An arm of the American Medical Association is upset and demanding that Warner Bros. publicly certify that the studio did not accept a product-placement deal with American Spirit cigarettes for He’s Just Not That Into You. Yes, even though the film does not actually show anyone smoking onscreen, and the cigarettes in question are just part of a subplot about Bradley Cooper’s character’s efforts to quit smoking on the insistence of his wife. The organization, which hopes to reduce teenage smoking in part by decreasing its presence in cinema, says it’s not interested in the context but instead the fact that the brand of cigarettes used in the film is specific and easily identifiable by its bright-yellow box. With all due to respect to the AMA and its mission, this is almost as ridiculous as a movie about people who still use MySpace, in which a character played by Ginnifer Goodwin can’t find a date.
