American Beauty - I'm a fucking dumbass

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

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