I can see why Fox Searchlight and Paramount Classics were fighting over the U.S. distribution rights to Jason Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking. (Fox Searchlight won.) The script is very witty and sharp. The dialogue, if nothing else (and there’s plenty else, starting with Aaron Eckhardt’s performance as Washington, D.C.’s all-time smoothest pro-tobacco lobbyist)…if nothing else describing the rationale “I have a mortgage to pay” as a “yuppie Nuremberg defense” will give it a kind of instant fame in chat rooms and cocktail parrties. Okay, somebody is now going to tell me that some comic coined the “yuppie Nuremberg defense” term ten or fifteen years in his/her stage act…right?
