American Beauty (The Awards Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Beauty.....In Many Forms
Review: Reading some of the reviews of this movie are painful. People who can't take off their "dumb" glasses for long enough to see the poignancy of this movie should go back to high school, or at least take some interpretation course. The producers of this movie are not GLORIFYING or HERALDING underage sex and the like; how does one get the idea that they enjoy these or something? American Beauty is the best movie of 1999, if not the decade, and is the epitome of a blend of comedy, insight, and poignance. The reason this movie is either loved or hated yields one simple explanation; American Beauty holds a mirror in front of most families in the nation, and some just cannot take this. Annette Bening shined as Carolyn Burnham, but the set was eclipsed by the utter brilliance of Kevin Spacey. His dry humor and outlook on life are amazing and unequaled in film. I believe Birch should have been given more credit for her role as Jane Burnham as well; she portrayed a teenager so similar to many today. Sure, many of the characters were strongly stereotyped (Birch, Mena Suvari, Chris Cooper, Allison Janney), but what movie does not contain these? This is to get meanings into the "thick-skulled" (but apparently even stereotypes didn't do for some). This movie deserved every accolade it's gotten. 5 Stars.

Rating:
Summary: Extraordinary
Review: Never has a film resonated with me emotionally with such intensity as "American Beauty" has, it is a truly remarkable accomplishment that comes together like a disturbance in the universe. Although it is not the first film to deconstruct suburbia, it is most likely to the first to brilliantly combine caustic humour and profound tragedy to create a portrait of modern humanity in it's raw and most naked form. Every aspect of it amazes me, the way it's directed, acted, written and realised, it unfolds and moves in ways I never thought possible. At one point, I completely forgot I was watching movie, instead, it felt like I was exploring the soul of America and all of it's tragic flaws. "American Beauty" completely unravels the facade that surrounds society, and by the end, everything and everyone we see on screen feels so achingly real, and so sadly true, some definitive moments will be lingering in your head for days. The movie's performances are absolutely incredible, especially Kevin Spacey, who is 100% worthy of an Oscar. He portrays his character with such complexity, a simple smile leaves us in complete awe. There are many meanings and messages interwoven in "American Beauty", skillfully made with a sense of darkness and beauty, and the way they all emerge is nothing short of spectacular. This is exactly what film-making is all about, the finest of 1999.

Rating:
Summary: Beauty comes from within.
Review: This film is set in suburban America, where the people supposingly have the iddlyic type of life that others desire. The reality of some people's life in suburbia is far from this perfect perception that is shown to the outside world. On the outside, you have a successful family, with a husband, wife and one daughter. Their house is beautiful, they sit down together to eat their dinner on their fine china, listening to the same music everyday.

From the inside things are very different, the husband, played brilliantly by Kevin Spacey, has a mid-life crisis. He quits his job, buys a new fancy sports car and starts smoking Mirjuana. His wife is having an affair, cos' she is bored with her life. The daughter is a normal disfunctional teenager, who is planning to run off with her boyfriend.

To me the title of the film means two things. Firstly the American Dream is not always what it seems. Happiness comes from within and not for lusting after other peoples "perfect lives". And secondly what is beautiful to one person, may not be beautiful to someone else. As they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I also believe that this film has the message - that we should stop every now and again to smell the roses and appreciate all the good things in our lives.

Rating:
Summary: GARBAGE FOR THE GARBAGE MINDED VIEWER
Review: I nearly vomited when I saw this travesty. To think that it won an Oscar for Best Picture is totally in keeping with the depraved Hollywood style of today. If you prefer decent films stick with the black and white classics or most of Disney. American Beauty should be retitled "American Ugly". There is nothing beautiful about this film. It is grotesque, glorifying just about every decaying moral in today's society. This type of film is what is wrong with America today. Heaven help us!!!

Rating:
Summary: Has to be in the Top Ten EVER ..Brilliant a Masterpiece.
Review: As Human Beings we are not perfect ,we have our Desires and Fantasy's good and bad ,in this Movie ,a man facing the possiblity of a lifetime of Mediocraty reaches the point of self destruction ,but Lester is such a likeable guy that it almost seems permissible what is going on in his world and the way he is conducting his affairs ..When he reaches the desired position with the young lady, that Primal urge to procreate that lies (sometimes dormant depending on who you are with)in all men, LESTER realises to his total disappointment that he cannot bring himself to do it (apart from the fact it;s statutory RAPE),
the innocence of her is Beautiful and his reaction is reassuring that in the Madness there is some sanity ,the Dichotomy is he wants to relive his youth when life was not so complexed and she wants to be a Adult and see's Sex as the prerequisite ...the Scene is Awesome and thats just one of the Amazing sensuous points of this Incredible Movie .. the Plastic bag scene which is so eloquently explained by a previous reviewer, is a ONE OF A KIND...that brought out feelings in me that were overwhelming .

