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How to Get Ahead in Advertising
UK 1989
produced by David Wimbury, George Harrison (executive), Denis O'Brien (executive) for HandMade Films
directed by Bruce Robinson
starring Richard E.Grant, Rachel Ward, Richard Wilson, Jacqueline Tong, John Shrapnel, Susan Wooldridge, Hugh Armstrong, Mick Ford, Jacqueline Pearce, Christopher Simon, Gino Melvazzi, Victor Lucas, Dawn Keeler, Kerryann White, Vivienne McKone, Donald Hoath, John Levitt, Gordon Gostelow, Pip Torrens, Tony Slattery, Rachel Fielding, Pauline Melville, Roddy Maude-Roxby, Francesca Longrigg, Tanveer Ghani, Joanna Mays, Sean Bean
written by Bruce Robinson, music by David Dundas, Rick Wentworth, special effects sculptor: Richard Neal, animatronic effects by Daniel Parker, Nik Williams, David White
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned) |
Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!
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Bagley (Richard E.Grant) is the top creative director of an advertising
agency, and he can make a success out of everything it
seems - everything but a boil lotion apparently, the first product that
really leaves him stressed out - so much so that he quits his job and
questions everything he's ever done. Eventually he even comes to the
conclusion that advertising as such is the root of all evil. His
increasingly bizarre behaviour has his wife (Rachel Ward) worrying before
long, but that's nothing compared to when he grows a boil on his shoulder
and claims it's talking to him, almost as if it was his own evil self, a
ruthless marketing genius, standing for everything he has just denounced.
Of course, nobody believes he really has a talking pimple on his shoulder,
and he is even put into psychiatric care and it's decided to surgically
remove the boil ... but before it comes to that, the boil grows out of his
shoulder, becoming his second head, and when the head is fully grown, the
pimple-head takes over Bagley's body and presses the real head into his
shoulder, making it nothing more than a - well, boil. With the new
head, Bagley becomes his old self again, the top marketing man of his
agency, and he's even better (or worse) than before, because now he's
totally ruthless. So much so that his wife, who thought him insane when he
had his melt-down, figures there's really something wrong with him this
time, and now
she starts to listen to his pimple (which is Bagley's old, real head of
course), and ultiamtely she leaves him, while he, it seems, can't be
stopped, as he now tries (and might even succeed) to make pimple's
fashionable to create a perfect enviroment for his pimple cream ... A
biting satire on advertising and marketing self-consciously playing with
motives of trash horror and being beautifully carried by a manic performance by
Richard E.Grant, this film unfortunately falls a few feet short of its
promises: On a narrative level, the film's build-up seems near perfect, as
it gets more and more insane by the minute - but then it suddenly lets
it's story slip and comes to an abrupt ending that fails to be a
resolution to anything that has previously happened. Still, the film is
great fun, but it's just not the masterpiece it could have been had
someone put some more effort in its script.
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