Yar, you be here: American Beauty (The Awards Edition) > Customer Reviews

American Beauty (The Awards Edition) Customer Reviews (28 - 30 of 109 Reviews)

Best Picture? You're kidding me, right? 2 and 1/2 stars
Besides the funny moments in this film, there is nothing good about it. Kevin Spacey delivers some very funny moments and the music in the movie is good but the movie itself isn't good at all. First of all, it's nothing about beauty. So don't expect this movie to be beautiful. It's disturbing and grotesque. I'm sure that everyone probably agrees with me that there is normally a protagonist in movies. Well, not here. There are no heroes but only perverted and strange people.
There's the frustrated dad who doesn't get any sex from his wife and whose daughter hates him. He only is freed from his problems with his family when he falls in love with his daughter's best friend. I know, that's disgusting. So now, he's working out, blackmails his boss, smokes pot and does whatever he wants. No hero there.
The girl that he falls in love with is obssessed with sex and finds herself to be "not oridinary" and beautiful. She's very dirty and isn't a hero.
Then, there's his wife, the realtor who likes material possessions and cheats on him and doesn't seem to care. She calls herself a victim, and may I ask: "of what?" You're rich, you have a family, how the hell are you victim? And then she even considers killing her husband because she's a victim. And she doesn't even know that he is fantasizing about someone. Wow. No hero there.
Then there's their daughter who hates both of them, especially her dad. For what reason? I don't know! She even jokes about wanting to kill him. That's not a very pleasant joke! She wants breast implants even though she has large enough ones. (She flashes her boyfriend). No hero there.
Then, there's the daughter's boyfriend. He's a psycho who films everything and sells pot secretely. When you're supposed to like him, it's hard to.
Then there's the boyfriend's dad who is a veteran army lieutenant. He's abusive and very violent and mean. And he has some skeletons in his closet. No hero there either.
See, the movie was hard to watch because you don't like any of the characters in the movie. It was depressing to see our society shown as it is and without any character that you like, well...
The movie had too many sex references and also had lots of uneccessary and weird stuff. Like when Kevin Spacey's character fantacizes, WEIRD!
The worse for me though is that I had lots of high expectations for this movie and it ended out being nothing spectacular, just a mediocre and not memorable movie. The acting is good as are some jokes, but it really isn't what everyone says it is. It's not original and is very strange. There were also many random scenes in it and well...
I don't even recommend it for a rent unless you want to see what the fuss is all about but the academy must have different opinions than me because this movie didn't deserve best picture. I enjoyed Kevin Spacey as usual in a very strong performance but the movie wasn't strong or interesting. It was about a man breaking free thanks to an 18 year old girl that he falls for but unfortunately the movie didn't do what I thought that it would.

Buddy Kane: "Who's the king?"
Me: "Definitely not Sam Mendes!!!!!"

Study in American Misanthropy by Brit director
Beauty" begins with Lester Burnham (Spacey), so beaten down by lifeless routine, that he has lost even the ability to feel pain or anything. Lester's harpy of a wife Carolyn (Benning), a status-hungry real-estate velociraptor is only capable of dishing out bile. Between the two suffers Jane, their self-loathing daughter (Thora Birch from "Ghost World). We also meet those who surround them, a gay couple; a retired homophobic marine; his catatonic wife, their seemingly psychotic, voyeuristic and pot-selling son Ricky, and Jane's obviously psychotically vain friend Angela.

