Movie Log: Thank You for Smoking

The wife and I watched this last night ("last night" being Saturday -- ed.); I'd fallen off of the movie-watching horse while playing Lego Star Wars II (as I expected I would), but -- having gotten to 100% complete in the game after about 65 hours of playing -- I'm back now.

Netflix sent us two movies in yesterday's mail; I hope to watch the other one tonight so I can send them both back in one envelope tomorrow morning. (Again, "tonight" refers to Sunday -- ed.)

Anyway, my obsessive tendencies aside, what about Thank You for Smoking? It's a solidly entertaining movie, and a good adaptation of the (very cynical, and very funny) Christopher Buckley novel. Aaron Eckhart's chin-dimple is a bit distracting, but I bet I'd be used to it if I'd ever seen him in a movie before. (For whatever odd reason, I hadn't seen him act before, so every time his face came into close-up I kept thinking that someone had just poked him with a letter opener.)

Eckhart plays a tobacco-industry lobbyist, and the good news is that this is not the story of how he learns to be a better person, and appreciate the birds and the flowers. He doesn't really change the kind of person he is over the course of the movie, which I suppose makes it a failure according to some screenwriter's template. But, using my "was-it-a-good-movie" template, it's very successful. It's cynical and funny, and uses a voiceover intermittently to good effect (something I like to see; it's apparently a hard thing to do well, so I like to see movies attempting it).

There's a bit less going on in the movie than there was in the book, as you'd expect, but I don't recall the book being hugely plotty to begin with; it was just a series of events (more-or-less linked) about this guy, and the movie follows that pattern, with somewhat fewer events to fit into a zippy ninety minutes.

If you're at all cynical about politics, advertising, or the corporate world, you'll probably like this movie. As an added bonus, it features Katie Holmes as a slutty reporter (who, it must be said, appears to be on a work-study program from American University -- she looks way too young for what her character is doing).