Thank You for Smoking

Thank You for Smoking is a unique, very funny movie with an outstanding cast. Smoking is a very touchy subject, but the film covers a lot of the nonsense that goes on with the anti-smoking movement without being insensitive to its dangers. Little tangent here, but every single campaign I've seen against cigarettes has been annoying and ineffective. If you've ever seen a commercial from New York's fairly recent series of commercials, you'll know what I mean. They try and shock you into quitting with grotesque imagery and fear mongering in a way that I find more offensive than if a smoker came up to me and blew smoke right into my face. Anyway, Eckhart plays a spokesman for a tobacco lobby who goes on TV and pokes holes in the poor arguments against the product he represents and generally wins at life, at least until the plot gets more serious near the middle. There's a bunch of different characters and subplots he jumps between, and the movie is pretty consistently and enjoyably paced.

After watching Juno, it's nice to see Reitman has some flexibility with the kind of comedy he can handle. Smoking is more mature and explicit, but never gets too base in the content and has a similar sense of intelligent humor. It's not quite the heartwarming film that Juno was, but it was put together just as well. I'm not sure how much of the script came from the book it was based on, but it's really just fun to watch how Eckhart faces each obstacle. I'm finding myself with not much to say here, other than almost every single speaking part was played by someone I know the name of or at least recognize, and that seemed almost odd but was also kind of cool. Really good film.