was it always so fricking terrible or did it just age poorly?
Academy Awards:
Best Picture
Best Director (Sam Mendes)
Best Actor (Kevin Spacey)
Best Original Screenplay (Alan Ball)
Best Cinematography (Conrad Hall)
Nominated: Best Actress, Editing, Score
 UFOs Are A Psyop Shirt $21.68 |
 |
UFOs Are A Psyop Shirt $21.68 |
i liked it. and that's really the only thing that matters
Have you seen it recently
What was the moral of the story?
You just gotta live life, man.
High school breasts are the best.
It's like The Last Picture Show but creepy. Old folks wants to be young again and the youth wish to grow up and be treated the opposite of the children they will ALWAYS be to their parents. "Age is an honor but still not the truth," and as the final monologue says, the things we end up wishing for or being enticed by are often someone else's dreams. Something sold to us that we bought. Did Lester's fasciation with American Creampie help him? Frick no. But it parallels Lester's obsession with his cousin's red firebird before he grew up. Before he became a father, playing with a child's red car toy to piss off his wife while she's fricking around town. The color red is used so much, especially when it comes to scenes involving youth and sex, with the intention of deconstructing what American Beauty meant in 1999. And while I have nothing against Alan Ball, this script is insanely great if you have the chance to read it, the film loses a touch of its brilliance because of how facetious it is in the context of its casts personal lives. Underage breasts (although hot) with her parents on the set, Annette Benning staying with Warren "I'm going to frick everything except my wife' Beatty, and King Kevin's love of Bryan Singing his wiener up some young intern twink's throat. It is a great movie, but for a time where we looked to Hollywood for entertainment and sometimes to learn something, the only thing we learn in hindsight from this film is that if you were openly gay married man at the tale end of the last century, you will find perfect stability. It shits on the nuclear family as well as the idea of loyalty to the ~~*suburban*~~ way of life. Which Blue Velvet also did, but much more subtly and without hatred for the people it was addressing. Because David Lynch loves American for its freedom while Sam Mendes would rather watch his ex wife Kate Winslet kill herself in front of Leonardo diCaprio. tx2jgw.
>Sam Mendes would rather watch his ex wife Kate Winslet kill herself in front of Leonardo diCaprio
Fricking kek, now THERE'S a movie I'd completely forgotten about.
follow your dreams (desires)
life is both beautifull and tragic
It's the little moments that make life, and you should be grateful for what you have. Many in the US today would kill for what Lester has at the beginning of the movie.
one of the biggest propaganda movies in history of cinema
if you don't frick young girls, closeted homos will kill you
>MACHO MILITARY MAN IS OF COURSE LE GAY
Lame gay israeli crap
Chris Cooper was legit the best actor in the entire movie even with how poorly written he was
Yeah but the film predates pol zoomer knee-jerk reactions
Wow man that's cool and all but who asked?
Alan Ball thinks everyone is secretly gay
All gays think everyone is secretly gay. Or wish.
It's a great movie. Kevin Spacey doesn't dissapoint
It's critically acclaimed trash. HAHA MEN ARE SECRETLY GAY AND PEDOPHILE TAKE THAT AMERICA. -Le israelite
Being attracted to high school girls doesn’t make someone a pedo and your extreme reaction to one single character being secretly gay is suspicious to say the least.
Weird how hollywood loved the film about kevin spacey trying to frick a kid
I remember American Beauty was shilled to hell and back. Critics like Roger Ebert kept giving it good reviews. Blockbuster promoted renting it in it's stores. It got nominated for a ton of awards. But oh yeah no one I knew watched it. It barely as I recall got any time on cable movie channels. No one barely references it today either as a fond memories of a good film or as jokes. It's almost like Hollywood were shilling for some pedo shit or whatever
i think nobody references it anymore because of Spacey. There were tons of parodies and people talked about it a lot for awhile. It was huge in the box office too
Nah, nobody ever referenced it outside of pretentious types.
It might've been the first of it's type on the film hipster pretentious movies list.
I feel it was memory holed before Spacey got metooed though probably because it didn't hold up as well. Plus you know trying to frick teen girls:the movie looked bad. During his House of Cards popularity they never referenced it. I also call bullshit on it's huge box office take. I remember people going to see American Pie. No one fricking went to American Beauty
Yea, I was in high school when it came out. It was a pretty big fricking deal at the time. This was a time before the internet existed in the form it does today, and one has to keep that in mind when considering the popularity or controversy of a movie like this.
