Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It is fascinating that after viewing How to Get Ahead in Advertising I began to think of similarities to Terry Gilliam's adaptation to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Both are very much comedies, yet in a more cerebral, dialogue driven way than just a vehicle for cheap laughs. These movies are funny in a way that makes the audience think and see the satire that is laid out before them. The world we live in is crazy and these tales subvert the insanity in order to comment on it. Originally I was expecting a British comedy of dry humor and good old-fashioned cheekiness and instead was surprised to find a dialogue heavy drama made funny by the fantastic performance from lead Richard E. Grant. Director Bruce Robinson has only directed three films in his career and, along with Withnail and I, has twice been given the Criterion Collection treatment. I will definitely be checking that film out post haste as I finally have reason to other than the strict curiosity struck by the drawings of Ralph Steadman, who coincidentally drew for Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing included. To make the small world seem even smaller, it appears Robinson has become attached to direct that film's sequel, The Rum Diary. While I love Gilliam, I am excited by the prospects of Robinson's like-mindedness combining with the genius that was Thompson's writing to weave a new masterpiece around Johnny Depp's return performance. I will however hope for an appearance from Grant as he is underused in cinema yet proves here he can handle a role that most definitely will be included in a Thompson story.Grant is an ad-exec at the top of his game. He is the go-to-guy for all sales pitches and at the moment is on the job to sell pimple cream. It ends up that he has no clue how to come up with an idea to end boils. The weight of the stress and anxiety soon becomes too much, and not only does a boil form on his shoulder, but it also begins to speak to him. The cutthroat panache he has used to build his career becomes fractured with a new sense of being and enlightenment to the fact that advertising, as an occupation, is a way of population control. Grant becomes aware that people like him have created a "big brother" type regulating that which the public buys and very well needs to survive. This newfound conscious soon finds itself berated and overtaken by the driven mentality displaced to the boil. All the ferocity he once held in check to be successful has become a split personality to be wholly unleashed on the world.The duality of character is left ambiguous throughout the film, as you never truly know whether the boil is alive or if both personalities come from an irrational mind. Grant plays the moments with perfect comic timing, oftentimes covering his mouth when the boil talks even though the voice is different than his own. The filmmakers do a great job of keeping the audience guessing, especially when early on we see him talking into a camera with the boil speaking while his mouth remains closed. We would then believe that the voice is real and separate from his mind until later on when his wife views the film. Grant's character in real life speaks the lines the boil would have on the tape, thus subverting whether the voice was real at all. Is he drowning out the boil or was the boil never speaking and only silence would have been heard had he not spoken in the present? All instances of philosophical inquiry into the mind control advertisers have over the general public are deftly handled and serious in tone. It is this give and take between the cerebral and the insane that makes the film work. Without Grant's total encompassing of his role, How to Get Ahead in Advertising would ultimately fail and become a pretentious mess of ill-conceived scope. His performance grounds the insight given into some realm of reality and helps allow the over-stylized approach work by making fun of its own pretentiousness.

Just to illustrate Black_Rider's depth of critical thought (or lack thereof), I'd like to point out that there are more trees in the U.S. now than there were in colonial times because the country is about 10 times as large now (thanks to native genocide and the unprovoked invasion of Mexico, among other things). That's one essential point of How to Get Ahead in Advertising: capitalism isn't about products, it's about selling. The drive for profit favors high-risk, short-term oriented business strategies. Businesses can't afford to think in the long term, or a more irresponsible competitor will undercut them. Businesses centered around rapidly shrinking natural resources such as the paper, lumber, fishing and oil industries are going to keep selling their products as fast as they can until they become so rare (i.e. depleted) that there's no longer a market for them. Then they'll either go belly up or move on to a more profitable market. But the market on a whole is unconcerned with matters like preserving enough forests to allow us to keep breathing, its only directive is to continue the exponential acceleration of its growth. As the movie points out, this ever-increasing growth of industry has to be supported by increased consumption, which means the all-pervasive coercion of advertising doing its damnedest to convince us we need things we don't to solve problems we didn't know we had. This movie is a favorite, both for the pure entertainment of a captivating fantasy and the razor-sharp screeds against commodity culture. It's not simple-minded leftist sloganeering; although it's clearly hyperbolic, the underlying critique is, in my opinion, quite sophisticated. Although I love Withnail and I, I'd have to say I get more out of this film.

Well, this is indeed a strange one.If you're looking for something to pass an evening, and you have a weird streak, this is the movie for you.I agree with the last poster, the ending was very lame, and frankly I didn't listen to it too deeply. I would have preferred some of the other suggestions for the ending that the poster wrote, such as having a boil grow on the wife for company. Actually, if the boil would take over on the wife like it did on Dennis, that would be even better. Or, if the boil head would grow ANOTHER boil head, that would be pretty keen as well. Either way, you will definately not be disappointed with this movie.

Its a brave, scathingly funny film that might be an acquired taste. This one definitely needs a memorable quotes section!! For a film made so long ago, its quite an accurate and eerie depiction of what the PR industry has mutated into...