American Beauty - I'm a fucking dumbass

this movie is ass.

(KIDDING.)

OTM, and not just cos Spacey is in it. gag.

oh, I blocked that out (mostly by not seeing it)

Maybe this isn't so weird.

xpost, I meant Starman.

-- scott seward (skotro...) (webmail), June 8th, 2004 8:30 PM. (scott seward) (later) (link)

stan lee presents charles foster kane vs. the fantastic four

I like Amelie though.

Then I saw other movies, and realized that the closing voiceover was the worst thing ever.

(one of the indie-film mags this month mentions that the grocery bag video was stolen from another filmmaker)

I saw American Beauty, and thought it was confused. Not confusing, just confused.

I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and thought it was an indie Love Actually, therefor bollox.

If anything, as I said at the time, AB is a sanitized version of 'Blue Velvet'. I can't remember why I said it then, but whatever. I think it has improved in my estimation, anyway, and Lynch has gone down the dumper.

What's so English about that? most films are made this way, surely. I do agree it's a bad thing though. i haven't been to the movies for about 4 months ( i used to go maybe twice a week at one point) and can't see the point anymore.

What I meant was, content != script. Content *is* visuals. In AB I think the visuals were an adornment to some good line-readings (as Pauline Kael pointed out). I think Gondry and Kaufmann found an amazing way of doing ESOTSM: I can't imagine what the script looked like, but the visuals *are* the story, the process of memory fading is up there on screen. I mean it's horses for courses, but as a marker I remember the weekend I saw it as being freezing cold. It wasn't at all, but the film was so bleak and wintry it got into my bones.

Oh yeah, when I first reviewed AB: 'sex, lies, and videotape' y'all!!! And yes, 'The Ice Storm', definitely (again, a big visual metaphor that works).

I don't see this as characteristically English. Agree it gives the film a certain old-fashioned quality but "essentially cinematic" > "essentially literary" is too lazy a critical cliche. You'd have to throw an awful lot of babies out with that bathwater (the whole of Wilder, for example, not to mention a host of obviously stagey masterpieces like "All About Eve").

ALTHOUGH I don't think 'The Apartment' is all that stagey, ie the great office scenes (pedants know that these were borrowed from Vidor and Lubitsch). But Wilder certainly did approach material with script paramount, yeah.

a HERO

i agree w/the person who says it's a "confused" movie. it's about a guy who gives it all up, this whole treadmill of material ambition, and we sneer at his wife's concern for her sofa yet cheer when he buys himself a snazzy convertible.

but the movie "works." the story, confused as it is, as politically nowhere as it is, is well-told. it's the kind of thing audiences used to take for granted in the forties and fifties: pedestrian tales told competently, with a few brilliant moments of performance.

People say this all the time, and maybe I'm just reading attitudes into him that aren't there, but... are you sure?

I know what you mean by this but I must note that I'm not actually a father. Just so Googlers don't get confused

Decent soundtrack, tho'.

Very similar to Six Feet Under for obvious reasons.

What do you mean by this?

EVIL

This is completely OTM. I always recommend 'Yi-Yi' to 'American Beauty' lovers.

xpost

Peter 'Family Guy' Griffin: Sometimes there is so much beauty in the world that I feel like I can't take it.

*cut to heaven*

God: What's wrong with you?!?! It's just a piece of paper! Do you know how complex the circulatory system is?!

Larry Clark.

Seriously, can't get enough. He's in town a lot, did you know? He goes shopping in the tenderloin for old books 1-2x a year.

All very B-List compared to my weekly Drew Barrymore run-ins in LA.

xpost: Better to like the films of Larry Clark then the photos.

I liked Bully. Mostly it demonstrates the banality of evil more intensely than any other film I've seen. It was actually really affecting.

Sum up your personality with five movies

Domestic realism (All the Real Girls, Secrets and Lies, You Can Count on Me), surrealism (Mulholland Dr, Spirited Away), mixes of both (Buffalo 66), comedies (Annie Hall, Waiting for Guffman), classic thrillers (Vertigo, Rosemary's Baby)

I am very pleased that someone else likes Buffalo '66.

also, the brown bunny is on it's way to the US apparently; but he re-edited it.

John Waters
"All the people who work there are great. They completely work with you and understand every bit of pressure you’re under. They make me relax - that’s really hard to do because I’m a hyper person. I love Berkeley, the good restaurants. It’s away from prying eyes of Hollywood and New York. They do a great job, that’s all. I’ve just had a wonderful experience there. I look forward every time to coming to Berkeley."

Yes, at the London Film festival.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A872057

i like it, too. when he buys her the heart cookie from dunkin' donuts? aw, shit.

EXACTLY

xpost that's different from the one I linked to. It had Jackson C Frank playing and some scenes from the movie playing in split screen.

