“Don’t be fooled by the smoke,” James Benning told a sold-out audience at the Toronto International Film Festival screening of his latest film “Twenty Cigarettes.” A collection of living portraits, in which 20 smokers, all friends of his, face the camera for the time it takes to consume a cigarette, it is both an homage to Andy Warhol’s fabled screen tests and a quintessential film for Mr. Benning, 68, a giant of American experimental cinema whose conceptually minimalist works tend to open up vast spaces for reflection. Observation and duration are central to his method. The 2004 landscape films “Thirteen Lakes” and “Ten Skies,” with their stark, self-explanatory titles, are composed entirely of 10-minute static shots, each the length of … Read entire article »

We have at least two friends whose New Year’s resolutions for 2011 were to quit smoking.If good wishes would help, they both could have had a shot at it. But even at about $6 a pack at a Marco Walgreens and much more expensive in many other states, giving up tobacco is a hard slog.One friend saw on TV, ads for a stop-smoking drug, Chantix. It frightened him even more than the dangers of cigarettes, so he recorded the commercial. Here’s part of it: A pleasant-looking woman, 40-something, sits at a kitchen table, telling the camera, “My name is Robin and I was a pack-a-day smoker for 25 years. I remember telling my boys, ‘Promise Mommy you’ll never, ever pick up a cigarette.’ Brian, … Read entire article »

If you spend much time watching old movies on cable channels like TCM, you may feel the impulse to open a window and air out the room. No adult, it seems, is without a cigarette, a cigar or a pipe. Smoking in movies and TV shows has been drastically reduced in the past decade with a few notable exceptions like “Mad Men.” Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, says it would have been “a joke” to do the 1960s period show without a haze of smoke. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that scenes of smoking in high-grossing films fell to 1,935 “incidents” in 2009, down 49 percent from a recent peak of 3,967 in 2005. Still, more than half of all PG-13 movies contain smoking scenes, according to the Center … Read entire article »

Modesto Police officers are looking for the person responsible for a robbery turned shooting at a discount cigarette shop, Monday evening. According to authorities, the shooting happened just after 9 p.m. at Wally’s Discount Cigarette on the 2400 block of Coffee Road in Modesto. The extent of the victim’s injuries are unclear at this time. Several officers are on scene gathering interviewing witnesses, trying to determine what led up to the incident. There is no suspect information at this time. … Read entire article »

Babies born to snuff-using mothers were more likely to have breathing problems than those whose moms smoked cigarettes while pregnant, in new data from Sweden.Snuff — ground tobacco that is high in nicotine but doesn’t generate the same additional chemicals as cigarette smoke because it’s not burned — is generally assumed be safer than cigarettes, said the authors of the new study. That’s still the case for many people — but it’s not a good option for pregnant women, according to Dr. Anna Gunnerbeck, the lead researcher from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The smokeless tobacco “may have a little bit different effect than smoking, because smoking has the combustion products, but it’s still not safe during pregnancy,” Gunnerbeck told … Read entire article »