Shock! Horror! A bit of burning leaf! Run away! Run away!
Smoking scenes still regularly occur in movies deemed suitable for children, despite significant evidence that they can cause adolescents to take up the habit. The data about cigarettes on screen is relevant right now because a lawsuit is seeking to ban tobacco appearances in youth-rated movies.
It never ends… Some people smoke. Get over it. Any film that portrays history will be portraying the habit accurately, so what? Grow up and get over it.
Look, I grew up when smoking was everywhere. I never took it up. Indeed, fewer of my peers did than our parents’ generation. It has declined dramatically. Seeing someone smoking in a film isn’t going to make people rush out and buy a packet of fags (if it did, I’d be a forty-a-day man), just as seeing car chases and shootouts isn’t going to make the yoof rush out and do those, either. The effect of film on people’s behaviour is over-rated.
“individual movie company policies alone have not been efficient at minimizing smoking in movies”.
Oh, do fuck off already…
To defend itself against the recent legal claim, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has said that prohibiting smoking imagery in films would amount to restricting free speech under the first amendment.
Indeed, keep it up.
But some films are smokier than others. A 2011 study led by Stanton A Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, found that several films which contained scenes with cigarettes were still not being labelled as “smoking” films by the MPAA.
Ah… Stanton Glantz… Where have we heard that name before? Oh, yeah, this is the raving smokerloonie who is an obsessive tobacco control nut-job. That Stanton Glantz. The one who has nothing better to do than poke about and interfere in other people’s lifestyle choices that are none of his damned business.
Looking at the box office, Glantz found that the 134 top-grossing films of 2011 depicted nearly 1,900 tobacco “incidents” (a definition that includes implied use of a tobacco product – for example if an actor is seen holding an unlit cigarette).
These were particularly common in period movies like Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows and Midnight in Paris (both rated PG-13, both of which had more than 50 tobacco incidents).
So, Holmes puffing on his pipe is an “incident” now is it? So, are we to airbrush it out of existence? Although, in the original stories, he smoked cigarettes and cigars as well as a pipe and taking snuff.
Jeebus!
I couldn’t possibly estimate the number of Red Indians* I saw shot, or the number of white settlers who were scalped in the westerns I’ve avidly watched from the mid-fifties onwards. As I’m now 66, I’m beginning to wonder if there’s been something wrong with my development since I’ve not yet shot or scalped anyone – although in Mr Glantz’s case I’d be happy to make an exception. Just to help him prove his theories, you understand.
*Yes, I know they’re now called Native Americans but I’m too old to be arsed with all this PC rubbish.
Why stop short at trying to write smoking out of film history? With a bit of ingenuity, the entirety of history could be recast to reflect current PC thought. (Which would probably leave very little apart from ‘safe spaces’ with puppies and kittens. But the guns can stay: write those out and you’re facing a NRA lawsuit!)
I neither smoke tobacco nor drink alcohol and I have to say that I’m really suffering from the sidestream sanctimony in this country.
Your managerial class first wrote off your industries, then turned your public services into their country club, and now you’re paying them six-figure sums to hound you to the grave with their self-righteous puritanism and their toe-curling BBC.
I just can’t understand why the people who stood up to the nightmarish EU (having previously stood up to Nazis and Napoleon) won’t stand up to this sort of schoolyard bullying. I just can’t understand it.
“Although, in the original stories, he smoked cigarettes and cigars as well as a pipe and taking snuff.”
He took cocaine too. More than one story also touched upon the use of opiates.
That said, the recent Sherlock Holmes movies starring wossname and thingy (not the Cummerbund and Hobbit TV ones) weren’t rated “U” or “PG”, but “12A”, so they’re hardly in the same category as an old Disney family movie. The trailers also clearly show the period setting.
Why anyone would be surprised or shocked to see someone in the 19th Century smoking tobacco I’ve no idea. I can only assume Mr. Glantz was a poor student of history.
Glantz, that sounds a bit like the technical term for a bellend.
“Yes, I know they’re now called Native Americans but I’m too old to be arsed with all this PC rubbish.”
I actually agree with that specific piece of PC rubbish Ted. It must be a bit galling to have been referred to as Indians for several hundred years because some explorer was so hopelessly lost that he though he was in India. These people don’t even look anything like people from India. Then there was the charlatan Joseph Smith claiming that the Native Americans were Jewish.