American Beauty - I'm a fucking dumbass

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