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List Price: $12.99 | | Label: Dreamworks Video
Salesrank: 2886
Released: October 24, 2000 |
| Our Price: $4.29 |
| Used Price: $1.38 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
When you've got nothing to lose, you might as well risk everything. Lester Burnham is in a rut. Facing a midlife crisis, lester reverts into a maddening rebirth of adolescence. His sudden, irreverant rebellion enrages his wife and confuses his daughter, when he turns a lustful gaze toward her friend.
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:
Beauty for All 
2009-11-05 - American Beauty is a movie about the life of an average American family (however, in this case it absolutely does not make any sense: it could be an American family, or a British family, or a Russian family, or some other family). This film is about problems which every member of this family has. The plot of the movie is plain and certainly common. Speaking frankly, the beginning of the movie produces enough dreary feelings. You may think it is the regular tearful story about a stupid husband, a stinker wife, their daughter who suffers of solitude and incomprehension, and also about their neighbors: a slight crazy guy who sells drugs and peers through a his video camera, and about his father, an ex-colonel who so extremely hates homosexuals that you begin to suspect him in his latent homosexuality. Of course, the movie shows exactly that. But it is not made like other soupy stories. It does not want to make you cry. It only tells you about lives of simply miserable people; it tells you what they feel, what they dream about and finally what happens to them.
Do you know why the movie Straw Dogs with Dustin Hoffman is really scary? It is not the violence of the ending when bookworm Hoffman kills everyone. The movie is scary because there is no right or wrong. And all this blood bath happened not because some bad guy decided to commit evil, while some good would stop him. It just happened through a series of coincidences. That is scary because in real life it happens like that. BAD GUY comes rarely. More often MISERABLE comes who in return makes miserable out of you.
Similar to Straw Dogs, there is no right and wrong in American Beauty. And Lester (Kevin Spacy) is not a stupid perverted dolt, but middle class man who has not achieved a lot and who could not establish a proper family where he could find love, understanding and support. And his wife Caroline (Annete Benning) is not a bitch or whore. She is just a woman who is trying to crawl on to the surface but she cannot. Their daughter Jane (Thora Birch) is not an evil bestial who dreams to kill her parents. She is just a little girl who suffers from misunderstanding and who is very lonely.
What is a person life like if shower masturbation in the morning is the best thing that will happen to him during the day? If he wanted to be strong and cheerful, but became weak and miserable. The center of the movie is the moment that, no matter how strange it seems, corresponds American Beauty to Fight Club. That is when Lester is trying to break free from the gray reality that surrounds him. In Fight Club the main hero finds relief in communicating with terminally sick people and then gains pleasure from bloody street brawls. Lester did not go so far. He just left his well paid job and started working in McDonalds, began to exercise and use drugs. The idea is that Lester broke free. He ceased being afraid of his bitching wife. He realized that there is no point in straggling for a job you do not like. Because you can be the happiest fast-food worker or the unhappiest vice-director of some office. And when Lester broke free, he felt good. He even starts to look better.
But, unfortunately such a state is not permanent. It is like remission before the impeding end. And the end arrives. Basically, the movie starts from it. Lester dies. We do not know who killed him. It can be anyone. Daughter Jane who cannot stand him and who is ashamed that her father is trying to hit on her classmate. Wife Caroline who hates her husband and thinks of him as a slug and a loser. Jane's boyfriend (who is jealous that Lester did not hit on him), Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), whom Jane is asking to kill her father. Ricky's father who is crazy about patriotism and fascism and thinks that Ricky has a sexual relationship with Lester. Everyone has reasons to kill Lester. Even Lester himself. Because all of a sudden he thinks it is too good for him to live. Why not die when you feel best? Why die when you suffer? But Ricky delivers more ideas to the movie: sex, lies, and video. He records a girl he likes, while other things get on to his line of sight. Ricky is the only one person who sees a beauty in an empty bag dancing in the wind. So, it is not considers that he becomes as the final hero of the movie.
The movie is made perfect in all means. From the point of plot (the writer Alan Ball won an Oscar for the original screenplay), and from the point of the director and actors. But first at all, this movie is great because it is about us. About all us, whoever we are -- Americans, Russians, children, adults, psychos. This movie breaks all stereotypes. The naughtiest girl in the school Angela shows up a virgin, the loving family is a joke; a homophobe hides his true orientation. It looks so usual, like routine. Fates of different people merge in one crazy ball and everyone is looking for his/her beauty.
p.s. sorry if I have mistakes(I am Russian))
A bit too much 
2009-11-02 - I may have missed the point of the movie. It seemed to be a hopeless movie, i.e. no hope for anyone, almost depressing. I guess you have to be in the mood to see it. If you want to see a family disintegrate, then watch it.
My very favorite movie of all time
2009-11-01 - Great, great movie. It has a great story, is hilarious at times, and also a tear jerker. I've watched this I don't know how many times (but I don't watch the ending any more). However, if you are the old-fashioned catholic type, I would not watch it. My husband's parents are that type, and because of how much we loved the movie we wanted to share it with them and watch it with them. Just a half hour or so into the movie, they got up to leave. They were so disturbed, they would not even stay to visit with the movie off. For them, the stuff going on between the teenager and Kevin Spacey was disturbing and disgusting. But we LOVE it.
