The intent of this week’s selection was marketing and advertising.
The first on my list, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, tells the story of a smarmy advertising executive under breaking under the stress of his deadline when he can’t think of a new campaign for skin cream. As his stress gets the better of him he get’s a huge boil on his neck which begins to talk and grows to become a second head (get a head in advertising, get it?) embodying all of his cynical amorality taking him over completely.
I really had mixed feelings about this one. It started in a really fascinating direction and almost exactly at the half hour mark it decided to be something else. At it’s best it was a darkly cynical satire but the rest of the time it was heavy handed sermonizing. What kept me watching it was Richard E. Grant’s performance. He did a wonderful job of fluctuating from a complete amoral bastard who lectures his colleagues about how it isn’t their job to solve a problem but to maintain it so they can keep selling their clients’ product, to a simpering half mad victim begging people to believe him when he says it’s the boil saying these terrible things and not him.
For the longest all I knew about The Hudsucker Proxy was it was a loosely based on the actual creation of the hulu hoop and that it was one of the Coen brothers few flops. But since then I’d heard that time had been kind to it and I started to hear good things.
Hudsucker Proxy presents us with modern fairytale about a complete innocent who starts work at the monolithic Hudsucker company on the same day it’s CEO commits suicide. Due to some dumb luck he gets hired as the new CEO by the board in order to make value of the company’s stock temporarily plummet so they can buy it up cheap. Instead he invents the hulu hoop and the craze makes the company more successful than ever.
This is a wonderfully sweet and funny film with a gorgeous stylized art deco aesthetic with the leitmotif of “Stormy Weather” in the background (though there were a few times near the end I found myself wondering if I was getting it mixed up with “My Way” and a happy ending provided by a literal deus ex mechana (seriously, the spirit of Mr. Hudsucker is lowered down as an angel playing a white ukelele.) It seems to be a callback to 1930s screwball comedies but if it is the Coens are giving it their own personal spin and more power to them.
