No, now Jack, I saw a good movie, 3 times, and will probably see it again. There's a lot to it, surely, and the writer and director seem to have had different core concerns. It was just those concerns that led someone to call it "American Beauty" that I thought lent it to this thread. And those were the particular aspects that I found weak in it, not that they were necesarily the most important.

I think Ken Kesey may still not have seen Cukoo's Nest--he swore he wouldn't, then later said maybe if it came on t.v....

People are saying threads like "jiggles" are silly and even demeaning, but I've always wondered why it's so hard, why there is so much resistance to extrapolating ideas about general aesthetic questions, empirically from daily life, stuff everybody sees and is aware of, has opinions about. And even in art school--you can take art-history all you want, and it's important to have that perspective in any subject, but you often will be a grad student in philosophy before you can focus on aesthetics. Why is this? I think it's interesting, bears thinking about. I haven't meant to derail these threads into my rambling lines of b.s., but hoped to see if they'd grow a little less fleshy, broader, so to speak, more abstract. That's why I brought up that angle in Am. Beauty.