Taiwanese gangster film Monga (艋舺) featured the most smoking scenes among popular movies released from 2008 to last year, followed by US supernatural action film Constantine, a study released by the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) yesterday showed.
The agency’s smoking scene monitor program found that Monga topped the list with 120 scenes with smokers, followed by Constantine with 110, US film adaptation of the novel of the same title Memoirs of a Geisha with 109, Singaporean dark comedy Ah Long Pte Ltd with 108 and Chinese biographical film Mei Lanfang (梅蘭芳) with 102.
Rounding out the top 10 were Hong Kong comedy Kung Fu Hustle (功夫) with 101 scenes, Hong Kong gangster film Triad (紮職) with 101, US musical Nine with 99 and Hong Kong’s King of Comedy (喜劇之王) with 83.
“In addition, about 36 percent of the movies aired in the past four years contained smoking scenes,” agency Director-General Chiou Shu-ti (邱淑媞) told a news conference in Taipei yesterday.
A larger concern is that more than 90 percent of the films were rated G, PG or PG-13, putting young viewers at risk of being swayed by the scenes, Chiou said.
During the agency’s monitoring of movies over the past six years, about 57 percent of films in Mandarin contained smoking scenes, compared with 37 percent of foreign-language movies, Chiou said.
“Moreover, the average number of smoking scenes in the former is 21.4, higher than the 18.89 scenes in the latter. Smoking scenes average an estimated five minutes in a 100-minute-long Mandarin-language movie,” she said.
Chiou said research showed that as much as 52 percent of people who started smoking during adolescence did so because of their exposure to smoking early in life.
The agency advised parents to discuss the health risks of cigarettes with their children when coming across such scenes in movies to deter them from using tobacco at an early age.
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