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List Price: $12.99 | | Label: Dreamworks Video
Salesrank: 1769
Released: October 24, 2000 |
| Our Price: $3.99 |
| Used Price: $1.84 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Marking the feature film directorial debut of award-winning theatre director Sam Mendes this funny moving and shocking journey through life in suburban America follows the trials and tribulations of Lester (Kevin Spacey) and Carolyn (Annette Bening) an upper-middle class couple whose marriage - and lives - are slowly unraveling. Lester s wife hates him his daughter Jane regards him with contempt and his boss is positioning him for the ax. So Lester decides to make a few changes in his life; the freer he gets the happier he gets which is even more maddening to his wife and daughter. But Lester is about to learn that the ultimate freedom comes at the ultimate price. Winner of five Academy Awards: Best Picture Director Actor Screenplay and Cinematography.System Requirements:Starring: Kevin Spacey Annette Bening Thora Birch Chris Cooper Peter Gallagher Mena Suvari and Wes Bentley. Directed By: Sam Mendes. Running Time: 122 Min. Color. This film is presented in "Widescreen" format. Copyright 2000 Universal Distribution Corp.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: R UPC: 667068538229 Manufacturer No: 65382
Description of American Beauty (Widescreen Edition):
From its first gliding aerial shot of a generic suburban street, American Beauty moves with a mesmerizing confidence and acuity epitomized by Kevin Spacey's calm narration. Spacey is Lester Burnham, a harried Everyman whose midlife awakening is the spine of the story, and his very first lines hook us with their teasing fatalism--like Sunset Boulevard's Joe Gillis, Burnham tells us his story from beyond the grave.
It's an audacious start for a film that justifies that audacity. Weaving social satire, domestic tragedy, and whodunit into a single package, Alan Ball's first theatrical script dares to blur generic lines and keep us off balance, winking seamlessly from dark, scabrous comedy to deeply moving drama. The Burnham family joins the cinematic short list of great dysfunctional American families, as Lester is pitted against his manic, materialistic realtor wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening, making the most of a mostly unsympathetic role) and his sullen, contemptuous teenaged daughter, Jane (Thora Birch, utterly convincing in her edgy balance of self-absorption and wistful longing). Into their lives come two catalytic outsiders. A young cheerleader (Mena Suvari) jolts Lester into a sexual epiphany that blooms into a second adolescence. And an eerily calm young neighbor (Wes Bentley) transforms both Lester and Jane with his canny influence.
Credit another big-screen newcomer, English theatrical director Sam Mendes, with expertly juggling these potentially disjunctive elements into a superb ensemble piece that achieves a stylized pace without lapsing into transparent self-indulgence. Mendes has shrewdly insured his success with a solid crew of stage veterans, yet he's also made an inspired discovery in Bentley, whose Ricky Fitts becomes a fulcrum for both plot and theme. Cinematographer Conrad Hall's sumptuous visual design further elevates the film, infusing the beige interiors of the Burnhams' lives with vivid bursts of deep crimson, the color of roses--and of blood. --Sam Sutherland
American Beauty (Widescreen Edition) Reviews:
Even though it's a bit old by now, still a great overall film 
2008-09-28 - My mom had this dvd lying around the living room so I decided to watch it today since I was bored with nothing else to do. I knew a little bit about it from watching the oscars back in 1999 and from word-of-mouth. It is a pretty good movie story wise, though a little predictable at times. All the characters can be relatable. Kevin Spacey delivers a dramatic and comendable performance and Anette Bening is great too. The acting in this movie was top notch. I would have give it 5 stars it if werent for the predictibility in this movie. Overall, I would reccomend it to casual movie fans like myself.
An outstanding accomplishment 
2008-09-14 - Drama in which a middle-class suburban family begins to fall apart when husband and father Kevin Spacey starts going through a mid-life crisis, quitting his job as a magazine writer, befriending his teenage daughter Thora Birch's boyfriend Wes Bentley, starting to smoke marijuana and beginning an obsession with his daughter's best friend Mena Suvari, all in an attempt to dispel the deadness that he feels inside and regain the happiness that he feels that he has not had since he was a young man. Spacey's behaviour serves to further destabilise his already dysfunctional family in which his daughter despises him and his wife Annette Bening and him never have sex: now his wife runs into the arms of another man and his daughter progresses from despising him to being outright sickened by him because of his obvious sexual interest in her best friend. But Spacey doesn't care because he feels that his life was a sham anyway and the only way he can regain what he has lost is by letting go of all the lies and pretences and doing whatever will make him and him alone happy. This film is populated by largely tragic characters, all struggling to make sense of life and escape the despair and bleakness that seems to them to be all that there is. Spacey is reliable as the voice of the movie and the main protagonist going through the mid-life crisis who moves from sympathetic to unsympathetic to sympathetic through the course of the movie. Thora Birch is excellent as Spacey's teenage daughter who feels that she is a misfit and forms a relationship with troubled boy next door and drug dealer Wes Bentley, who has been inside a mental institution and has an unsettling habit of filming people on his camcorder when they don't know he is watching. Annette Bening is on form as Spacey's desperately unhappy estate agent wife whose primary concern is putting on a façade of marital and domestic bliss for the world to see to hide the fact that her family and marriage are falling apart. Mena Suvari puts in a favourable performance as Birch's insecure best friend who derives her self-esteem from the fact that men find her sexually attractive but is secretly afraid that she is nothing special and hence will never gain the adulation that she craves. Finally Chris Cooper is good in a supporting role as Birch's boyfriend Bentley's violent and homophobic father. This film, although largely bleak in tone and quite disturbing at times, is poignant and has a profound message about the importance of seeing beauty in life, which director Sam Mendes symbolises throughout the film with red petals from the American Beauty rose (from which the film takes its name). With a number of revelations and a shocking final twist, this is one of the best films I have ever seen, and easily deserves the Oscars that it won. An outstanding accomplishment.
American Reality
2008-08-12 - This is a great, satirical, passionate, sensual, and disturbing movie. You will love the character development and find yourself on the side of different characters as time goes on. The characters are so diverse and dissimilar from one another that it is realistic, in that they are not cookie-cutters of one another. Complexity of characters is what really makes this movie.
Kevin Spacey and Annette Benning give performances that are so convincing that you feel like you've just witnessed the true American family; a family that is not the warm and fuzzy - but the real family that shows the ugliness and anger that really goes on within the facade.
technically beautiful ... morally crap 
2008-08-03 - It should take more than technical perfection to deserve recognition by the Academy.
The plot is expertly crafted. The direction is superb. The acting immaculate. The photography and editing exemplify the highest standards of film making.
We learn nothing useful from this film. In this case the senseless death of the hero character is an insult. This film was a waste of good cellulose. What would have been useful is the way back ... teaching us how to turn desperate and deteriorating relationships around ... and move forward.
Enough has been said but....
2008-07-02 - There have been so many reviews of this movie I will limit my comment to state my sheer amazement after reading the 1 STAR reviews ...
It is beyond comprehension this brilliant piece of artistry can be rated below 3 STARS by anyone.... In my mind it is one of the most socio-realistic screen plays that have ever come out of Hollywood - not due to the (perhaps overly) tragicomic characterizations but because each character represents something real in all of us... But maybe that does not resonate with those among us who prefer to see the world as black and white rather than the accumulation of shades of grey we all live and live in.
For me this is one of my top10 movies of all time and one of the very few I can watch again and again.
