― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 02:27 (twenty years ago) link
― amateur!st (amateurist), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 02:28 (twenty years ago) link
― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 02:29 (twenty years ago) link
― cutty (mcutt), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 02:29 (twenty years ago) link
― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 02:30 (twenty years ago) link
― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 02:31 (twenty years ago) link
― cutty (mcutt), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 02:31 (twenty years ago) link
― Morley Timmons (Donna Brown), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 02:32 (twenty years ago) link
xpost, I meant Starman.
― Allyzay, Wednesday, 9 June 2004 02:33 (twenty years ago) link
-- scott seward (skotro...) (webmail), June 8th, 2004 8:30 PM. (scott seward) (later) (link)
stan lee presents charles foster kane vs. the fantastic four
― amateur!st (amateurist), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 02:33 (twenty years ago) link
― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 02:33 (twenty years ago) link
I like Amelie though.
― Gear! (Gear!), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 05:21 (twenty years ago) link
― Andrew (enneff), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 05:47 (twenty years ago) link
― dog latin (dog latin), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 06:58 (twenty years ago) link
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)
― miloauckerman (miloauckerman), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 07:03 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― Johnney B (Johnney B), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 07:06 (twenty years ago) link
― Possibly Kate Again (kate), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 07:06 (twenty years ago) link
― amateur!st (amateurist), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 07:19 (twenty years ago) link
― stevem (blueski), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 08:46 (twenty years ago) link
― Spencer Chow (spencermfi), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 08:50 (twenty years ago) link
― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:04 (twenty years ago) link
― Crickets Dance On Tequila Booty (Barima), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:04 (twenty years ago) link
― Crickets Dance On Tequila Booty (Barima), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:05 (twenty years ago) link
― frankiemachine, Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:07 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― Enrique (Enrique), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:10 (twenty years ago) link
― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:17 (twenty years ago) link
― Enrique (Enrique), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:19 (twenty years ago) link
― stevem (blueski), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:26 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― jed_ (jed), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:27 (twenty years ago) link
― Tuomas (Tuomas), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:32 (twenty years ago) link
― Crickets Dance On Tequila Booty (Barima), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:35 (twenty years ago) link
― jed_ (jed), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:35 (twenty years ago) link
― jed_ (jed), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:41 (twenty years ago) link
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).
― Enrique (Enrique), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:45 (twenty years ago) link
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").
― frankiemachine, Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:48 (twenty years ago) link
― Enrique (Enrique), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:53 (twenty years ago) link
― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:55 (twenty years ago) link
― frankiemachine, Wednesday, 9 June 2004 10:07 (twenty years ago) link
― Michael B, Wednesday, 9 June 2004 10:10 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― Enrique (Enrique), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 10:11 (twenty years ago) link
a HERO
― stevem (blueski), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 10:12 (twenty years ago) link
― Chris 'The Velvet Bingo' V (Chris V), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 10:14 (twenty years ago) link
― stevem (blueski), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 12:15 (twenty years ago) link
― VengaDan Perry (Dan Perry), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 12:24 (twenty years ago) link
― Dave Stelfox (Dave Stelfox), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 12:33 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 12:34 (twenty years ago) link
― cutty (mcutt), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 12:36 (twenty years ago) link
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 12:39 (twenty years ago) link
People say this all the time, and maybe I'm just reading attitudes into him that aren't there, but... are you sure?
― gabbneb (gabbneb), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 12:41 (twenty years ago) link
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
― Matos W.K. in Mpls (M Matos), Wednesday, 9 June 2004 14:30 (twenty years ago) link
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
― Left, Sunday, 15 January 2023 00:03 (one year ago) link
It's Cheever's suburbia and Pet Shop Boys "Suburbia" in American sitcom frameworks.
― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 15 January 2023 00:06 (one year ago) link
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
― Left, Sunday, 15 January 2023 00:07 (one year ago) link
The sexual exploitation of teenagers was and remains popular. Thora Birch was 17 when she was topless in this!
― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Sunday, 15 January 2023 00:10 (one year ago) link
whew how lucky Kevin Spacey is gay
― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 15 January 2023 00:15 (one year ago) link
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.
― an icon of a worried-looking, long-haired, bespectacled man (C. Grisso/McCain), Sunday, 15 January 2023 00:17 (one year ago) link
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
― Left, Sunday, 15 January 2023 00:19 (one year ago) link
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
― jmm, Sunday, 15 January 2023 00:21 (one year ago) link
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
― fentanyl young (Neanderthal), Sunday, 15 January 2023 00:47 (one year ago) link
xp is that for American Beauty or The Incredibles 2?
― circa1916, Sunday, 15 January 2023 01:48 (one year ago) link
you know what's worse than American Beauty? Road to Perdition.
― papal hotwife (milo z), Sunday, 15 January 2023 02:08 (one year ago) link
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.
― symsymsym, Sunday, 15 January 2023 06:25 (one year ago) link
dat critic delmar
― fentanyl young (Neanderthal), Sunday, 15 January 2023 06:36 (one year ago) link
I was trying to find David Denby's review and came across Jonathan Rosenbaum's:
https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2020/03/getting-it-both-ways/
― clemenza, Monday, 16 January 2023 03:36 (one year ago) link
That's ... not one of his finer moments
― عباس کیارستمی (Eric H.), Monday, 16 January 2023 13:34 (one year ago) link
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.
― clemenza, Monday, 16 January 2023 16:05 (one year ago) link
Surprise the reader with a new perspective on a film. JRo's review on this one only indicates he was snowballed
― عباس کیارستمی (Eric H.), Monday, 16 January 2023 16:08 (one year ago) link
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.
― clemenza, Monday, 16 January 2023 16:33 (one year ago) link
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
― mh, Wednesday, 18 January 2023 17:46 (one year ago) link
(I kid, but wow the "teenagers are working through things but recognize true beauty/have true beauty" bit was overwrought by so many degrees)
― mh, Wednesday, 18 January 2023 17:47 (one year ago) link
American Beauty, Alan BallBeing John Malkovich, Charlie KaufmanMagnolia, Paul Thomas AndersonThe Sixth Sense, M. Night ShyamalanTopsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh
I think the only one of these I could stomach watching these days is Topsy Turvy.
― Motion to adjourn to enjoy a footling (President Keyes), Wednesday, 18 January 2023 17:57 (one year ago) link
well he only ends up dead because the world has conspired against his cool rock n roll rebirth iirc
― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 18 January 2023 17:57 (one year ago) link
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.
― omar little, Wednesday, 18 January 2023 18:03 (one year ago) link
I haven't your unyielding good taste
― عباس کیارستمی (Eric H.), Wednesday, 18 January 2023 18:07 (one year ago) link
New Sam Mendes looks terrible.
― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 19 January 2023 11:07 (one year ago) link
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.)
― clemenza, Thursday, 19 January 2023 15:53 (one year ago) link
thought the #babylon finale needed a punchup. pic.twitter.com/S0CjeCH679— alex gradet 🐀 (@menace2snacks) February 2, 2023
― عباس کیارستمی (Eric H.), Saturday, 4 February 2023 16:32 (one year ago) link