« Monkey business: the curious death of a "George" collaborator | Main | The Ken Burns move: it's fade-to-black »
February 08, 2006
I's get in your smoke: celebrating cigs in cinema
In the Observer, Lynn Barber "celebrates her filthy habit" as reflected in movies: "I thought I spotted a mistake in the new George Clooney film, Good Night, and Good Luck, which is set in an American television studio at the height of the McCarthy witch-hunt. Ed Murrow strides into his boss Bill Paley's office with a lit cigarette in his hand. To me, this smacked of insolence. Surely you would always stub out your cigarette before going into your boss's office, safe in the knowledge that he would offer you another one the moment you arrived. Or maybe Clooney was making a subtle point—that Murrow had little respect for his boss. Either way, the nuance will be lost on non-smoking audiences." Aside from her own smoky indulgences, Barber describes what antismoking activists note down as "smoking events." "A smoking 'event' is when someone lights a cigarette or when cigarette packets or advertisements are shown. Good Night, and Good Luck has about a thousand 'events' per hour—everyone is wreathed in smoke—but that is justified by historical authenticity. More surprising is a film such as, say, Brokeback Mountain where someone must have made the decision to let the leading characters smoke."
Posted by pride at February 8, 2006 12:27 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.mcnblogs.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/807
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)