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American Beauty
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Guide Note:American Beauty is a comedy and drama film that stars Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Mena Suvari, and Thora Birch. At the 2000 Academy Awards, the film was nominated for eight awards, and took home five.Fast Facts:
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I’m not sure American Beauty does have a moral. It’s full of morally charged themes — dehumanizing corporate practices, lust and masturbation and adultery, child-beating and statutory rape, homosexuality and homophobia, intolerance and murder. Yet in the end, it seems as if we’re meant to feel that the real issue is the beauty in a plastic bag swirling in the breeze or a dead dove on the grass.
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It is the absence - rather than the presence - of love that is most noticeable in the first half of American Beauty. The Burnham family dinners simmer with anger and awkwardness: these are people who have fundamentally forgotten how to love each other. One of the saddest moments of the film occurs at the end, when Carolyn, faced with her husband's death, realizes that she will never again have the chance to love him. One of Ricky's most astounding characteristics is his apparent belief that his father loves him despite how he treats him, and that the beatings and the lack of trust are simply his unique way of showing this love. Ricky's ability to love Jane stems from this remarkable ability to trust in the inherent goodness of others.
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As good as the acting is, though, the best part of American Beauty is director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Conrad Hall's complete and stunning control of the camera. A movie about beauty must convey that on the screen, and Mendes and Hall accomplish this in so many ways. If I were to list all of the memorable shots in American Beauty--a funeral procession through a bower of trees, a character merging with the shadows, a naked girl in a bed of rose petals, and on and on--I'd run out of space without mentioning anything else in the film. But even more impressive is how those images reflect on and rhyme with each other.
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American Beauty is not necessarily quite the revelation it seems intended to be, but it is good. It isn't anything substantially different from surrealist satires from Buñuel to Sitcom, although it is the most remarkable example of the style in mainstream American cinema for some time. As a critique of both the 1990s and the 1970s, it has its points, but it does suffer from a devotion Freud which doesn't always serve it well. It is interesting to see how this wave of surrealist films has crested with [E]XistenZ, Rushmore, Fight Club, American Beauty, and the upcoming Being John Malkovich, and one wonders if this is the result of late twentieth-century anxiety about the certainties of life in postmodern America or just a trend. American Beauty is a hypnotic, meticulously crafted film and it ranks among the best films of the year. It is the first unmissable movie of the year 2000 in Ireland, and it is well worth seeing.
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NEW YORK, June 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- BeautyBank, a division of the Estée Lauder Companies, unveiled actress Ashley Judd today as the personality representing their new skincare and cosmetics brand, American Beauty. The agreement establishes Judd as the spokesperson for the line, slated for a national launch in October 2004.
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American Beauty