Thank You For Smoking

A flip of a coin had decided that I not attend a Q&A of Thank You For Smoking, but a second session the night after allowed me to eat my cake and have it too. I'd also heard that sitting in the session for the first night- the one I wasn't at- was Richard Wilkins, currently battling it out with Angela Bishop as Australia's most irritating TV personality. And we have a lot of reality TV contestants still vying for fame, so that's a pretty impressive achievement.

Thank You For Smoking



Satire should be two things: funny and smart. Thank You For Smoking is both these things, but it's not the best film of the year.

Aaron Eckhart plays Nick Naylor, tobacco lobbyist. He'd be completely hated if he weren't such a good talker. He runs rings around those we should like, those trying to take down the industry, while flat out lying about the deaths it causes. His closest- only, in fact- friends are the other Merchants of Death: Mario Bello as an alcoholic alcohol lobbyist and David Koechner as thegun mad lobbyist for everyone's right to bear arms.

In one scene the "MoD Squad" fight over whose industry in fact causes the most death- Nick proudly accepts his victory. And yet, we like them. William H. Macy plays Nick's most vocal opponent, Senator Ortalon K. Finistirre, and he's likable too, if only because he's William H. Macy... but we still sort of want Nick to win.

At one stage Nick makes a trip to Hollywood from Washington DC, with his son, played by Cameron Bright, who isn't scary in this. This relationship, by the way, becomes the emotional anchor in the film. He makes this trip to visit super-agent Rob Lowe, to try and make smoking in the movies sexy again. For a while here it looks like this will be the film's main plot, until it sort of fades away. And this is the biggest problem of the film- we have good characters, we have the funny, but we never really get a huge driving plot. It's based on a book by Christopher Buckley, and the fact that it's from a novel really show. This sort of loose plotting works in book form; less so on film.

The whole time watching this movie there was a speck on the screen. It was dust on the lens of the projector, probably, and it kept distracting me, and maybe a more engaging plot would have helped me to ignore this speck, but my eyes just kept moving back to it.

And that sounds like a really harsh judgement, a judgement reserved for a much less enjoyable film. I did have a lot of fun here. It's nicely dark, although it could have been a lot darker, and I barely scratched the surface of how good the cast was. There's also Katie Holmes, but try to look beyond that. Besides, this is pre-crazy, and she gets to say "fuck" a bunch, even if she is too young for a role of an unscrupulous hard-hitting reporter.

So there's a lot of fun to be had here. It could have been tighter, but there are a lot of laughs. Plus, it really made me want to read the book.

8/10

The Q&A began with two short films from the director Jason (Ivan Jr) Reitman, the first of which had the worst boom work ever. Seriously, the microphone was halfway down the fame sometimes, and this was not just some MiniDV thing shot by a bunch of teenagers who'd seen too much Jackass and decided to skateboard naked and blindfolded down a hill into a creek, it was professional and on film and expensive! It was very distracting.

Reitman was funny, as a comedy director probably should be, riffing with the audience well. He mentioned how closely he did stick to the book- he wrote the script too- the only part added being Nick's relationship with his son- this was considerably less present in the book. He'd wanted to adapt the story since the nineties, and finally got the opportunity after the short film of boom got him the attention he needed around Hollywood.

He found his cast to be a dream to work with- William H. Macy apparently gets it right on the first take, every time. Reitman found himself doing second takes with him just because they had the film. He didn't mention the Katie Holmes crazy, but I think this was before the whole Cruise thing.

There's a shot in the film of Aaron Eckhart lying semi naked in the lap of the Lincoln Monument. That's perhaps one of the funniest shots in the film, and I've just ruined it for you. You can thank me later. They are first wanted to have, instead, Eckhart floating unconcious in the pool in front of the Washington Monument, but weren't allowed to get this. When the Lincoln Monument moment was concieved, they found out they weren't allowed to film that, either. Reitman instead took a shot on his digital camera, and Eckhart was blue screened onto that, later. So a shot in the finished film is taken directly front a normal digital camera. I liked that story.

Reitman's next film sounds like it'll be decent. It's called Juno, and it's about a young pregnant girl and her relationship with the people she plans to adopt the baby out to. This sounds like the plot of a painfully saccharine Hallmark Channel film, or one of the subplots in the final season of Friends- you know, that season that aired about five years after that show was still worth watching- but he's describing it as a pretty dark comedy. Sounds a lot better now.

Next time I'm going to doing a special TV edition. Except without the "special" part. The second worst show on Australian TV has been cancelled... while the worst show on Australian TV has been renewed for another season. Stay tuned.