The folks in India’s “Bollywood,” home to the world’s largest film industry (by output, not revenue) are up in arms over new health regulations banning smoking in films and television. The new guidelines, to take effect from 1 August, also make allowances for older movies: cigarette packs must be electronically masked, and a health message must scroll at the bottom of the screen during smoking scenes.

As India can’t enforce these requirements on imported films, they will instead require foreign exhibitors to get a special rating from the Censor Board.

Upon hearing this news, I was going to comment that our own rating system, while moronic in its own special ways, isn’t quite so extreme as to screen for something so common. Then the last DVD I watched opened with this:

So I’ll just shut up now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 3rd, 2005 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Film.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.