Rating:
Summary: Death of a Salesman for the 90's
Review: A film like this not only entertains while you're in the theater but also drops subtle questions in your head about the nature of human behavior and the gulf between fantasy and reality. After watching this movie, viewers will think long and hard about their own lives as well as the lives of people around them. The movie spells out the social disillusionment phenomenon everyone experiences but can't really grasp.

American Beauty reminds us that, like Lester, we really have no idea what we really want. We're not rational creatures as economists assume we are. Our instinct might lead us to perform one action, yet our brains might tell us to perform the complete opposite. We may lust after material belongings, yet how do we know we will still treasure those material belongings once we obtain them? Lester may lust after Angela, yet once he feels her in his hands and finds out the truth about her sexuality, an entirely different feeling comes over him.

Ricky Fits, the drug-dealing boy next door, is able to look beyond conventional notions of attractiveness and find beauty in non-promiscuous, solemn girls as well as in plastic bags floating in the wind. When many criticize the movie, they say, "Where's the beauty in a plastic bag?" And that's the point. We live in a world of aesthetic subjectivism. What one person finds attractive, another may find repulsive, yet the urge is there for people to assume aesthetic absolutism. "It's just a plastic bag! How can there be beauty in it?" Well, a human being is just an aggregation of tissues, bones, and blood. How is that attractive? It depends on how you look at it. Reality is shaped by perspective.

Some people criticize the Ricky Fits character because he records his life experiences on tape and doesn't actually experience them. But time moves inexorably in one direction. Time cannot be stopped. In a physical sense the past and the future don't exist. We are only conscious in the present. Everything we do, everything we achieve, every bit of happiness we experience -- they are all eventually buried in the past by time. Recording subjective beauty is a means by which one can attempt to salvage beauty from the past into the present because time eventually destroys all beauty. If you don't believe me, walk into a pre-school and then walk into a nursing home. Remember that all the old men and women in the nursing home were once little kids.

Another profound element of American Beauty is in the tag line: look closer. An individual's behavior is not independent of his environment. Humans are conformists by nature, and humans will modify their behavior to assimilate into existing social categories. If any individual dares to stray from the category to which he has been assigned, he is shouted down and ostracized. No one can resist the urge to conform, so why bother? Everyone is nice in public, yet on the streets they blare their horns, scream, and swear. Some boys I know pretend to hate American Beauty because on the surface it seems like a "chick flick." They force themselves to watch gory horror movies and show off to others how they can stomach intense violence and excessive sex scenes. In American Beauty, Angela acts like a total slut, as many girls seem to nowadays. In the end, however, she is not what she makes herself out to be. Colonel Fits tries to act like such a man, yet in the end it's all just a giant facade. Civilization is but one giant movie, and members of society must start acting their parts if they want to belong to this civilization. Otherwise, they're outsiders. Try walking into a job interview without a tie. You'll be thrown out. That is the power of convention.

What if I asked you this question: What do you want in life? Most people would say, "happiness." But is happiness worth deluding yourself for? Carolyn Burnham shields herself from sadness by adopting a positive-thinking philosophy, a philosophy of self-affirming mantras and harsh self-discipline. Positive thinking may help you attain your goals, but positive thinking also blinds you from reality. Is it wise or moral to change the channel when you hear about mass starvation in Africa so you can enjoy moments of fleeting happiness from a cheap romance movie? Self-help is just a euphemism for self-deception. All humans need some complex fraud to distract them from the harsh and nihilistic realities of life, whether it's religion, money, or even love.

In spite of American Beauty's greatness, there are problems. Characters are stereotypical, but viewers will hardly notice unless they're ultra-critical. Anyway, exaggeration is essential in satire so that certain points are made obvious to viewers. Furthermore, Alan Ball's original screenplay is slightly edited. The ending is more optimistic and doesn't quite fit in with the movie's overall nihilistic themes. Ball's true message, therefore, is slightly blurred because we don't know whether his message came from his heart or from the portion of his brain that maximizes profits.

Problems aside, Sam Mende's debut movie is one of the greatest I've seen. Not only is it entertaining but it is also filled with ideas you can think about. It's an important film for society because there's so much society needs to learn. One girl I knew refused to watch American Beauty because, as she said, "I'm not gonna watch a movie with a name like that!"

Look closer.


