American Beauty - I'm a fucking dumbass

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)