Thank you for Smoking 10/09/06

Have you ever heard people describe a movie as "good for a bad movie." Like it was a horrible idea but its been done so well its pulled off as mediocre. This movie is the exact opposite. "Its bad for a good movie." The idea was good, it had good actors, the script was okay, the execution of the thing just really really sucked.
There are some scenes in this movie, the Mod Squad dining room, that are filled with special effects. There's great lighting, there's good blocking, the scene looks like its in a movie. Then there's other parts, like the fairground scene, where it looks like it was shot with a home video camera. It's like the director spent all his money on a few scenes, ran out of it halfway through, and then halfassed the rest of the movie.
And what was with the kidnapping subplot that lasted only about five minutes. This movie did not need that. It's completely gratuitous and to my senses it was only introduced because the first time director Jason Reitman, did not trust his own material. I may be an American but my attention span is over five minutes long. I came to the movie theater and I paid $7.50. I was interested in the material, there should have been more respect for my intelligence. This movie was just way too cool, always trying to prove to me that it was worth watching. I assumed it was worth watching before I got in the theater, it didn't need to keep on persuading me. All it needed to do was focus on telling the story.
One last thiing. It's a shame what this script did to a few of the actors. Katie Holmes' reporter was very underwritten and she deserves more screen time before she jumps into bed with the main charachter. And the kid, I don't know who played the kid, but he is given some of the most unrealistic lines in the entire movie. and of course he's just a kid so he can't pull it off. What's more is there's alot of jokes here that just fell flat. The shame is they could have been funny if the timing were a little tweaked here and there. The guy from the OC has a string of blatantly smashed together lines that sound like jokes but never really worked. A note to directors of comedies: If a joke isn't funny you've got to rework it, rewrite it, or at the very least, cut it. There's nothing worse in a comedy than a joke that doesn't produce laughter. A bad joke ruins the mood and it's better not to hear it at all.