You’re doing great work. I think you’ve succeeded in warning parents about the gratuitous tobacco imagery in The Incredible Hulk. I’m extremely sick of movies parenting kids. Tons of awful parents — parents that deserve lung cancer — have let their kids see this movie and I can imagine every kid walking out of the theater, putting a Twizzler in their mouth, imitating a cigar puff, and saying, “Hey dad, look I’m just like General Thaddeus ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross, fantastically played by the guy from Body Heat.”
Hell-ywood has gone too far with their portrayal of tobacco. The negative consequences are never on-screen. Would it have been so hard for them to have the lung-hating Gen. Ross respond to every question by saying, “Sorry I couldn’t hear you, my damn emphysema’s acting up. And I was thinking about my baby I just had to abort because he was sick from second hand smoke.” Then he should hit himself in the head with a frying pan to show how retarded you have to be to smoke. Hey! There’s an idea. Maybe only retarded people should smoke on film, or at least them and other people no one wants to be like. I.e. for movies marketed for men, only men with small penises smoke. In fact, a character at at least one point in the movie has to look directly in to the camera and say smoking causes impotency, perpetual U-shapedness and if you smoke, your dick becomes so small it could fuck a rat’s nostril without tickling its nose hair.
And why aim for a rated-R for movies with gratuitous, superfluous, detestable, gratuifluoustable use of tobacco? Why not NC-17? Teenagers don’t know anything. It’s long been accepted as fact that parents have no influence on their children. The ones with the real influence are characters in movies, characters like that Wayans brother in Requiem for a Dream, the villain in Rambo and the fun-loving, party-throwing, beachball-buying General Ross. It’s actors like William Hurt — an actor that deserves lung cancer — that make parenting hard and it’s American heroes like us and Yul Brynner that make it easy. Movies influence us whether we like it or not. My daughter started calling upon Satan and holding seances after watching Rosemary’s Baby. My son chained up his girlfriend after seeing Black Snake Moan. I’m just glad those movies didn’t feature smoking.
A lot of people protest an R-rating for movies featuring tobacco use on the grounds that it’s “un-American” and why should it be rated-R for people to see something they can see on any street corner? To these ignorant people, I say it’s because normal people don’t smoke. The people they see on the street corners are always hobos, obnoxious ‘Nam vets, pedophiles and other people that deserve lung cancer. What you can’t see on every street corner is glamorous, gorgeous people smoking, like the aforementioned Adonis, Bill Hurt. When normal people smoke on screen, America is being lied to.
Continue fighting the good fight.
Lung-loving and Philip Morris-hating,
Respiratory System Fan.
P.S. The Incredible Hulk is a movie that deserves eight simultaneous heart attacks… after being diagnosed with lung cancer.