>Is frequently cited as a film that aged poorly, has multiple articles written about it's dwindling reputation, is commonly put alongside Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Crash (2004) as one of the worst Best Picture winners
>Is still cited as a cultural touchstone in cinema, regularly taught in film schools, highly rated on pretty much every film site, has multiple essays on youtube
ONE OR THE OTHER MAN
People just hate on it now because Kevin Spacey bad
people still like other films he starred in though, like Margin Call
It's pretty good. The performances are great and the vibe is strong. Very entertaining but also a little simplistic/pre 911 feeling.
Also I'm surprised Cinemaphile doesn't shit on it more given the gay angle.
The gay angle makes no sense
>RAAAH I HATE homosexualS
>SON YOU ARE homosexual GET OUT
>RAAAH I NEED TO GO KISS MY NEIGHBOR NOW!
if you were repressed all your life you wouldnt suddenly stop and go kiss your neighbor
thats stupid
Would you frick your neighbors ass?
For all we know he regularly visits male prostitutes.
there is nothing wrong with being against gay "marriage" despite having sex with other men
After #MeToo I no longer believe supposed sex scandals and sexual harassment claims in the media. I know it’s crazy but I think they’re all bullshit.
Convenient
>you should be okay with homosexuals shoving their degeneracy down everyone's throats because a few people who correctly call out this shit as amoral and deviant just so happen to be hypocrites
By that logic literally no moral platitude is worth holding because somebody out there who believes in it is a hypocrite, and you're a moronic nihilist if you think that
Homosexuality is a sin and it cries to heaven for vengeance.
It's fake nihilism since they never apply it to shit they care about
>NOOO YOU CAN'T JUST KEEP YOUR DISGUSTING VICES TO YOURSELF
>IF YOU DO SOMETHING WRONG YOU SHOULD COMITT TO DOING AS MUCH WRONG AS POSSIBLE
>guy who hates homosexuals is secretly a homosexual
That was unironically a cultural trope in the 90s, not sure why, maybe it was ones of the lefts early attempts to brainwash people into accepting homosexuality.
I’m pretty conservative but one of the things I like about zoomers is they’re moving past this gay/straight dichotomy and all forced conflict it entails.
>maybe it was ones of the lefts early attempts to brainwash people into accepting homosexuality.
not maybe. unlike today, in the 90's leftist cultural subversion was still well made.
That's a hilariously stupid piece of propaganda that worked for them for some reason.
>Homosexuality is normal and beautiful, and if you disagree then you're a disgusting degenerate poopdick homosexual!
>guy who hates homosexuals is secretly a homosexual
if you do it in an ostentatious way as if you were trying to convince everyone how NOT gay you are then yes. 100% cases. Literally every fricking time. Normal people who dislike gays (for plethora of different reasons) don't act this way because it's not personal to them. You only act like that when it's personal
It's teenager 2deep4u shit. Like that plastic bag that blows around in the wind. Spacey carries the movie, the movie looks great (lighting, locations, photograpy), the blonde girl is eyecandy, the guy and his father are ok too, the missus who sells houses. I just think it's a bit onesided in its portrayal.
This is the perfect ringtone or message tone.
Lester waking up, jerking off while taking his morning shower and saying to himself out loud: "It's all downhill from here!" is cool.
>plastic bag
that was the point
he's a cringy teenager
That part of it is bullshit but the movie pisses me off for other reasons more.
It's not mutually exclusive you binary thinker.
The setting is appropriate to its time period.
That doesn't mean it isn't worthy of its accolades anymore.
Shakespeare in Love is better than SPR and absolutely worthy of its best picture win.
I only noticed the negative discourse over the last 10 or so years and I think it is because zoomers can't relate to the world it is set in. Also Spacey bad.
>zoomers can't relate to the world it is set in
Haven't seen the movie and I was born in early 96, my memory of the pre-9/11 days is a little fuzzy how disconnected will I be from the world this movie portrays
Best I can explain it is that there was an actual feeling of hope for people. When the movie came out it was shocking to a lot of people since the average normie viewed the story as a self inflicted tragedy by Lester. People lived lives similar to what the characters experienced in this film and genuinely thought that they were experiencing a fulfilling existence. This movie was a giant middle finger to people like this. Now it is kind of quaint, things like the gay neighbors and the closeted gay nazi neighbor are played out.
You should watch it. I watched it recently and thought it still held up but I do believe many people can not relate just based on where they are in life.
It was a movie for high school students. The frick are you on about.
>People think it's no good because they lack empathy
Come on.
The backlash happened because Paramount/Viacom were pissy that Mendes/Ball/Spacey said "no just no" to MTV wanting to give the film an award for "best kiss" for the scene where Spacy's character kisses a 16 year old girl and banned the network from using clips to promote it for said award at the MTV Movie Awards.
Also, American Beauty (like Daria and Fight Club) was a product of the late 90s cynical mindset about life that got nuked off the face of the earth following the Sept 11 terror attacks. Hard to naval gaze whine about how hard the upper middle class lifestyle is when deranged fundie muslims are killing people in catastrophic terror attacks which kill hundreds of thousands of people and triggering what basically amounts to the new Crusades at best and at worst, WW3.
>"cultural touchstone"
>literally every single character in the movie with more than a three lines of dialogue is a disgusting human being
>I don't remember raping that kid but it sounds like something I would do. - Spacey
My favorite scene is when he gets high with the kid and they talk about Reanimator.
Who the frick hates Shakespeare in Love??