The track is "Milk And Honey", now I remember.

the neighbor from american movie is IN storytelling and the name of his movie is AMERICAN SCOOBY.

i think you are wrong, sir.

but the whole idea of making a "serious" documentary about a subject to later turn it into an exercise of ridicule and laughter is the essence of the american movie/american scooby parallel.

Every time I hear about that "plastic in the wind" thing it reminds me of how much that character was just some bullshitting corny indie fucker trying to get laid with some false sincerity and DV cam shots of a Rite Aid bag.
Which is quite the metaphor for the movie itself. (And it worked, Sam Mendes is married to Kate Winslet)

[email protected]

"yi yi" is utterly remarkable, though.

i don't think "american beauty" is terribly made at all. it's not terribly imaginative, but much more than competent. but i found the compacency and confusion of the screenplay very hard to take, and i uterrly loathe kevin spacey's acting.

it's much worse than that!

-- Arthur

Alan Ball = Golden Girls writer (really, he was)

"The image of the floating plastic bag was taken from the avant-garde filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky's silent work Variations. Dorsky has been remarkably gracious about this, but the fact remains that American Beauty's most original moment was stolen, which goes some way towards explaining why this lyrical paean to the world's beauty seems so strangely disconnected from the conventional satire of middle-class life which comprises the majority of the film."

http://www.nd.edu/~pwicks/journalism/americanbeauty.html

will anyone still rep for this movie?

me.

NO NO NO!!!!!!!!!!!

I hated this movie when it came out, hate it now. Rent Happiness instead.

Happiness is good too. i have have movies on VHS.

have have = have both

good for you.

i don't have currently have a VCR, tho, so it's not all that good for me.

bad for you.

i like this thread title, a lot

I liked American Beauty when it came out. Don't know if I'd like it so much now, but my initial opinion was positive.

this movie is a crime against humanity

American Beauty taught me that the suburbs are like, so phony.

I booed and threw popcorn at the screen when I saw this in the theater.

actors love this movie for some reason

actors are, for the most part, stupid and vain.

Rent Happiness instead.

or Storytelling for Solondz' American Beauty zing

http://filmfreakcentral.net/dvdreviews/americangump.htm

plastic bag in the wind = box of chocolates

i loathe the tone of that article but it's weird to remember that in the same year we had american beauty, office space, and fight club -- each of them a "male-re-empowerment fantasy revolving around an ordinary guy telling his boss to fuck off"

of the three, american beauty was the worst -- narratively it rigged the deck by inserting the blackmail plot point, meaning spacey's middle aged revolt has no consequences for him or his family

Election and eXistenz better than all three

election's male lead also had a mid-life crisis which, although manifested differently, still results in facial injury.. though really it's broderick's teacher colleague who represents the reality of what happens to guys like kevin spacey's lester: they don't get shot by their gay right-wing neighbor, they play in a rock band in their garages and get sent to jail for banging underage nookie

gah kenan's article has now infected my writing

Rock Hardy OTM

Liking that movie got me into one of the biggest arguments I've ever had with my wife.

this is still a three star movie - does that count as repping?

i thought it was amazing when it came out

saw it a few years later and...no

i don't think it's badly made though--it's got some funny and well-acted moments. it's just really vapid and smug.

"How ya like gettin' it from tha king...?"

or Storytelling for Solondz' American Beauty zing

-- Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, February 7, 2008 12:51 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

american beauty is one of the worst movies ive ever seen but id still rather watch it again than fucking storytelling

^^otm

Not the worst thing around. Not the best. Probably about average as far as Best Picuture Oscar winners (since 1976) goes.

"your story was a piece of shit"

^^ only worthwhile thing in storytelling.

not to be cap'n save-a-mo but the american beauty trashing in storytelling was pretty funny

has calling out the vapidity & hypocrisy of upper-middle class american life ever been original?

i mean like henry james was doing the shit 150 years ago

no titty there BIG HOOS

fwiw I agree that Storytelling is not that good but it has a couple of really funny moments (the "censored" sex scene, the American Beauty parody)

i don't remember the american beauty parody at all.

i just threw an upper-middle class american out of my hotel for being vapid & hypocritical

i don't remember the american beauty parody at all.

its very brief - basically one of the characters in the second story arc shoots a film about the beauty of a plastic bag in the wind etc

clever

the plastic bag scene

big boobs in the window

that's about it

todd soldonz is a piece of shit

it made chris cooper a star, that's cool

^^ tru i guess maybe in that way it contributed to making the bourne movies cool, so props for that

oh man i totally forgot dude was in this... <3 <3 <3 chris cooper

never understood why people are so eager to hate on solondz

remember when wesley whats his face was supposed to be the next joaquin phoenix?

because he made movies after happiness

xpost

hhahaha yeah he was in ghost rider

and... P2!

and some western about a mining town that nobody saw

and a costume drama with kate hudson and heath ledger (rip) that i did see. it sucked.

oh man he sucked in P2

and some western about a mining town that nobody saw

Lone Star! You should definitely see it, it's one of the best American films of the 90's.

lone star is a movie with chris cooper, about a border town. not a mining town, with wes bentley

and some western about a mining town that nobody saw

the claim, which is dope

u all should see it

the claim, dir. michael winterbottom

xp

Lone Star is terrible!

i assume you mean the film and not the beer or There Will Be Blows

shakey what in fuck is wrong with you

wes bentley is a big junkie.

the claim was good

lets talk about it instead of this dumb movie

wes bentley is a big junkie.

sad!

