-cotton sportcoats and "douchebag neck" tees three years before Williamsburg?

A steely-eyed, remorseless David Bowie gives the movie a certain cachet and this appearance by Jason Calacanis as a master booster will also have its draw. But I can't see it crossing any mainstream borders even after building bridges between psychographic camps. I'd give it the early-mover advantage, except a lot of the same territory was already covered better by Groove.

And it's not the kind of zany premise that gets people into theaters. For that, Prendergast put on a puffy blue suit with a giant, round head — the fictional icon of fictional technology company BlueNexion, which hires his character Salman to stand on a lonely stretch of Texas highway and, inevitably, get into hijinx. To its credit, it looks far more entertaining than August.

Watching the slapstick-and-ennui portrayal of a schlemiel as corporate mascot in the film's trailer couldn't help but remind me of the poor Podcast Pickle, familiar to anyone who's attended South by Southwest Interactive the last few years. The film opened in New York City on July 4, and will be coming to a hip theater near you here in the Bay Area on August 1.