Rating:
Summary: Haunting and Disturbing
Review: I rented American Beauty and I expected to be horribly offended at the father's infatuation with the young girl. When the movie came out I was fifteen and the idea of someone's father lusting after me made me want to gag, however that was only a small part of the story, the rest of it was absolutely spell binding.
Usually when I watch movies I knit, because I like to do two things at once but I could not get over how involved I was in the movie and the characters and how everything was not like it seemed.
Annette Bening was fabulous as the controlling mother who had to have everything go her way but was really falling apart. I like the how Mendes showed how their marriage was falling apart because she was so obsessed with material things. Wes Bentley had some beautiful lines and Chris Cooper was stellar because he always is. The acting and writing was top notch as was the directing. I loved how there were mainly three colors used, black, white, and red. There are other colors obviously but those were the main three and they were used exceptionally well.
I grew up in suburbia and I can attest things are not idyllic but they are not as melodramatic as this story was. I think the point was to show that people in the suburbs feel they have to hide their dissapointment and they lie to cover it up in disgusting shameless ways. The cinematography was gorgeous as well.
Reading other reviews many people who had problems with this film had issues with the homosexuality, which ironically was a small part of the film and not offensive as a man lusting after a girl the same age as his daughter. I do not think the moral of the film was "let's all be gay and let's hate American values" it was to mainly look closer at a sterile place where everything was "perfect and living the American dream" and realize that no place is perfect and to appreciate beauty in flawed things-ie Wes Bentley's character and Kevin Spacey. I personally think that is a beautiful moral and that this is a beautiful and engaging film.

Rating:
Summary: beauty, comedy, and tragedy at the same time
Review: This movie, like the more recently released The Assassination of Richard Nixon, is centered around a middle aged man whose midlife crisis is causing his life to fall apart. However, in this movie, unlike Assassination, the man in question (Kevin Spacey) has a bit more of a sense of humor. The story begins with Spacey narrating from a place of being recently dead--so we know from the start that the movie is going to end tragically, although we do not know how. Spacey seems, however, to be quite okay with the idea of being deceased.

Spacey is, basically, bored with his life. He seems uninspired with his work and, in any event, there are rumors of downsizing when a new boss is hired. His wife (Annette Benning) is more motivated, although not entirely successful, in her work as a real estate agent, and seems a bit disgusted with her husband's lackluster career. Their relationship seems somewhat loveless (Spacey describes masturbating in the shower as the high point of his day). His daughter (Thora Birch) is also very bored with life, and hangs out with a cheerleader friend (Mena Suvari) for whom Spacey eventually develops a strong crush.

The Fitts family moves in next door. The father, a Colonel (Chris Cooper), is homophobic (and, we later discover, ironically also a closet gay) and abusive with his son and most likely his wife. The mother (Allison Janney) is nearly catatonic for unexplained reasons that may have to do with abuse by Cooper. The son (Wes Bentley) has spent time in a psych ward, but is also secretly a drug dealer and a rather successful one at that.

These characters set the stage for the characters' various antics that follow. Spacey is ultimately fired from his job, but blackmails his employer into a hefty severance package. He starts smoking marijuana with Bentley and develops a strong crush for Birch's friend Suvari when he overhears her expressing an interest in sleeping with him. He uses the money from the severance package to buy a new car and basically starts living the life he wished he'd had in his youth.

Benning is increasingly disgusted with her husband's behavior--it seems he can do no right in her eyes--he is disgusted with him masturbating but equally disgusted with the idea of having sex with him. She is much more attracted to the top local real estate agent, with whom she has an affair both because she finds him sexy and because she hopes to learn more about selling real estate from him.

16-year-old Birch is initially disgusted by Bentley's voyeuristic habits--he has a nasty habit of following her around and filming her with his camcorder. Yet she eventually discovers his love for beauty in everything that he films, and, after a confrontation with her mother, poses bare breasted in the window as Bentley films her from next door. Bentley is caught and violently confronted by his Marine Corps father.

This sets in motion the sequence of events that lead to the film's tragic end. What is beautiful about this film is that the characters are not in total denial about their lives unravelling. They know what is happening--the career problems, the marital breakdown, and the affairs--and yet all of the central characters, in their own way, are still able to see the beauty in life and to enjoy the positive, even with everything that is going wrong. In fact, it is perhaps because of the pervasive theme of tragedy that they are more able to stop and enjoy life when given the opportunity.

So--in many ways, not an altogether happy movie, and yet a surprisingly uplifting one give the final outcome. A well earned Oscar for best picture.

Rating:
Summary: Look closer into this movie.
Review:
Lester Burnham ( Kevin Spacy) is a depressed workaholoic man whom is tired of his same-old life including wife ( Annette Bening). His marriage is falling apart, he fantasizes about his daughter's ( Thora Birch) best friend Anjelica ( Mena Suvari) and there's a boy next door whom is obessed with Burham's daughter.

A fantastic film worthy of all those awards even for best picture of the year, it's a funny and serious look at suburban America with some great photography, good acting and a nice music score by Thomas Newman. Ot's also a must see movie! it definitely makes you think, laugh and cry with all those emotions to help propell the film.

The DVD is stupendous with it's featurette, Commentary by Director Sam Mendes and Alan Ball, two trailers for the film, DVD-Rom stuff, storyboard presenation with commentary and production notes.

A beautiful and tragic dark comedy that will definitely be enjoyed for years to come for moviegoers.

Rating:
Summary: WOW!!!
Review: I LOVED This movie. MY favorite part was Wes Bently's rear end. The rest was only OK. The part about the plastic bag was great. They are good for holding stuff. they are very useful.
He has the best butt that i have seen. see it.