This film just tasted like pure pro-Big Tobacco propaganda to me. Didn't anybody else feel that way?
Its message seemed to be that Big tobacco companies are no more ruthless or immoral than journalists or politicians, no more greedy than ex-Marlboro men. So, leave off, already!
Was it funded by Phillip Morris inc?
Let's get out of here!
Your choice. Kinda the whole message, innit?
shareI think you're avoiding the point. It's more about the lobbying than it is about tobacco. Cigarettes is just the envelope they use to deliver the message.
shareJust not sure how anyone could consider this "Big Tobacco propaganda" regardless. More like a sarcastic expose if anything on that front.
shareNo, this is simply entertainment and a fun film. Get over it.
shareThis movie is a lot like the old TV show, "Yes, Minister", and it's not-as-good sequel, "Yes, Prime Minister".
It shows what happens behind the curtains, it shows how things get done, it shows how powerful people think, and what rhetoric and machinations they use to get their win.
It's a VIEW to the corrupted corporate power, just as the TV show's is a view to the corrupted political power.
It doesn't take a position, it just shows us, and expects us to laugh at the ridiculousness of how the world works. It's rather poignant, really, and although it's rather cartoonish, that the 'evil people' consist of a few individuals eating crappy food in a tiny room, only one individual representing a whole evil industry, a lot of this movie can't be far from the truth when it comes to this type of manipulations and machinations.
This movie is like a mixture of Gordon Gekko's speech in 'Wall Street' and the amazingly truthful and downright scary view into politics shown by that TV show. It shows how clever people can always turn black to white, lie to truth, evil into good and so on. Only seemingly, of course, by the usage of rhetoric, emotional manipulation and eloquent speech and intelligent tactics.
Evil won't really change into good, but if you can whitewash it so it looks like it did, you have fooled the masses and the evil can go on behind the scenes, now that it 'appears' as good. Just like the petrol car corporations have always had these 'green' campaigns to cleanse their tarnished image, just like factories were suddenly changed rhetorically into 'plants' (because it sounds better), this movie shows how cigarettes can represent freedom and how the cigarette corporations can be responsible, because they don't want kids to smoke.
If anything, this movie reveals how manipulative these evil industries and their representatives are, and if you don't see that, you don't understand what you watched.