Maybe someone mentioned this above, but the scene with the wife smashing her fists against her temple or the wall (or something like that, can't recall for sure), after she wasn't able to sell the house she was showing -- while repeating "STUPID, STUPID, STUPID" -- was chilling cinema. The rest, meh.

The Claim looks good.

I almost threw up during the scene in which Annette Bening collapses atop her pile of beautiful clothes upon learning of Kevin Spacey's death.

you have to watch the claim on a nice big screen, too. it helps to be stoned. just really beautiful and glacially paced. reminds me a little bit of mccabe and ms miller? and actually, deadwood too come to think of it.

I don't really know why people hate this film, but then I haven't seen it in over 5 or 6 years so I might not like it now. I don't understand why people don't like Amelie though - what's not to like? It's good fun. Romanticised, yes, but that's sort of the point isn't it?

Actually yeh, that plastic bag scene was very dumb in retrospect. I must have watched AB when I was a naiive 18yo and didn't really find it so yucky.

max i'm sold

the plastic bag scene in american beauty isn't dumb, it's the only scene that ISN'T dumb, you're watching a plastic bag perform at a high level like an athlete, it's like watching ski jumping in the olympics is dumb...i never saw a bag do that before and i'm glad i did.

yeah tracer--when i say deadwood and mccabe and ms. miller i mean more in terms of the grit and grime and the fucking magnificent setting than in the sensibilities of either more. its probably not as well-written as either of those two, but its the kind of movie that wins or loses on its cinematography (and it wins, i think).

The only good thing that ever happened in Family Guy is a scene of God yelling at that kid, "I created everything in nature and in outer space, and that PLASTIC BAG is the most beautiful thing in the world? What is your PROBLEM?"

rong. blue harvest is pretty awesome.

i remember repping for american beauty when i first saw it, but i haven't seen it since. don't really feel inclined to, either

i can't tell if m@tt is being serious or not

waht the hell: http://imdb.com/title/tt0218378/trailers-screenplay-E14774-310

yeah dude. that doesnt remind you of deadwood?

american beauty isn't as good as its reviews or as bad as its rep. there'll be some kind of rediscovery at some point where people decide it was significant somehow. i don't trust my opinion on it at all because i saw it with a woman who loved it and at the time i was hitting on her so i liked it too. (the kind of disclaimer that should really be on movie reviews.) i don't remember having a strong reaction to it either way. it seemed of its moment.

i do remember being charmed by the plastic bag. reminded me of the red balloon.

(btw that relationship didn't end well.)

you got married?

j/k

i don't trust my opinion on it at all because i saw it with a woman who loved it and at the time i was hitting on her so i liked it too. (the kind of disclaimer that should really be on movie reviews.)

^

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2y0WebFULM

It's a good enough film. Not epochal, but certainly enjoyable to watch, if you are not the kind of person who hates things.

Most of what I liked about AB were the scenes with him first having his whole rediscovery thing after he quits is job. I would have liked this movie a LOT better if it had ditched the convenient blackmail thing and just been about a dude quitting his job, getting dumped by his wife, etc.

When I first saw this I liked it, but the whole repressed gay neighbor thing really left a bad taste in my mouth. It seemed so tacked on, and to have so little to do with what I thought was the main theme of the movie. I still like the music and the vaguely surreal atmosphere. The scene where he smokes the pot with the unibrow caterer was my favorite.

The bag scene was good because it's a total stoner scene. I never watched it stoned, but I bet if I did I would totally get into that scene and the expression on my face would probably be just like the one Bentley wore throughout the movie.

also I saw Magnolia a few weeks later. Another movie I loved at the time and despise now.

Ha, I hated "Magnolia" from the get-go!

Magnolia is good too. I also have that on VHS.

This movie had a really bad influence on film scores.

This = American Beauty

fuckin' a

On the second viewing, it occurred to me that EVERYONE WAS A SUSPECKK

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/103/364746582_27244604e9.jpg

https://www.instagram.com/p/B1fFJFFlt95/

the worm has turned in the Zeitgeist

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/american-beauty-legacy-20-years-later_n_5d5c344fe4b0d1e1136902be

Interesting piece--the backlash has fascinated me for years.

i love the backlash.

this movie was always bad and I hated it when it came out

Otm

my buddy dave and i railed against the dumbness of the plastic bag scene in the school playground back in 1999 and we were dumb kids

but we were right

AB seemed impressive in a few very superficial ways, primarily pacing and editing and some acting here and there (Thora Birch was probably the best one here and it was always good to see Scottie Bakula pop up) but now it feels like a condensed version of a low midrange quality premium cable show that lasts one season.

