American Beauty - I'm a fucking dumbass

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