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Addiction Incorporated

Comments (0) By Melissa Anderson Wednesday, Dec 14 2011

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Addiction Incorporated
Directed by Charles Evans Jr.
Variance Films
December 14 through 27, Film Forum

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With a name that not even the PR team at Smokefree America could dream up, Victor DeNoble emerges as the hero of Charles Evans Jr.'s mostly muscular documentary on the 1990s campaign to expose Big Tobacco. DeNoble, a psychologist, was hired by Philip Morris in 1980 to study the effects of nicotine; four years later, he and his colleague Paul Mele were fired for their findings—and, thus, unwanted evidence—that the substance was highly addictive. The first third of Addiction Incorporated is the weakest: Evans tricks out the material—DeNoble and others sitting in front of ochre backdrops recounting these experiments and their implications—with dopey animation and even sillier re-creations. But when the chronicle shifts to 1994, the year that FDA commissioner David Kessler charged his agency with investigating the tobacco industry, the director skillfully braids the reminiscences of journalists, lawyers, and elected officials who fought the corporations (and some who shilled for them) with C-SPAN footage of the congressional hearings from April of that year. One of those testifying was DeNoble, whose suppressed research from a decade earlier proved crucial in starting the battle against a seemingly indestructible opponent. His direct, candid responses then match the respectful, no-nonsense anti-smoking lectures he delivers to schoolkids across the country now.

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2 comments
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robert downey junior
robert downey junior

i need a fix of heroin; anybody got some good horse for me?

Lindsey Blohan
Lindsey Blohan

I got some coke leftover from my playboy magazine money, bobby.

 
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