(no subject)

[zustifer]

How can you attack American Beauty for the completely wrong reasons? It wasn't the surface detail that was annoying, it's the fact that the layer underneath it was only marginally more thought-out. Seriously, buying a sports car is character development? The plastic bag, though, I could watch a whole movie of that.
And sincerely. I will fight anyone who says 2001 is incomprehensible or boring. FIGHT. Unless your excuse involves never having seen a movie before and not really getting what this strange too-long jokeless sitcom thing that's shot in 70mm is all about.
(Not one of the Overrated Movies, but we just watched Barry Lyndon, finally, and it hasn't got a dull frame in it. It did however make me realise that Shelly Duvall is the true form of any leading woman in a Kubrick movie.)

Comments

[piehead.livejournal.com]

I finally watched Barry Lyndon at the beginning of the year, it took two sittings, but damn was that a good movie.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Freaking landscapes! So good. And the duel scenes where everyone's head lines up with a landscape element!
The candlelight as practical light source didn't even really jump out at me. I guess it's a testament to how well lighting is usually faked.

[bismuthobsidian.livejournal.com]

American Beauty IS deep, the sports car is just the shallow layer. 2001 IS boring, though not incomprehensible. I nearly petrified watching that damn ship float by!

I'll meet you in the parking lot at midnight. I'll bring my sword.

[madeofmeat.livejournal.com]

IAWTC. I just spent some time thinking about why American Beauty felt important to me. There's Spacey and the soundtrack, both of which could make anything more juicy and flavorful, but I realized that the movie is about people breaking. The characters vary with regard to location on the conscious-voluntary/unconscious-involutary continuum, positive or negative outcome, and how well we can relate to how early or late in their growing tragedies and traumas the breaking happened, etc. They all break earlier and more dramatically than people do in the real world (with the exception of Mena Suvari), of course, but that may be what gives the film a sense of immediacy--it's the implication that your normal-seeming neighbor or your child or your spouse or you might just break one day and come out of the experience with a completely different outlook, and there's no telling how severe it'll be or whether it'll be good or bad.

My opinion of 2001 isn't as harsh as yours, but I'll argue that a good bit of the last part of the film is indeed incomrehensible.

I'll be at the parking lot with a bag of marbles and eighteen live frogs.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

What, you mean Space Baby?

I obviously need to rewatch American Beauty. Everyone always sees so much in it, and all I see is a series of failures to engage with anything, a glorification of suburbia, and an understanding that appears only in death (making it sort of useless). But it has been a while, and maybe I was being film-student harsh on it when I first saw it.

You guys just have fun in the parking lot. Let me know if Bismuth really has a sword, because that's pretty cool.

[madeofmeat.livejournal.com]

The whole ending sequence. It's easy to assign any number of reasonably internally consistent meanings to it. Having talked to some folks who read the book, I know what it was about to a small extent, but it certainly wasn't clear in the movie.

As for American Beauty, I really didn't see it as glorifying suburbia. There was an awful lot of tragedy on multiple levels in that movie, so I'd say that, if anything, it was a slap at suburbia, implying that it was an excellent incubator for a variety of sociobehavioral strangenesses. Or it was just a setting. Mostly, though, I like the depiction of suburbia's fishtank effect.

[bismuthobsidian.livejournal.com]

Lordfeepness described it as everyone being desperate. The funny thing is that the movie really is shallow in a way because there is really only one "lesson", that God loves you and wants you to be happy and pain is a part of that. The movie is about how none of the characters understand this and how they are all desperately scrambling around trying different things to make themselves happy and your right, they do that until they all break in their own ways. Lester Burnham understands this at death but the creepy boyfriend understands this in life and the gay couple next door. Anyway, it is my favorite movie. If you ever see the show "Six Feet Under" it is a whole series about the same thing.

[madeofmeat.livejournal.com]

The lesson could also be variant of Stephen King's observation that "even the most well-adjusted person is holding on to his or her sanity by a greased rope." But instead of "sanity" it could refer to something both more banal and more insidiously creepy. Maybe we're all much, much closer than we think to some explosive in-brain tipping point, after which our outlook will be sufficiently different from what was there before that we will not know ourselves. We may (may) still be sane, but we will be new and very strange.

But that's only one aspect of the movie for me, and perhaps not the dominant one. It's also interesting just observing the intricacies of how these other people break. The girl grows more similar to Lester, others become strangers to everyone. The only person who has a handle on who he is is Lester, who broke a while ago and is still sane (his mother probably broke even earlier, but she's, well...). Everyone else is in unexplored territory. ...Except the gay couple. They're two-dimensional enough not to matter.

OHey, wanna read some sci-fi about people's minds freaking out in a stressful situation? Go read Starfish for some really interesting character examination in an extreme biogeek sci-fi setting. I think Sanspoof will back me up.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Omg, do you really have a sword? That is badass.

[bismuthobsidian.livejournal.com]

No, but I have a large collection of knives.