It feels trite to say this right now, given that America is currently squirming under the boot of an openly fascist presidential regime, but the escalating omnipresence of corporate advertising in every aspect of daily life is starting to feel outright apocalyptic. It was already demoralizing enough when corporations convinced us to advertise brand names on our clothes, so that we’re paying to display billboard space on our own bodies, but once they caught up with the fact that we spend most of our time looking at each other through screens instead of in person, things have only gotten worse. Yes, the internet is a convenient access point to a wider world of art and social interaction, but it’s also an easy access point to funnel nonstop advertisement into our eyeballs. Every streaming service is just a variation of the Tubi model now, inserting commercial breaks into shows & movies we’re already paying to watch. Those old-guard artforms are also gradually being replaced with social-media microcelebrities, who skip the middleman and deliver shameless sponcon as the main source of entertainment instead of an occasional annoyance. Credit card companies control what we can do & see online via what kinds of content they allow to be monetized, stepping in as the internet equivalent of the MPAA to determine what does and does not qualify as pornography, and what forms of pornography are “allowed”. I could go on, but you have a phone, so you’re already well aware of mainstream culture’s slow-motion landslide into a corporate-sponsored Hell pit. It’s a pervasive menace that darkens & distorts every aspect of modern human life, and it’s willing to choke what’s left of that life out of us as long as it can also squeeze out our last few pennies with it, as indicated by the current advertising push for the resource-draining evils of generative A.I. So, I was pleased to discover two new movies in theaters right now that treat the exponential relentlessness of corporate advertising as the existential threat that it truly is — both of which were packaged with trailers advertising other new movies to check out while they’re in theaters, of course.

In her self-satirizing mockumentary The Moment, pop singer Charli XCX treats corporate advertising as an existential threat to art. Set during her Big Moment following the blow-up of her album Brat last summer, The Moment imagines what would happen if Charli made the same corporate business deals that took other pop stars like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and Justin Bieber to “the next level” during their own respective Big Moments. Her in-film record label scores two major (fictional) deals on her behalf: a credit card marketed exclusively to queer clientele and a production of a Disney+ style concert film documenting the Brat world tour. The Brat credit card deal makes for an easy, funny punchline mocking the crass commodification of identity politics and is deployed in the film as a form of recurring prop comedy. The production of the Brat concert film is a more nuanced debacle, with Alexander Skarsgård stepping in as a corporate-stooge movie director determined to sand off all of Charli’s roughest edges so she can be marketable to a more Family Friendly audience. Instead of sticking around to fight the good fight with her longtime creative director Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), Charli folds under the pressure and allows Skarsgård to take over, turning the coked-out club classics nightlife vibe of the Brat album into a cigarette-themed version of The Eras Tour. It’s an oddly vulnerable PR move, in that it can be read as Charli satirizing herself as indecisive to the point of having no artistic convictions at all, portraying her as being personally incapable of maintaining a clear creative ethos once corporations step in to promote her art to a wider audience. The more generous reading, of course, is that she’s saying that no one can stand up to that kind of corporate pressure, and that’s why all corporate-sponsored art sucks. Whether she’s the butt of her own joke or she’s throwing punches at peers, it’s at least clear that the real villains are the credit card companies and the assembly-line hack directors who are willing to sacrifice art to the almighty altar of Advertising.

In the new sci-fi comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, director Gore Verbinski (along with screenwriter Matthew Robsinson) treats corporate advertising as an existential threat to human dignity. Sam Rockwell stars as a time-traveler from a near-future dystopia that has been overrun by A.I. In order to stop his grim timeline from coming to pass, he must quickly recruit random customers from a Los Angeles diner to put a stop to that A.I.’s creation over one long, zany night before it’s too late. This A-plot premise is broadly generic in both its LOL So Random style of humor (think “hotdog fingers” and you get the gist) and in its observations on smartphone addiction, in which all teenagers are portrayed as George Romero zombies who aimlessly wander through the city while staring at their screens. There is some biting satire scattered throughout the film’s Black Mirror-inspired vignettes, however, once the focus shifts away from Rockwell’s all-in-one-night mission to profile the daily lives of the diners he takes hostage. Juno Temple’s screentime as a single mom who loses her teenage son to a school shooting is especially fruitful, both in how it portrays America’s treatment of those shootings as being as unavoidable of a natural occurrence as bad weather, and in how the tragedy invites advertising into her family home. After her son is killed, the grieving mother is sold on purchasing a cloned version of him, but she can’t afford the luxury model, so her subscription comes with ads. A corporation has smoothed out all of the details of her son’s personality until he is a generic non-entity, and they’ve doubled that indignity by making him a mouthpiece for IRL sponcon, spouted as if it were casual conversation. Likewise, the Romero zombie teens elsewhere in the film speak entirely in ad placements when not staring blankly at their screens, satirizing the ways in which modern online discourse has turned us all into uncompensated employees of marketing companies. With or without an inevitable A.I. takeover, we are already doomed.

Unfortunately, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die far exceeds its LOL So Random allowance by the end, and it’s ultimately just not very good. Gore Verbinski has made exactly one fully satisfying film to date (Mouse Hunt, duh), and ever since then he can only manage to stage extravagant disappointments that almost kinda-sorta work if you squint at them from the right angle, among which Good Luck is no exception. He has a very Baz Luhrmann-coded career in that way (Strictly Ballroom, duh). Charli XCX’s movie is much less ambitious and, thus, has a much easier path to success. One of The Moment‘s more reliably successful gags is the way luxury brands, hotel chains, and sponsorship deals are announced in the strobe-lit block text that has accompanied all of Charli’s recent concert performances, very directly using her art to advertise corporate products. Most of the film is shot in the grainy, low-lighting texture of modern fly-on-the-wall documentaries, and most of the humor registers as similarly low-key. That makes for a much less ambitious source of comedy than the anything-can-happen-at-any-moment zaniness of Good Luck, which works up an excess of flop sweat while scrambling across Los Angeles in search of the next randomized Mad Libs punchline. For all of the ways Verbinksi’s latest might disappoint as a comedy, however, it’s easy enough to get behind its resentful messaging about how our culture-wide smartphone addiction has “robbed us all of our dignity and turned us into children.” Despite all of its cutesy visual gags, dirt-cheap guitar riffs, and Deadpool-level ultra sarcasm, it’s at least pointing its finger at the right cultural boogeyman. Corporate advertising is going to kill us all, and we’re inviting more of it into our brains every second we spend looking at our phones. Now excuse me while I check every local cinema’s website to plan what showtimes I will purchase tickets for next.

-Brandon Ledet