American Beauty - I'm a fucking dumbass

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

Seems like a bit of a detail there!

I was unaware of that Incredibles 2 review too. Haha, wow. Great Deadspin headline:

“New Yorker Film Critic Has Reservations About Children's Movie Because His Boner Kept Blocking The Screen”

My favorite Magnolia scene (I haven’t seen the film in forever, so memory has holes) is probably the pharmacy scene. Second favorite, somehow, is the one where every main character is inexplicably singing whichever Aimee Mann song.

Soundtrack > film

And for all that, it’s still better than American Beauty

also he's married to noted english fascist allison pearson

Oh my good God!!!!!

(The Kael interview is by Francis Davidson (sp?), and recorded for San Francisco's City Arts and Lectures.)

Thanks...Francis Davis; he put out Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael. I'm saying I'd never heard the interview, now I'm wondering if that's the actual interview that he turned into the book (which I have read).

How did Lane respond to all the offense over his review? He never interested me as a critic because, based on some of his earlier reviews I'd read (or more accurately probably skimmed), he struck me a a bland, go along to get along-type writer. The thing with Kael is, if she'd gotten complaints about something she'd written--she always did, but today those complaints would be a much bigger issue--my guess is that she would have bristled and dug herself an even deeper hole. She didn't seem like the apologizing type. (She did respond to the outrage over her Shoah review, but from memory, it was more an explanation than an apology.)

Magnolia is one of the worst movies I've ever seen and it's still somehow better than American Beauty which leads me to conclude that American Beauty is not even a film but some other, worse thing

American Beauty is a toilet

Why are you talking about American Beauty on the American Beauty thread? Can we get back to Kael?

*peeks head in door*

i love this thread title

*scampering away sounds*

AB has the feel of a fourth tier cable channel’s stab at a watercooler show, one of those no one would stick around for past episode 1 or 2 but since it’s a movie most everyone saw it thru to the end. This was probably the peak of “Spacey is our greatest actor now” hysteria, which deflated pretty quickly after this.

Just popping in to say Magnolia is a gigantic pile of horseshit

When it's got the "American" adjective in the title, you know it's going to be profound.