Thank You For Smoking: Opinionated Movie Comment #3

Thank You For Smoking, Aaron Eckhart, William H. Macy, Cameron Bright, Katie Holmes, JK Simmons; dir. Jason Reitman
Yes, the director here is the son of Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters, Meatballs), and Reitman the Younger appears to be aiming for satire rather than slapstick. The movie is based on a novel by Christopher Buckley, son of conservative (or libertarian) icon William F. Buckley, Jr., so there’s an interesting thing here about the Sons of American Icons, about Hollywood meets Deep Thought. America is living in spin, and our hero (or antihero) is the sultan of spin, the lord of lobbyists. Nick Naylor is the voice of America’s tobacco industry, and he’s damned good at his job. The opening scene lays it all out—he appears on the Joan Lunden show as an apologist for the tobacco industry; he immediately charms a boy dying of lung cancer (caused, of course, by smoking) and he makes a promise that he really doesn’t have the power to keep. He justifies his job, to his son, with an explanation based on flexible ethics; and here’s where the film fails: Is it satire of the industry of spin, of Big Tobacco, or is it a story of a man coming to grips with his relationship with his estranged son? There are numerous entertaining scenes and memorable moments (which I won’t share here for fear of ruining anyone’s enjoyment of the film), and Aaron Eckhart oozes charm, breathing life into this character, drawing us into his world just as he repulses us. So like the film, my review is disjointed: Watch it, but don’t expect a fully functioning, unified piece of work.

To Hunt Cool or Not to Hunt Cool...: Book Critic at Play #3

So Yesterday, by Scott Westerfeld
In 2001, social commentator Douglas Rushkoff did a show called Merchants of Cool for Frontline. This program takes an in-depth look at marketing to teens, specifically a phenomenon called cool hunting. It’s a great and disturbing program. A few years later—and I don’t know if there’s a direct connection—Scott Westerfeld, author of the wondrous (and disturbing in its own right) Uglies Trilogy, wrote this book: So Yesterday. This novel takes on the very same topics, and wraps them in a tale of… industrial espionage? delusional youth? It’s hard to tell till the last few pages, and that’s a good deal of the charm. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Westerfeld is a master of packing and youthful characterization. Hunter, our narrator, is a 17-year-old Cool Hunter, a focus-group veteran, a Trendsetter but not an Innovator. (Caps are Westerfeld's, not mine.) He meets Jen, a cooler teen, on the street, takes a picture of her shoelaces to send to his boss, and then takes her along to a focus group on a new ad for "the client" (a thinly disguised Nike). Jen makes a brilliant observation that Hunter's boss, Mandy, does not pass along to the client because it would mean they'd have to reshoot the million-dollar ad. (I won't ruin it, but it's a demographic comment, a pithy observation about representation.) Everyone is impressed with Jen's brilliance—and her cool. Jen is an Innovator, and it is near this point in the novel that Hunter explains the layers and levels of consumers, observers, and doers. Clever, very clever. In any case, Mandy later calls Hunter and asks him and Jen to meet her the next morning. The problem is, she never shows. It seems that Mandy has disappeared. Part teen adventure, part romance, part social satire, and all neatly presented by an appealingly self-deprecating and self-doubting narrator, So Yesterday is a fun, finely packaged exploration of consumerism and cool hunting. And this media educator has been wondering how in the world he might use it in class (given that the media course doesn’t feature novels).