Life though beautiful obviously isn't as nice as it looks. Lester's cozy suburban home encloses his frigid wife and remote daughter, and for him it's a loveless shelter when he's not at work in his dead-end job. Then something happens: On the verge of losing his job, Lester quits and blackmails his boss for a generous severance package. Now free, after a fashion, he entertains lustful thoughts of Angela while buying weed from Ricky, who unbeknownst to Lester, has become Jane's lover. Freed from the daily grind, and with Ricky and Angela seeming to urge him on, Lester recreates himself as a teenager, directionless and determined at the same time. His approach to life disdains the carpediem that typified Hollywood "Dead Poets" rip-offs of the early 1990's for something more along "let the day pass you by." His wife, determined to succeed in real estate, is revealed not just amoral, but stunningly shallow - a walking manifestation of sheer materialism and ostentation. All who populate "Beauty" live in some illusion - Lester with his renewed youth, Carolyn and her dreams of success, Ricky and Sarah and their fantasies of a future together, Angela's fantasy of herself on the cover of "Elle", Ricky's father's mirage of the all-American family..etc. After meandering, the script decides that somebody will have to wake up and take reality on the chin for everybody else - and the script settles on Jane and Ricky. Bad move: Jane and Ricky prove so mature in their love for each other, that they prove better able to wake up and smell the coffee than the rest of the cast. Instead of a searing portrait of the disintegration of family life, Ricky and Jane prove that love and the family is alive and well. The closer they get, the more we realize that Jane won't be destroyed by her self-loathing, and that Ricky's not really a psycho at all. (If children are our future, then we could do far worse than Ricky and Jane.) As Ricky and Jane straighten themselves out. The rest of the flick seems out of whack - as if the script suddenly became terrified of its capacity for mass destruction and wanted to turn into a sunny parody of its earlier self. Jane contemplates life without bust enlargement; Carolyn's crass materialism, never disavowed, is mollified by her affair and possible love for her competitor in the real estate market (surprisingly refreshing Peter Gallagher); and Lester's attraction for Jane's friend is more mutual than irony should allow. The only constant in this perfect storm is Ricky's father, a die-hard Marine whose only apparent role is to set the story firmly in America (apparently the only Western nation that British-born director Sam Mendes can conceive of teeming with right-wing, jingoistic, homophobic, militaristic robots).
The script's sudden risk-shyness infects the characters so, that by the end of the film, all they can do is feel satisfied with each other. Even Lester, the most beaten down of them all, feels fine.

I enjoyed the leads of this flick enough to overlook how otherwise overrated it really is. "American Beauty" never exploits its fictional setting to achieve any sharper edge on a now well-worn theme of the darkness underlying American family life. Surprisingly, it never explains the film's core plot point: Burnham's dramatic character shift (occurring in the film, but apparently late in life). We get the idea that people have treated him like dirt for ages, yet in the first shot, he's already equipped to turn the tables on his boss and his wife, and attract Angela as well.

What undermines the film the most is the persistent hint that those on the other side of the camera may be in thrall to the greatest illusion of all - that this really is a deep look at the shattered psyche of the American family that hasn't been done to death decades ago.

Beautiful!!
-I remember seeing this movie for the first time in grade 5. And believe it or not--the storyline is just as clear now as it was then. Lester is unhappy with his life and makes an effort to change it. A previous reviewer went on about how Lester wasn't a true protagonist. I beg to differ. Lester represents about 95% of the middle aged men in America. He is sexually frustrated, he has an awful relationship with both his wife and kid, plus he wakes up every morning to work a dead end job that makes him unhappy. Other than continuing down this miserable path, he does something about it. He chooses to better himself, and that ultimately makes him a hero. In my opinion, he's the bind that holds the movie together. He uses a very dark, morbid sense of humor that cracks me up every time he's on screen. His actions are justifiable. And also somewhat relatable.

-Another thing I like is the movie's incredible use of imagery. American Beauty has some of the best cinematography I've ever seen. The scenery is absolutely breath taking. And it's simple--not too over the top. They didn't have to travel across seas to find amazing landscapes. They just took a contemporary American home and made it both symbolic and beautiful.

-The scripting is also right on point. Today's movies have way too much dialogue. But Beauty's characters say more through their actions than they ever could with words--and that's a rare find in recent cinema.

-American Beauty is just that. A beautiful film that centers around a dysfunctional American family. It's dark, depressing--yet realistically portrayed. I would definitely recommend.

Previous Page

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Next Page