I subjected my poor friend to a full-on, top of my voice, 20 minute power rant on the many ways i hated it as we walked to the train station after the movie. god i hated it so much.

such a smug film, too; it's basically a dumb Facebook artist meme stretched out to 122 minutes.

This doesn't quite apply to thew critical backlash, but I feel part of the general backlash is with people my age who saw it in High School when we were first getting our feet wet with important films, and didn't have easy access to the classics (DVD was still pretty new, Criterion only had about 50-60 titles out etc.). In that context, it's quite profound...until you see other stuff.*

Omar's also OTM about the TV influence. Thanks to this and 6FU, Ball became a huge touchstone on 'Quality Television' from cable on down in the '00s. Desperate Houseswives was such a PG-13 AB knock-off.

*Similar case w/Fight Club (note it's not included in the '99 list in the linked article), except many didn't let go to it, and ergo it's had a much more poisonous legacy.

I hated Fight Club too. saw both movies as essentially reactionary and regressive, both feature cop-outs masquerading as critiques.

both undergirded by gay panic as well

yet weirdly imo/ime actors and theatre people LOVED this movie.

Fight Club has aged just as poorly, what with it's lionizing of toxic men and 9/11 ending.

Theatre people also think Moulin Rouge (Luhrman) was the peak of modern cinema

I feel part of the general backlash is with people my age who saw it in High School when we were first getting our feet wet with important films, and didn't have easy access to the classics (DVD was still pretty new, Criterion only had about 50-60 titles out etc.). In that context, it's quite profound...until you see other stuff.

this mirrors my exact experience. blew my mind in high school and then i watched like five movies with fewer rocks in their heads and forgot about it. on revisit the glow had diminished heavily and i preferred magnolia anyway (i know).

i still think fight club is a good movie though. fincher makes the best of a bad book. i don't think it lionizes toxic men, the point is that the toxicity ends in nihilism?

A surprising amount of people still ride hard for Dogma too.

the movie presents the gay couple as this very sexless friendly duo and the closeted guy as this sweaty and desperate murderer. i still lol when thinking about the phantom blowjob he "witnessed" which leads to his breakdown. and Spacey being this gentle benevolent understanding guy in a very unctuous actorly not-spontaneous manner when Cooper tries to kiss him is basically foreshadowing the former's move into being a schmaltz king for a few years after. His career after AB is Travolta levels of weird.

in the early days of movie message boards basically Dogma and Fight Club and American Beauty and Blair Witch were some of the new classics of cinema everyone rode for.

blair witch absolutely kicks ass though

i don't think it lionizes toxic men, the point is that the toxicity ends in nihilism?

the nihilism looks cool, is the problem.

I do think Fight Club is decent, it looks good and the performances are fun, but it's surprisingly a bit boring for me, it doesn't really have much of a narrative pull.

the nihilism looks cool, is the problem.

― Οὖτις, Monday, September 9, 2019 3:57 PM (thirty-five seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

... it really do not think it does

Dogma and Fight Club and American Beauty and Blair Witch

burn this canon

of these four Fight Club is far and away the best because Fincher manages to have some fun with it, but that's as far as I'll go

Blair Witch is interesting stuff imo, i think as a document of its time even after casting aside the decent scares and concept it's vv fascinating.

the last ten minutes or so of blair witch still fuck me up. whole thing is executed so well

the biggest joke of the film and unfortunately a prescient one is a smug dork thinking he's the most awesome and attractive guy in the world but losing his mind because it's so not true he has to create a separate persona he presents to the world.

might as well take this over here
1999 in film

or here lol
1999's Best Movies: 20 Years Later

...“Pleasantville,” “The Ice Storm” and “The Truman Show.”

man, college flashbacks. only ditch weed and a nearby blockbuster for entertainment when i was broke. i think i remember liking Ice Storm(?)

this movie was always bad and I hated it when it came out

― Οὖτις, Monday, September 9, 2019 4:52 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

The Ice Storm is the best movie mentioned in the last 50 posts.

^yes. that seems to have fallen in favor somewhat too, but I thought it was great

Truman Show i actually saw in the theater. went to see Office Space, was one of two people in the entire theater and laughed my ass off. i had brought in a half pint of evan williams and polished it off by the end. then got the bright idea to hide out and sneak into a later showing of Truman. theater was absolutely packed. it sucked p bad iirc.

