Before we start, I think it's important that you know a little thing about me, and where I'm coming from. I do smoke. But I believe that most of the lawsuits filed against the tobacco industry are unfounded, desperate attempts for people to put the blame on anyone but themselves.

I think social security is a safety net for the financially irresponsible.

I thought The Insider was a great movie from a strictly entertainment perspective (don't get ahead of me on this one!), and I enjoyed it very much.

Russell Crowe is Jeffrey Wigand, a Brown and Williamson VP of Research and Development whose conscience compels him to blow the whistle on the industry. He claims that Big Tobacco has been covering up scientific research that proves nicotine is addictive

The biggest issue I have with this movie is how it so comfortably passes itself off as an unbiased, historical representation of what happened between real life executive Jeffrey Wigand, real life producer Lowell Bergman, and real life corporation Brown and Williamson. The problem is that the movie is so well crafted and so interesting that it's very easy to accept it as 100% Grade A Truth. However, this is clearly Wigand's story, and closer inspection would reveal that the main characters here are just a little too perfect to be real. Did Bergman really storm into the offices of CBS and rant and rave the way AL Pacino does in this movie? Some words might have been exchanged, but it's hard to believe anything as dramatic as what's depicted in The Insider could have happened for real. They would have likely said, "Okay, calm down, have a cup of coffee, have a cigarette. And why do you keep yelling HOO-WAH?"

Gina Gershon makes an appearance in the movie as a tough, icy corporate attorney for CBS. As a standard caricature of faceless law more interested in money than people, she's fabulous.

Anti-tobacco camps use their fair share of propaganda, but all of that seems conveniently ignored in this movie. If you don't believe crusaders of health can bend words just as deceptively as Big Tobacco, consider this commercialized statement: second hand smoke is worse than the smoke that the smoker inhales. Sounds good, doesn't it? After all, the smoker has a filter on the end of that cancer

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Approximate Word count = 1005
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)