I thought it was great in high school. Saw it again about a year ago and I genuinely hated most of it.
Academy Awards have nothing to do with the art of film making. It's just a marketing tool.
Yeah but the Academy Awards were big time trying to shill this. Brokeback Mountain was another film like this where the media kept talking and talking and talking about it but no one and I mean fricking no one would admit to seeing it unless you were some pretentious movie homosexual.
My name…is Lester Bernstein.
I like American Beauty a lot, but to me the movie will be always be summed up by my dad's review of it -
"That's the one where the guy's married to Annette Benning and wants to frick a moronic cheerleader right? *shakes head dismissively and pssshes*"
Dads rock.
I saw it recently and was surprised that I still liked it so much. I'm probably a lot older than most people here and almost hitting the age of mid-life crisis though.
What aspects of it has aged poorly?
American Beauty is just too much of a product of the 90's cultural zeitgeist of "le sigh... i have a family and a well paying job and a big house that I own and I live in a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity...but I feel like there's got to be MORE to life...If only I could go back to the carefree days of minimum wage shit labor..."
Like nobody can relate to that shit now.
>If only I could go back to the carefree days of minimum wage shit labor
It's about recapturing his lost youth. He's misguidedly trying to go back to a point in his life where he had no responsibility and still had the belief there was a positive future awaiting him.
you're not understanding what late '90s early '00s films were about, pol zoomer
>question everything
>escapism
>anything is possible
>all the principles you believe in are worthless
>the truth is coming so you'd better be prepared for it
>what you see on TV isn't real
>life is just a series of delusions
that's what ties together
>office space
>the matrix
>vanilla sky
>american beauty
>scream
>magnolia
>fight club
>memento
>blair witch
it's funny because the majority of those films you listed hold up a million times more than American Beauty. The general theme of American Beauty isn't what makes it bad
>office space
This!!!
The hypno-therapy scene....Every day is worse than the one before. That means that every single day you see me, that's on the worst day of my life
That all resonates again, now. I guess it never really even left.
The scene where the military guy sees his son in the garage with Kevin Spacey and thinks he's blowing him while he's rolling a joint or some shit is the goofiest shit. Right out of an Austin Powers movie.
Surprised no one has mentioned this. It was by far the most epic showing of pedo breasts since Olivia Hussey. Not only was Thora Birch underage but her breasts were massive milkers. Her unveiling alone makes the movie worth watching.
BTW Her mom was, ironically, a professional pornstar.
yeah, her parents were fricking weirdos and had to be on set because she was underage during that scene. Thora Birch was probably blacklisted because she learned how to conduct herself like her parents in the business
Wasn't she blacklisted specifically because of her father who would meddle in the productions she was on as well as having constant asinine demands?
once she was of age she could have had him removed from set at any time. Was he her acting manager or something?
>Was he her acting manager or something?
Yes. Even 10 years later he was still her manager and got her fired from a broadway play when he threatened one of the other actors. He's a nut.
Lies and deception
Hollywood writing about under-age gentile molestation seems a bit redundant.
It's one of those nihilistic semi-arthouse American movies that are made expressly to win Oscars.
People liked it because the homophobic right wing guy was secretly gay.
I thought it was strange that they set it up where it was a murder mystery, especially near the end. He says in the beginning "i will be dead", which is fine but in the final 10 minutes or so they set up some WHO WILL KILL HIM between the daughter, mother, or neighbor. It's such a hacky script. Why are we shown to believe all three parties are capable of murdering some guy having a mid life crisis
The movie was originally written as a murder mystery. It started with the daughter and her boyfriend being tried for the murder of Lester. A lot of it was shot too but that aspect of the movie was edited out. It still does feature the opening scene where the boyfriend asks if she wants her to kill his father and she says, "yeah, would you?" Though you never at all feel like she or the boyfriend will ever kill him imo. Probably why they dropped it. There is no mystery and it's the least interesting aspect of the film.
Do they make Jamie seem taller in this movie? I never realised how tiny she is until My Name is Earl. What a hot little package.
I thought she was tall as well but just looked it up and she's 5'5
This was my exact reaction when I first watched it a few years ago. Criminal that it won Best Picture in such a stacked year. It's written like a bad porno.
Do you know who else was nominated off the top of your head
The Green Mile and Sixth Sense off the top of my head. The actual best movie of that year, Fight Club, wasn't even nominated.