Fight Club still best gay film of '99

(novel written by a homo too)

if you think it "lionizes toxic men" I think you missed the last 30 mins

morbs otm

relishing this tbh

Love American Beauty (then and now), love The Ice Storm (took two or three viewings), hate Fight Club (then and now).

undergirded by gay panic

this is where I remind Shakeybrain AGAIN that one of Pitt's first lines (to Norton) is "do I give you the ass or the crotch?"

can't remember anything about that film, but that does sound like a homophobic straight guy thing to say

the movie presents the gay couple as this very sexless friendly duo and the closeted guy as this sweaty and desperate murderer. i still lol when thinking about the phantom blowjob he "witnessed" which leads to his breakdown. and Spacey being this gentle benevolent understanding guy in a very unctuous actorly not-spontaneous manner when Cooper tries to kiss him is basically foreshadowing the former's move into being a schmaltz king for a few years after. His career after AB is Travolta levels of weird.

― omar little, Monday, September 9, 2019

What's fascinating about American Beauty is that Ball and Mendes still thought they could get away with Network-indebted cartoons in 1999 and still entertain. By the last third it has contempt for everyone except Spacey's pure desire to bed a teenaged girl even if unrealized and Chris Cooper's desire to shoot him and himself for his thwarted homosexual passions. It strikes me as very much a late '90s movie in which a liberal suburban enclave could greet the gay couple next door but still think honoring their lusts is gross, and accept a career woman but still make fun of her as a corporate drone.

It's constantly hedging yet congratulating itself for showing representations of liberal America.

not enough hatred of Alan Ball itt

also presenting her affair w/another man her own age as a pathetic clownish thing while Lester lusting for a high schooler is a hero's journey of self realization.

if you think it "lionizes toxic men" I think you missed the last 30 mins

I strongly dislike the ending of Fight Club. At best, the film is queasily ambivalent about its overall stance. To me, the reveal that Tyler Durden is just a mental construct only serves as way to let the audience off the hook in their over-identification with the fight club and their shitty antics.

The nihilistic 'actions' are often made to look silly or gross, as in the globs of human fat scene.

There was an epic AB thread on the Salon forums back in the day. Largely critical.

Yeah, I saw it more as trying to be grossly transgressive and mischievous in a "cool" way, but ymmv.

xp

also Spacey's scenes in AB might've made more sense with a few frames of cock spliced in

Length or duration

uh

Among the movies many other sins, I always (fairly or not) considered the American Beauty score to be ground zero for the annoyingly twee marimba/celeste/xylophone musical sounds that took over commercials and documentary soundtracks in the 2000s.

now I want to see it again

The part where Narrator/Durden still looks cool as hell and winds up with the hot girl while a great, anthemic Pixies song rolls over them watching explosions did a great job of undermining toxic masculinity.

so did Annie Lennox's cover of "Don't Let It Bring You Down" during the rose petal bathtub scene.

The nihilistic 'actions' are often made to look silly or gross, as in the globs of human fat scene.

The scene that resolves with Norton finding his inner badass by overcoming worldly pain and not giving into that namby-pamby meditation shit IIRC

xp no, no, see they were blowing up toxic masculinity

toxic Joe Biden clients

BernieBro club

the Narrator is introduced as an "empathy vampire" attending 12-step meetings he has no real stake in; v heroic

save it for the FC anniversary next month, you cloddish motherfuckers

I didn't like it at the time but Fight Club sounds interesting in retrospect

It might've worked best as a Henry James story.

Let's just say the way it presents itself and the message it tries to convey are somewhat at odds.

Still never figured out how they got away with showing Thora Birch (born 1982) topless. It fits with Alfred’s “constantly hedging but congratulating itself.”

the Narrator is introduced as an "empathy vampire" attending 12-step meetings he has no real stake in; v heroic

Yes, a pathetic loser... until he joins (starts) the nihilistic death cult that gives him male friendship and a hot lady to fuck.

I actually hated this movie back in 1965, the year of Sam Mendes being born.

Amazing that it's not Mendes's worst (The Road To Perdition wins that battle)

Quantum of Solace

The Road To Perdition wins that battle

He who lives by the Hanks, dies by the Hanks.

I did see a National Theatre screening of the amended-directed Lehman Trilogy, which is fantastic.

Now that you mention Bond, Skyfall is the only Mendes movie I’ve liked at all.

*Mendes-directed (ugh autocorrect)

in the early days of movie message boards basically Dogma and Fight Club and American Beauty and Blair Witch were some of the new classics of cinema everyone rode for.

― omar little

how does the Matrix fit into this

or am i confusing the thread because I have very mixed feelings on the Matrix

I know someone who will still get drunk and start telling randoms at a party about the Matrix and Baudrillard.

sam mendes is such a fucking DO U SEE middlebrow hack

he is one of the worst things

a recent re-watch of this was as bad as expected but i did not expect it to look as ugly as it did.

what makes FC a much more interesting movie is that it's far more willing to engage with actual transgression rather than smug self-congratulations of AB. AB never once challenges its audience's sensibilities, all the while pretending to be edgy. FC also arguably very smug but that's an intentional part of the text, I like to think. That Durden's authentic inchoate/primal/masochistic rebellion ("just hit me!") shades so easily into semi-violent para-military anarcho-fascism (the incoherence is the point!) or even full-on death-drive is also the obvious point...it's supposed to be "cool"... until it isn't.