It's archetypical late 90s suburbiacore.
the moment when he decides not to have sex with her because she's a virgin makes no sense
He thought he was just gonna bang a nasty bawd not corrupting an innocent kid.
Feminist propaganda, this movie is ass.
The movie is basically hard to grasp and seems a bit preachy until u reach that age and realize its all for real, its all too real in fact
>Shakespeare In Love
I still want to know how the frick that won over Saving Private Ryan. Hell, I'll take The Truman Show over that for Best Picture.
Didn't Weinstein put his dick on the scale?
Think about it though, a big time israeli director made a big budget WWII movie and didn't win Best Picture. That just seems so odd.
Why do people care so much about the oscars anyway? As if a movie getting "best picture" somehow validates it any meaningful way
Like the legacy media, medical industry, and academia, people used to believe in it. It was always full of scumbags, but they had at least SOME professional integrity because if you were the best, that’s where you went since there were no alternatives. The pants fell down 10-20 years ago and now it’s a death spiral that free thinkers want no part of so it just keeps getting worse from incest and now no one gives a shit.
>SOME professional integrity
I doubt it. I dont buy it. Sounds naive
I would never watch a movie nominated for an Oscar, they're all shit
If you win an Oscar as 'best foreign movie' or 'best foreign actor' (if that term isn't offensive already) it gives you access to Hollywood money and Hollywood connections.
You're not old enough to remember when he was consistently denied an oscar despite making the best picture in any given year. He'd been pigeonholed as a kid's movie director to the point that it seemed like they wouldn't even give him R ratings even if someone's heart was ripped out of their chest on-screen. It wasn't until Schindler's List that they couldn't say no... but just that one time.
It's about theater. Any movie that fellates the people who make movies (theater kids) will always have a leg up. Not always enough to push it over the top, but definitely gets more credit than it deserves. Babylon didn't get this bonus because it was simultaneously shitting on modern hollywood with its presentation of silent era into golden age hollywood. (and was also a deeply flawed film)
Happiness (1998) is a better movie that does the same message
Nobody ever liked this trash "movie". It's shit.
>Crash (2004)
>one of the worst Best Picture winners
Movie about fricking in car crashes won Best Picture?
wrong Crash, holmes
the crash that won the oscar was proto-woke tripe, not a based Ballard adaptation
I got them confused too. I wanted to watch the good one and downloaded the wrong one. Still finished it, it was blatant oscarbait.
>TFW woke articles complain that Crash blames racism on racism character instead of LE SYSTEM or WHITE PEOPLE BEING BORN EVIL
The revolution turns on itself as always
The old revolutionaries are labeled as reactionaries by the new more batshit wave of revolutionaries
Hollywood pumps out and rewards melodramatic garbage like this whenever a “fascist” is president. It’s the same reason Moonlight and Green Book won best film despite both being forgettable trash.
crash is pretty hard to rewatch. that's the only reason i can come up with that it would be disliked now.
yes, that's the joke, nobody remembers the Black person movie but everybody remembers the car crash fetish picture
You ever just feel like a bottle, rolling on the ground after getting licked?
>>Is frequently cited as a film that aged poorly
Frick what zoomers think
When I was like 7 years old I saw a big poster of this in blockbuster and thought it was a vegana
I think it's a genuinely good film, though very much "Hollywood" in its style. I especially love Ricky, and if you think he's full of it, then you're on a very sorry tragectory, I'm afraid. You'll be in your 40s someday relating a lot to Lester.
Why do people hate Crash?
Some hate it for being woke
Woke people hate it because it's not antiwhite enough
Y'know that makes sense. Same reason everything is shit now.
It was a compromise win; TPTB didn't want Brokeback Mountain to win best picture because of the backlash it would get for being about gays. So they picked a bland worthless film about racism instead to get best picture while arranging for Ang Lee (director of Brokeback Mountain) to get best director as a consolation prize for being denied "Best Picture".
Weinstein basically gamed the system. He released SIL at the very last minute to qualify for the Oscars that year then ordered the cast of SIL to basically do every single interview they could while holding court and claiming Saving Private Ryan was depression-core dogshit and that the only reason people paid to watch it was to watch the opening massacre scene (the storming of the beaches of Normady scene).
Also years later, a lot of voters were interviewed and admitted that Weinstein was right in that they thought Saving Private Ryan to be too bleak and depressing and went with SIL because it was a light hearted comedy.
I want to somehow thank you for your service while addressing how impossible it is to take the Academy seriously like you do.
Shakespeare in Love is kino
>has multiple essays on youtube
Literally every film with a decent cult base has youtube essays about it
3/10 bait
Forgive me, OP, for speaking so bluntly. You gays make me want to puke my fricking guts out.
Whatever happened to the guy and the girl? I've never seen them in anything else.
Wes Bentley was in Four Feathers but then had his career derailed via drug addiction and got blackballed for a while from Hollywood. He ended up hooking up with Ryan Murphy, who salvaged his career via giving him work on American Horror Story and he currently is part of the cast of Yellowstone.
Thora Birch spent most of the 00s and 10s retired as she was a child actress and just did indie films. IIRC she was on Walking Dead and Wednesday recently.
Thora Birch was in Ghost World with ScarJo and Steve Buscemi.
the guy still gets some work, he was in interstellar and was a big part of Yellowstone
>well me too son, me too.
The film is subversive israelitesish nihilistic propaganda
This shit hits different when ordinary people can't even afford a house anymore.