American Beauty - I'm a fucking dumbass

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.

Does American Beauty get any praise because the male lead ends up not acting on his desire for the teenaged girl?

American Graffiti? American Honey?

Does American Beauty get any praise because the male lead ends up not acting on his desire for the teenaged girl?

― Halfway there but for you, S

set to Annie Lennox's version of "Don't Let It Bring You Down."

American Pie is a more profound exploration of normative masculinity and suburban anomie than this bullshit

There was a kind of frenzied hoopla around this movie when it came out.. like it was so self-evidently “high quality”, people just tripping over their own dicks to praise it. Why was that?? Very hard to credit it now.

This badly written review trashing it from a local critic I'm glad retired is hilarious:

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1999-09-24-9909230203-story.html

from = by

the easiest and most disturbing explanation is that a lot of critics saw themselves in the sp***y character but it was probably a bunch of stuff. it plays with a bunch of themes that probably seemed profound enough if you didn't care that it doesn't do anything new or interesting with them

it has the same fin de siecle angst and energy as fight club and the matrix which haven't aged perfectly either but are a lot easier to watch today than this and a lot of it comes down to the main character but also there's something about the smugness and self-importance of this one which makes it so cloying

It's Cheever's suburbia and Pet Shop Boys "Suburbia" in American sitcom frameworks.

now I'm remembering this was the year of britney's breakthrough and how repulsive the press was about her from the jump and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to connect this cultural sensibility to our hero's creeping in this film which afair is heavily romanticised and only really shown from his perspective

The sexual exploitation of teenagers was and remains popular. Thora Birch was 17 when she was topless in this!

whew how lucky Kevin Spacey is gay

This was also DreamWorks first solo 'Prestige Picture', and they threw a lotta money into promotion, keeping it on n theatres building on word of mouth after a disappointing opening etc.

that critic is probably right about other critics' identifications but lol @ weed dealing as more a cause for handwringing than voyeurism and the "homophobes are secretly gay" trope attacked for being *too* PC - 1999 really was another planet

I'm sorry to say that even the usually reliable David Denby of The New Yorker seems to have popped his cork, proclaiming it "by far the strongest American film of the year."

Oh New Yorker paws

keep looking at this thread like it's a band name and album title, and that's more entertaining to me than the movie ever was

xp is that for American Beauty or The Incredibles 2?