I find the nihilistic ending funny but also I think it's intended to be hopeful since it's the moment the implicit symbolism of Tyler's revolution (going back to year zero) becomes, for the character, a moment in which a different/better self is finally maybe possible (but maybe not, as the dick splice implies). The irony of the hate the movie gets is that, in the end, it really amounts to a kind of defense of the status quo. And as everyone has pointed out, the movie's worshipers are engaging in exactly the kind of hapless and impotent "rebellion" that the movie satirizes. It's perhaps to the movie's detriment that it can't find a third way except in its admirable refusal of overt moralizing.

The overt moralizing of AB, by contrast, is what makes it such a shallow movie--nothing is really risked, there's no *real* rebellion, we're on his side the whole time, and he even "does the right thing" (doesn't sleep with a teenager) since, after all, he's a good guy. We leave the theater and the world is exactly as it should be...death drive indulged and deferred and the ~very same~ suburban american wasteland the movie spends most of its time mocking is sentimentally reaffirmed. Give me the collapsing buildings instead.

booming post ryan

not sure why today everyone is talking about bad films from the 90s that they don't like, but w/e

Yeah great post Ryan, hits exactly what I've not been able to put into words about AB (which 17-year old me loved at the time)

https://media3.giphy.com/media/IqtLevb2hxYkM/source.gif

^^ prescient imo

ryan otm

the cinematographer of AB, Conrad Hall, did a lot of good stuff from the '60s on (In Cold Blood, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy, The Day of the Locust, Marathon Man)

I know someone who will still get drunk and start telling randoms at a party about the Matrix and Baudrillard.

― Greta Van Show Feets BB (milo z)

i mean, that's cool, i'm glad they can see it in a baudrillardian sense... i can't really do that, first off not having read baudrillard, second off as much as i respect the wachowskis as trans pioneers it just seems like so much neoplatonism to me, shallow and kind of wrong. even if i actively try to read it as relating to trans depersonalization/derealization i can't get anything out of it, because fucking dualism! i haven't even seen the sequels because nobody has ever said anything to indicate that i would benefit from seeing them.

the sequels are great and linger on the meaning of personal choice in a world where all of your options are laid out for you in advance. imo you would benefit from seeing them

prepared for the flurry of posts informing me that the matrix sequels are not great

Just gonna say that Speed Racer is great and leave it at that

speed racer is easily their best imo

love to derail an american beauty thread toward the wachowskis

Definitely relate to the experience of initially taking the bait w/american beauty. I remember rewatching it when it came out on video and couldnt believe I'd previously fallen for its bullshit.

Fight club & the matrix I smelled a rat from the get-go. At the ending of the matrix when keanu slips on a pair of sick oakley shades and flys away(?) or whatever, I remember yelling out "DO THE DEW!" which 17y/o me thought was a p funny heckle but everyone else in the theater did not

(they were right, heckling any movie is a monstrous activity for savages)

no, it's in The Departed you should smell a rat

"The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce" - Baudrillard

Could never get past trying to figure out how Morpheus's shades stayed in place.

Will echo some of the posts itt, I saw AB as a 15-16 old and it genuinely seemed ~profound~ at the time. Definitely get how it could strike a chord with an angsty, clueless suburban adolescent suspicious of the adult rat race maannn.

Like only two years later in college I excitedly put in on for some friends who had never seen it before and I was incredibly embarrassed.

Could never get past trying to figure out how Morpheus's shades stayed in place.

prepared for the flurry of posts informing me that the matrix sequels are not great

― american bradass (BradNelson)

that's ok brad if you think i should watch them i'll put them on the list

i too thought "speed racer" was their best film but i only watched the first 20 minutes, should i watch the rest?

matrix sequels are terrible tbh

Matrix Reloaded has its considerably good moments but that ending...

Revolutions is dreadful imo.

Speed Racer is one of the greatest films of the 2000s

When American Beauty came out my closest moviegoing friends and I were eighteen-year-old boys--literally the stupidest creatures that God ever put on this planet--and even we all immediately recognized that American Beauty was a reeking heap of rancid offal.

— ℑ 𝔇𝔬𝔫'𝔱 𝔅𝔩𝔞𝔪𝔢 𝔜𝔬𝔲 (@NickPinkerton) September 12, 2019

I'm going to put this here, but I just learned via Red Letter Media that not only are there two cinematographers named Conrad Hall (Conrad L. Hall and Conrad W. Hall), but they *both* worked on American Beauty!

Father and son. L’s father was James Norman Hall, co-author of Mutiny on the Bounty.

Ah. Maybe I knew that.

I didn’t dislike AMERICAN BEAUTY—I hated it. It’s not that it’s badly made—it isn’t. It has snappy rhythms and Kevin Spacey’s line readings are very smart, and Annette Bening is skillful in the scene where she beats up on herself. But the picture is a con. (1999)

— pauline kael bot (@paulinekaelbot) January 14, 2023

Kael OTM

It is very skillful at passing off some bullshit as deep truths.

most poorly-written Oscar winner EVER. And that's saying something.