A Classic
2009-10-26 - This is a must have film for Kevin Spaceys fans. Well done with all actors in good rolls.
Classic Vicious Cultural Marxism from the Hollywood Elites
2009-09-23 - This movie is propaganda disguised as entertainment or art. I'll grant that it's entertaining. The plot in brief is a middle-aged guy (Kevin Spacey) with real-estate agent wife and sullen teenage daughter, who quits his job to work out, smoke pot, work at a hamburger joint and chase his daughter's hot friend. New neighbors move in with a dominating ex-Colonel father and a pot-selling, "artistic" son. The son falls in love with Spacey's daughter, Spacey's wife cheats on him, and Spacey dreams of hitting on his daughter's friend. Spacey also befriends the Colonel's son, who sells him pot. The Colonel is obsessed that his son isn't gay, but is secretly gay himself, and in a weird twist, propositions Spacey, who refuses. Spacey has a chance at his daughter's friend but he refuses it in the end (in the one act of moral clarity in the movie), but then he gets shot in the head by one of the others (I won't tell who).
No doubt that Kevin Spacey is an appealing character, even though he acts immature and juvenile. Of course, one is led on in the film, wondering whether Spacey's character is going to score with his daughter's female friend. So the writers use the "adolescent porn" hook to get you interested, as well as the fantasy of dropping out of society, like Spacey, and then they stick you with the anti-family propaganda when you unwittingly think that the movie is entertainment.
If you know anything about Cultural Marxism and the ideology of Theodore Adorno, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, this movie typifies it to a tee. "Cultural Marxism" is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is also called "Critical Theory" in that it seeks to criticize America's (or the West's) culture so vehemently, so viciously, and so falsely, that people feel ashamed of their culture and are then open to political change and domination from the Left. That's what this movie is in a nutshell. It's very artful and manipulative propaganda. Very much like "Cider House Rules."
Cultural Marxism seeks to destroy all of America's cultural icons, and it stems from an anti-Christian, anti-American, anti-white, anti-private-enterprise, pro-drugs, pro-open-sex, pro-atheist viewpoint. Cultural Marxism turns morality upside down. This movie cynically dumps on white, suburban families, middle-class Americans, American marriages, parenthood, the military, the private job (capitalism), and a disciplined lifestyle. It promotes as "heroes:" gay couples, a drug-dealer teenager who hates his father, and a loser guy who regresses from a position of responsibility to being 18 & irresponsible again. It also promotes drug use and teenage sex. (Great! Just what America needs more of --- teenage drug use and promiscuous sex! There's no down side to that!)
Seeing this movie makes you feel sick about the American Family because you see absolutely no redeeming characters or good family members. This is the intent of the author/director. White suburbia is depicted as a moral wasteland. The trick that the story writer/director uses is human sexuality. Because everyone has a libido, then everyone is corruptible and contemptible. THUS, no-one can judge anyone else's behavior, and the culture that is examined under the cynical microscope, comes off as corrupt and sickening to the viewer. But because the writer/director has total control of what happens, he can warp the values and characters at will, and so makes a "normal" family look contemptible, but a pot-smoking, drug-dealing kid who lies to his parents, look like a hero. (He also makes a gay couple look like virtual saints.)
The character of the Colonel is depicted as a bitter anti-gay man, who (of course!) secretly is gay himself. His marriage is catatonic and his drug-dealing son (THE HERO) hates him and lies to him. This is a slap to military families. I would be willing to bet that military families are generally much better, more loving and healthy than your typical family. But NOT IN THIS MOVIE. Of course, a typical Welfare single-parent family from the city will much more likely have gang/drug/crime/teenage pregnancy/STD problems, but this doesn't prevent the SELF-LOATHING White Cultural Marxists to pick on the middle-class intact family for their "American Beauty" hit job.
Spacey's family is a disaster, as his wife cheats on him (with a man himself going through a divorce), his daughter hates him, he is nasty to his wife, and there is no love anywhere. But the Colonel's family is worse. In other words, there are NO good families, no positive role models, no love, no values. A moral wasteland. Except of course, for the upside-down values of the Colonel's pothead son, and the two "saintly" gays shacking up. So you're put just where the Cultural Marxist director wants you to be -- confused and vulnerable -- so he can propagandize you. The "successful" private job also gets raked over the coals, as Spacey's Real-estate agent wife is made to look foolish, the business job that Spacey quits is also made to look corrupt and contemptible, and the pursuit of a better life materially is criticized as morally barren.
I repeat, the story line is entertaining, as the director pulls you in with identifying with Kevin Spacey's character and wondering if he's going to score with his daughter's alluring friend, all the while feeding you his (the director's) horrible contempt of the middle-class, "successful" American Family. The only redeemable part of the movie comes at the end, when Spacey is dying and he reflects on what is really important in life. But that is too little, too late to save this moral mess of a movie.
Watch this movie with a HUGE GRAIN OF SALT and remember that the Cultural Marxists are trying to manipulate you!
