Advertising insults the intelligence of everyone exposed to it, but of course, the stuff works. Consider the gnashing of teeth and rending of hair that followed the recently reported demise of the Twinkie: if not for the anthropomorphic sponge cake we all grew up watching on Saturday mornings, would anyone care? Twinkies, after all, taste disgusting — but Hostess’ ad agency convinced us all that taste didn’t enter into the equation.

A business ripe for parody, advertising has been well skewered on the big screen in such films as Frank Tashlin’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), Robert Downey’s Putney Swope (1969), and Bruce Robinson’s How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989). As the decades have passed, the films have become grimmer and more acerbic — which brings me to perhaps the most disturbing of the lot, Generation P. Directed by former ad man Victor Ginzburg, this savage satire opens Friday, November 30 at an as yet undetermined Landmark cinema in San Francisco. (The film was originally booked to open at Berkeley’s Landmark Shattuck Cinemas on Friday, November 23.) … Continue reading »