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From:Annette Bening , Thora Birch , Chris Cooper , Peter Gallagher , Sam Robards , Paramount , Sam Mendes , Dreamworks Video ,
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User Rating: Amazon Sales Rank:#1334 |
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5 of 7 customers found the following review helpful:
 Heavy Irony on Amazon, 2007-06-06
I'm always surprised by how many people do not appreciate this movie. The reasons people give for not liking it ARE OFTEN INCREDIBLY IRONIC.....think about it.
The movie says that morals (and pretty much everything else in life) are relative and subject to being perceived in every possible way...
Hell, Shakespeare said "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." -Hamlet
Society is often so focused on nonsense that we all accept it without really stopping to think.
People read beauty magazines so they think people will love them more, and in turn people loving them will make them love themselves (Caroline). Many women have ingrained themselves so strongly in this that eating disorders have become a rampant problem in the U.S. With television shows like "The Swan," "American Idol," and who knows what else...it's no wonder this is the case.
Who says that smoking marijuana is "bad?" Who says that being fat is "bad?" Who says that being a homosexual is "bad?" Who says that never being afraid of anything is "bad?" In fact, why are we all so afraid of everything?? WHO is telling us to always be afraid? I think this is a very very important question in today's society.
Who says that a bag floating in the wind (litter) is necessarily "bad?" To really be content in life you have to perceive "reality" the way you want to. Not the way people (and the media) tell you to.
The fact that Lester Burnham chose to work at a fast-food restaurant, smoke pot, and lust after an underage girl (was she under 18?) is irrelevant.
He could have done anything other than what he was doing. He could have chosen to get up and follow his dream of starting a business, take over the world, become a monk in the mountains...IT DOESN'T MATTER. Was what he really did that "bad?" That's what made him content because that is the role HE WANTED to play in this world, but never had the guts to actually play out for himself.
If you've seen Fight Club the concept is pretty much the same (also came out in 1999, coincidence?) I like Fight Club, but this movie is much better. I believe Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) makes a statement like, "People do it everyday. They look into the mirror and see the person they'd like to be, but don't have the guts to run with it like you did."
The point is that THIS is what LESTER wanted to do. NOT Caroline, not his boss, and most importantly NOT SOCIETY.
Of course there are limits to this. Hurting people is never a good route. I doubt the movie was advocating people with the dream of being a serial killer to become a serial killer...Though of course Shakespeare's quote also applies here. Think about it...
The movie is saying that people need to stop being robotic automatons and become the person that they want to be, not what everyone else "thinks" they should be.
THINK. It's the greatest gift you'll ever have.
1 of 1 customers found the following review helpful:
not my genre, 2007-05-23
I really liked "existentialist" lit and those Russian literary genres (pathetic character dramedy) when I was a teenager but can no longer stomache them. I never cared for the work of Kaiser Soeze. I find mid-life crisises to be a boring subject. Many of the details are absurd and hard to swallow. I'm not a fan of fractured plots esp. plots that start with the ending - what could be more played out? starting with the main characters death is not new or clever (like in "The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas"from the 1800s -or a more direct cinamatic comparison "Sunset Boulevard" with the main characters voice over and sympathetic conclusion to the love triangle before the big finale).
But I do appreciate that amalgam of literary, theatrical and clean cinematic/TV writing styles that went into the story. And I liked the look of the film. I'm sure it deserves all it's praise.
2 of 0 customers found the following review helpful:
Not an "American" issue..., 2007-05-05
I enjoyed all the feedback and interesting comments and points of view about the "issues" this movie conveys. But a sad truth that we all seem to miss is that the United States is a huge country with people from many different races and cultures all mixed and blended together. Add to this mix a society and culture that thrives on materialism and self-centeredness and you have what American Beauty attempts to communicate and raise our awareness about.
Needless to say, this movie does not portray an "American" issue, it effectively raises our awareness that IT IS a world issue because of the fact that most nations around the world make up what we like to call our "American Society and Culture." I DO agree with Mrs. Walker when she stated, "...it's a sad day when a movie likes this says something this important about who we are as a culture. A sad day indeed..." People like to say that this movie displays an "American" issue and it thrashes its culture, but it is a sad world out there where all nations and cultures have been "sedated" with its own desires for personal gain and power. BUT, thank the Lord that there is still "good" out there, around the whole globe...but we are just too "blind" to see this subtle beauty that surrounds us daily...
3 of 4 customers found the following review helpful:
all hail alan ball, 2007-05-02
it should be no surprise that this is one of the greatest films ever made; just look who wrote the screenplay. that's right, alan ball,
who also created the greatest television series of all time, "six feet under." coincidence? i think not.
mr. ball will have a new series premiering on hbo(too good to be television) called "true blood" in autumn 2007.
4 of 4 customers found the following review helpful:
American masterpiece., 2007-04-20
This film is not to ordinary people! It is a film to the same people capable of understanding films like "Blade Runner", La Dolce Vita, Saving Private Ryan, Forrest Gump and others masterpieces. It is a film to people capable of discerning between something good and bad, people that read truly good books and listen to truly good music. "It is not to people that like films with Chuck Norris, Jennifer Lopez, and Madonna, and consider both Sylvester Stallone and Madonna respectively the best actor and actress ever". When I saw this film for the very first time I recognized immediately his value, it is a portrait of a complete alienation of the modern life where the next step is just stay acting all the time as if the life was a "B film" with a very poor script indeed, and the worst thing is that you look at your side and see that everybody has been acting the same "B film" with the same poor script. What happens in this case is that the character of Kevin Spacey discovers one day this reality and tries to recover the meaning of his life, but he knows that this means to get away from this style of living, just getting rid of the life he has been living for years and this is not an easy thing to do. Watching it is like to be put in front of a big mirror. Soon people around him start to react against his sudden liberty and their final achievement is to eliminate him as a kind of a vengeance, because his real liberty was too aggressive to their hypocrisy. In the end he is assassinated for the same reason those "two bikers were assassinated in the film Easy Rider", because he is "Too Free" and has been showing to the others their futile and useless way of living. Is a very courageous film. Bravo, The script is terrific, "and some scenes are pure poetry". It is sad to read reviews of people saying that don't like this film because of some sexual scenes, in a country that is the major producer of pornography in the whole world, what is the prove that this film is right, we have to change this society immediately.
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