Well, Jack I lose everybody with my opinion on American Beauty. Sure, The bros meant to preach, but rather flippantly, not too deep.

What about all that talk in American Beauty about being ugly, or ordinary, or what is beautiful? I find it has an element of an aesthetic super-hero fantasy, Super-Perceptiveman--"I don't get afraid." Sure, and Up up and away, To infinity and beyond, and all that. I think critics over-rate it because they feel it's their story, their quest. What if that dancing bag said Wal-mart or McDonalds on it? What if plain Jane were acted by a plain actress? I'm not saying it's a bad movie, but I had read a review before I saw it that led me to imagine a much better movie. It's a little short on kindness, a little smug--the writing is what I'm talking about--it was superbly done. I liked Boogie Nights much better.

The movie that's routinely made for the artsy niche market goes a little like this:

There's a repressed community. (an asylum, a boys school, a religious community subsisting on a bland diet of bread and fish, a slice of Americana.) They don't know how to live! There arrives a wild-card outsider, who shakes things up, (stirs up trouba, stands on his desk and does impressions, roasts and serves up whole baby birds in sauce, fires up a doobie) and somehow sets one or more of them free! Typically somebody dies. When there are villains they're often military types (Big Nurse was an Army nurse.) The most ambitious versions of this tale, like C. Nest and Am. Beauty try to effect a convincing first-person-omnicient p.o.v. After a while you begin to nitpick at the details that don't ring true--those poetry-loving townie girls in Dead Poets Society! I knew those girls, they didn't give a rat's ass about poetry. The homophobic dad in A.B., who of course therefore must be a repressed gay man--now that was acted so brilliantly that you may let it pass, but there's a pat syllogism of self-hate-turned-outward in the film, every bit as silly as the yuppie self-esteem pop-psych motivational-tape stuff that is being satirized. So I find it more fun to pick at it than love it, that's all. There's something not quite nice about it.