One of those categories that had 4 good-to-great nominees and somehow the other, utter piece of shit ended up winning.

American Beauty, Alan Ball
Being John Malkovich, Charlie Kaufman
Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson
The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan
Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh

i have never seen this film

One of the replies to that tweet links to a late interview with Kael. Can’t wait to dive into this.

She rips on it more here. https://t.co/feAFtXujD6

— Charles Bennet (@ChuckBenetRamse) January 14, 2023

American Beauty, Alan Ball
Being John Malkovich, Charlie Kaufman
Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson
The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan
Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh

Being John Malkovich >> Topsy-Turvy >> The Sixth Sense >> American Beauty >> Magnolia

Poppycock

xps I live for new Kael audio clips

C’mon man Magnolia’s great

I'll grant Magnolia's likely in fourth place in that lineup

American Beauty is bad, Magnolia is actively painful to watch, which I count as worse than bad.

Annette Bening's AB character would've likened up Magnolia.

more films shd end with a rain of toads

Interviewer: So you haven't broken down at all and thought, "Well, I'm going to watch Nashville today"?

Kael: No, I haven't watched Nashville again. I was thinking about it because of this new... what do you call it, CVD? Or what are the initials?

Interviewer: Uh, CD-ROM, or...?

Kael: Uh, no.

Interviewer: Oh DVD.

Kael: Yeah, DDD... issue is supposed to be coming out.

kael still otm tbh smh

Digital Dideo Disk

I think the biography shed light on the lie that was her claim to never have seen a movie more than once

Her reviews said so. She offhandedly remarked more than once about catching '30s comedies on TV.

Right, I think her preference was turned into a character flaw by external sources

She also said two somewhat different things on different occasions.

a. I don't like watching a movie more than once, ever.
b. I don't like watching a movie more than once before writing the review.

That YouTube interview is good--never heard that before. There's some funny stuff around the 12:00 mark about staying to watch a film twice in a theatre; around 34:00, she says she was unfairly ambushed about her Nashville review, by Altman too, even though she checked with his office beforehand and was encouraged to review the film preemptively; and around 42:00, there's some talk about tasteless movie jokes that makes me wonder again if she could last today.

Who is the interviewer?

I mean the NYers lead movie critic now is Anthony Lane, who fills the back page with his wet dreams about Elastigirl (Mrs Incredible) so if he’s not fired I don’t know why Kael would be

Never took to Anthony Lane, so I rarely look at him; didn't know anything about his big dust-up with The Incredibles until now. I think Kael had the capacity to offend more than that, but maybe you're right, maybe she'd be fine.

He’s a terrible writer I can never get past the first paragraph

Haven't read him in a while. He seems incapable of any kind of passionate or committed argument. The reviews feel like a string of pointless quips, and you're left with nothing.

yes he's amazingly and incredibly fucking awful i hate him

also he's married to noted english fascist allison pearson

Seems like a bit of a detail there!

I was unaware of that Incredibles 2 review too. Haha, wow. Great Deadspin headline:

“New Yorker Film Critic Has Reservations About Children's Movie Because His Boner Kept Blocking The Screen”

My favorite Magnolia scene (I haven’t seen the film in forever, so memory has holes) is probably the pharmacy scene. Second favorite, somehow, is the one where every main character is inexplicably singing whichever Aimee Mann song.

Soundtrack > film

And for all that, it’s still better than American Beauty

also he's married to noted english fascist allison pearson

Oh my good God!!!!!

(The Kael interview is by Francis Davidson (sp?), and recorded for San Francisco's City Arts and Lectures.)

Thanks...Francis Davis; he put out Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael. I'm saying I'd never heard the interview, now I'm wondering if that's the actual interview that he turned into the book (which I have read).

How did Lane respond to all the offense over his review? He never interested me as a critic because, based on some of his earlier reviews I'd read (or more accurately probably skimmed), he struck me a a bland, go along to get along-type writer. The thing with Kael is, if she'd gotten complaints about something she'd written--she always did, but today those complaints would be a much bigger issue--my guess is that she would have bristled and dug herself an even deeper hole. She didn't seem like the apologizing type. (She did respond to the outrage over her Shoah review, but from memory, it was more an explanation than an apology.)

Magnolia is one of the worst movies I've ever seen and it's still somehow better than American Beauty which leads me to conclude that American Beauty is not even a film but some other, worse thing

American Beauty is a toilet

Why are you talking about American Beauty on the American Beauty thread? Can we get back to Kael?

*peeks head in door*

i love this thread title

*scampering away sounds*

AB has the feel of a fourth tier cable channel’s stab at a watercooler show, one of those no one would stick around for past episode 1 or 2 but since it’s a movie most everyone saw it thru to the end. This was probably the peak of “Spacey is our greatest actor now” hysteria, which deflated pretty quickly after this.

