Feature for Thank You For Smoking

Light(en) Up!: Thank You For Smoking by Simon Thompson

'Thank You For Smoking' is one of the most talked about movies of the year. Whether it's due to the biting satire of the sleeper hit - or the fact that Katie Holmes has a sex scene in it - there's been no escaping this movie ever since it's first screening at the Toronto Film Festival last year.

The film is the first from director Jason Reitman - the son of the man who gave the world movies including the classic 'Ghostbusters' and the not-so-classic 'Evolution'. Big shoes to fill but not laurels that he wants to rest on. Reitman Jnr wants to make it on his own.

He revealed: "I was fortunate to have a good upbringing, a good financial upbringing, so I can make the kind of movies I want to. I grew up on movie sets, I'm comfortable on sets.

"By the time I got to directing, I'd learned so much, but if I'd made this film five years ago it would have been a much less polished film."

The star of the movie is Aaron Eckhart - an actor best known for playing a despicable misogamist in the indie-flick 'A Company Of Men' and the 2000 Julia Roberts movie, 'Erin Brockovich' - who plays cigarette lobbyist Nick Naylor. A man so hated, so wanted and yet so in demand that during the course of the movie he gets a death threat, beds a journalist, fights the senate, tries to develop his relationship with his son and meets the legendary 'Marlboro Man'.

Based on a book of the same name, the film's follows Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco. He makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers. When confronted by health zealots out to ban tobacco and an opportunistic senator - played by William H Macy - who wants to put poison labels on cigarette packs, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes on TV talk shows and enlisting a Hollywood super-agent to promote smoking in movies.

Naylor's newfound notoriety attracts the attention of both tobacco's head honcho and an investigative reporter for an influential Washington daily newspaper. He insists he is just doing what it takes to pay the mortgage, but the increased scrutiny of his son and a very real death threat may force him to think differently.

The role of Naylor was a bizarre u-turn for health conscious Eckhart, who has confessed: "I used to smoke. I quit like three and a half years ago. I quit because I consider myself to be an athletic person.

"I never felt good about it, I felt like every time I took a drag I had a hollow space in my chest."

Bearing that in mind, he admits that he needed to walk a very careful line with the role.

He explained: "The one thing about creating a character is that you cannot dislike your character. If you do, you're doing a disservice for the audience. You have to love your character."

But it's that conflict that attracted him to the part in the first place. Eckhart added: "Here I had to be a tobacco lobbyist, and there is a strong argument, who is saying, "Look, tobacco is not illegal. Millions of people do it every single day, and if you try to take cigarettes away from this country or Europe, they'll kill you." So there is an argument there."

However, the genuinely witty and highly commendable satirical sharpness of 'Thank You For Smoking's script has been overshadowed by two things. Katie Holmes' breasts and whether or not they have made the final cut.

It had been reported that a steamy sex scene between the former 'Dawson's Creek' star and 38-year-old Eckhart had been ditched amid speculation her, at the time, fiancé Tom Cruise objected to it.

The romp was still included in the film when it debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in 2005, however when it was screened at the Sundance Film Festival this year the footage was gone.

A spokeswoman for Fox Searchlight, who produced the film, said: "It has never been altered.

"It will be released with that scene. We don't know what happened, but we're looking into it."

When director Jason Reitman was asked about the missing sequence during a press conference, he joked that it had been lost in a "technical glitch" during a reel change.

Responding to the same question at another screening, Canadian Reitman said: "If you want to see a sex scene with Katie Holmes, rent 'The Gift'" - a reference to the 2000 film in which the former 'Dawson's Creek' beauty appears topless.

True to their world, for the international release, the scene is back in. However, the director has downplayed the eroticism of the sequence, saying: "It's humorous humping! It's Kate and Aaron gyrating back and forth."

Critics have given the film one of the warmest welcomes of 2006. Peter Travers from film and music bible Rolling Stone magazine said: "Ethics never get in the way of the jokes. Both sides of the political fence will feel royally skewered." Meanwhile, David Rooney from US magazine Variety called it "an entertaining satire on contemporary morality that skewers corporate spin culture, political correctness and that most rhetorical of concepts in Bush's America, personal freedom." Also, although it hasn't had the wide release many movies enjoy - it has still rake in has already taken a very respectable $23.8 million in the US alone.

Now the rest of the world is being given the chance to roll up and inhale the fumes of spin - and it's up to each individual viewer to filter out the truth.

But be warned, if, when you've finished watching it for the first time you feel the uncontrollable and inexplicable need to buy another ticket and go right back in, I'm afraid to say you're addicted. But I guess that's the whole idea.