Just popping in to say Magnolia is a gigantic pile of horseshit

When it's got the "American" adjective in the title, you know it's going to be profound.

Does American Beauty get any praise because the male lead ends up not acting on his desire for the teenaged girl?

American Graffiti? American Honey?

Does American Beauty get any praise because the male lead ends up not acting on his desire for the teenaged girl?

― Halfway there but for you, S

set to Annie Lennox's version of "Don't Let It Bring You Down."

American Pie is a more profound exploration of normative masculinity and suburban anomie than this bullshit

There was a kind of frenzied hoopla around this movie when it came out.. like it was so self-evidently “high quality”, people just tripping over their own dicks to praise it. Why was that?? Very hard to credit it now.

This badly written review trashing it from a local critic I'm glad retired is hilarious:

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1999-09-24-9909230203-story.html

from = by

the easiest and most disturbing explanation is that a lot of critics saw themselves in the sp***y character but it was probably a bunch of stuff. it plays with a bunch of themes that probably seemed profound enough if you didn't care that it doesn't do anything new or interesting with them

it has the same fin de siecle angst and energy as fight club and the matrix which haven't aged perfectly either but are a lot easier to watch today than this and a lot of it comes down to the main character but also there's something about the smugness and self-importance of this one which makes it so cloying

It's Cheever's suburbia and Pet Shop Boys "Suburbia" in American sitcom frameworks.

now I'm remembering this was the year of britney's breakthrough and how repulsive the press was about her from the jump and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to connect this cultural sensibility to our hero's creeping in this film which afair is heavily romanticised and only really shown from his perspective

The sexual exploitation of teenagers was and remains popular. Thora Birch was 17 when she was topless in this!

whew how lucky Kevin Spacey is gay

This was also DreamWorks first solo 'Prestige Picture', and they threw a lotta money into promotion, keeping it on n theatres building on word of mouth after a disappointing opening etc.

that critic is probably right about other critics' identifications but lol @ weed dealing as more a cause for handwringing than voyeurism and the "homophobes are secretly gay" trope attacked for being *too* PC - 1999 really was another planet

I'm sorry to say that even the usually reliable David Denby of The New Yorker seems to have popped his cork, proclaiming it "by far the strongest American film of the year."

Oh New Yorker paws

keep looking at this thread like it's a band name and album title, and that's more entertaining to me than the movie ever was

xp is that for American Beauty or The Incredibles 2?

you know what's worse than American Beauty? Road to Perdition.

This asshole can't even make fun James Bond movies.

I'd also like to think that if American Beauty is remembered at all, it will be as the movie in which a potential future first lady performs vigorous, if simulated, sexual intercourse while shouting obscenities.

That potential future first lady is Bening. She is, of course, the real-life wife of Warren Beatty - a man who may or may not be serious about running for the presidency.

If he is, and if he should somehow win, then American Beauty, in which Bening and Gallagher appear to make love, could become a curious cultural artifact - the Bedtime for Bonzo of our wilder, crazier times.

That's the way I prefer to look at it, anyway.

dat critic delmar

I was trying to find David Denby's review and came across Jonathan Rosenbaum's:

https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2020/03/getting-it-both-ways/

That's ... not one of his finer moments

Like that review a lot. One of the best things a critic can do is surprise you. Kael and Kauffmann used to surprise me all the time; Armond White, at least in his present guise, never surprises me.

Surprise the reader with a new perspective on a film. JRo's review on this one only indicates he was snowballed

I know you already know this, but I meant in terms of what a critic likes and doesn't like.

It isn’t surprising that this DreamWorks movie is the love child of Steven Spielberg, who bought the script and hired the director...

Don't think I knew that.

now that I'm old I realize it was more Midlife Crisis: The Movie where idolizing teenagers or attempting to live out your teenage dream leaves you dead or a murderer recognizing your own sexuality

(I kid, but wow the "teenagers are working through things but recognize true beauty/have true beauty" bit was overwrought by so many degrees)

American Beauty, Alan Ball
Being John Malkovich, Charlie Kaufman
Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson
The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan
Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh

I think the only one of these I could stomach watching these days is Topsy Turvy.

well he only ends up dead because the world has conspired against his cool rock n roll rebirth iirc

I haven’t seen a really good Sam Mendes film yet. Skyfall was the most superficially impressive just because of some screencap-worthy imagery but the guy can’t direct a dynamic action scene to save his life.

I think the only one of these I could stomach watching these days is Topsy Turvy.

I haven't your unyielding good taste

New Sam Mendes looks terrible.

The thread where we anticipate Sam Mendes' "Sweeney Todd" movie

Rule: if you want to jump all over this, you have to first pay money to actually see the film. (This will keep me safe.)

thought the #babylon finale needed a punchup. pic.twitter.com/S0CjeCH679

— alex gradet 🐀 (@menace2snacks) February 2, 2023