About

American Beauty.

English
McSpadden
7 May 2010
American BeautyAmerican Beauty is a movie arguing the simple and subtle events that take place each and every day in the typical American household. These events that take place are the direct result of ideas of what the American family should look like. The struggles of achieving social acceptance are abundant throughout this film and the different ways of dealing with the realization of being that normal and typical American family can result in life altering circumstances. The everyday tasks and the constant uniform schedule that the majority of Americans conform to, begin to weigh on the feeling of satisfaction in the characters of this movie. Each character realizes the plainness of their life at different points in the story and begin to question whether or not they are truly happy and satisfied at what their life is. Each character deals with the truth in different ways whether it be drugs, affairs, or sex, to displace the feeling of being normal and fulfilling the feeling of living a good life. The film starts off with the voice of Lester Burnham telling the audience that he will be dead in less than a year, foreshadowing the event of his death. His daughter then has a video clip of asking a boy to kill her father Lester, which the audience assumes is the cause of his death. The movie has clear and easy to follow scene sequencing that allows the audience to easily follow what each character is doing and how their plans will affect the others. Each scene keeps the audience guessing on how one character will affect the other. The director does a fantastic job of letting the audience understand what each character thinks they are seeing and believing when the audience really understands what truly is going on. The scene where Colonel Frank Fitts believes he see’s his son with Lester Burnham when in fact the audience knows they are just rolling a joint together. The scenes allow the audience to see what is...

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What are the costs of living in a success-driven, consumer-oriented, image-obsessed society? This challenge to contemporary America’s suburban culture finds a voice in Sam Mendes’ 1999 movie AmericanBeauty. The film’s complex subtlety underscores its implication that subtlety itself is a casualty in our society. American Beauty’s tagline exhorts viewers to “look closer,” but the film expresses ambivalence concerning what is revealed by closer inspection. On one hand, protagonist Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) and his young neighbor Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) speak of the unappreciated beauty surrounding us; however, Lester also begins to question the values of a world that seems perfect but is actually a suburban dystopia. Through their use of various filmmaking techniques, particularly cinematography and editing, Mendes and his collaborators create a vivid illustration of this dichotomy.
In terms of depth of narration, AmericanBeauty is a remarkably subjective film. Mental subjectivity actually serves as a baseline and framework since the movie unfolds as a posthumous flashback narrated by Lester. The audience moves deeper inside Lester’s mind at various points in the plot, particularly during his fantasies about Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari), a nubile blond cheerleader. In the film’s expository scene, Lester says in his...

...The ﬁlm AmericanBeauty, directed by Sam Mendes is a ﬁlm about imprisonment and escape from imprisonment (Mendes, 1999). AmericanBeauty explores the breakdown of a suburban family man whose life journeys from self loathing and emptiness to freedom and liberation but at the ultimate cost of his life. Mendes effectively employs a range of techniques to help convey the meaning of this ﬁlm such as set design, camera angles, colour and soundtrack.
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...﻿AmericanBeauty PREEEEEEEP
Themes
Happiness
Exists as an myth, goal (illusion)
All the characters want to achieve it
They all have different thoughts and beliefs of what happiness is and how to achieve it
Lester Burnham
Pursues happiness by reaching out to his true desires and ignoring what the society (mostly his wife) has to say
In the end he realizes that he found true happiness, however he took it to a significant extent, by doing drugs, smoking pot, getting a cheap job, seeking a sexual affair with a 15-year-old
His determination to achieve happiness has blinded him, he is willing to do anything to achieve happiness
AmericanBeauty
“The joy in life is his who has the heart to demand it.” The 1999 American drama film, AmericanBeauty, directed by Sam Mendes is about a man’s, Lester Burnham’s, search for happiness. In the film Sam Mendes develops the idea that to secure the satisfaction of self-fulfillment, one must pursue inner happiness to achieve completeness in their life. Initially, Lester has no happiness in his life and he is denied by the society and family. However, he decides to take a stand and reach out to his inner happiness. In the end, Lester achieves the happiness that he has been seeking.
At the beginning of the film, Lester Burnham is in a mid-life crisis which is mostly caused by his wife, Carolyn, and daughter, Jane. He is inferior...

...to film. | 10-12 |
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* Shows elementary ability to identify and describe film techniques. * Composes a basic response to film | 1-3 |
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Good morning class. What is important to you?
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...Stereotyping In Modern Film
Stereotypes are extremely prominent in modern cinema, the first example that springs to mind is that of the film "AmericanBeauty", directed by Sam Mendes, in 1999. Here is a seriocomic look at suburban America, which utilizes various stereotypes in order to make a broader statement on the symptoms supposedly brought upon us by living boring suburban lives. While the stereotypes work to the filmmakers' advantage in the film's cutting comic stages, once the film devolves into melodrama, the stereotypes become much more apparent, changing the film from a scathing satire to a parable of sorts.
The plot of the film can be summarized by saying that it concerns the character of Lester Burnham, just as he is about to begin a mid-life crisis. Lester is becomes somewhat of a hero to the average, middle-aged, 9-5 American. His wife, Carolyn, is your average fading all-American girl, who has become a shrill drone, critical and sexually unresponsive to her husband's advances.
Then, of course, is their daughter Jane. Jane is going through the all too familiar stages of adolescence which cause the teenager in question to become perpetually glum as well as perpetually disgusted by anything her parents might say. The only thing she seems to care about is acquiring some sorely unneeded breast implants.
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AmericanBeauty is a 1999 American drama directed by Sam Mendes. The film centres on the less-than perfect lives of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) and his family as they are trapped within the confines of the Middle American image. Entrapment is a recurring theme in Mendes’ film—Lester is trapped by the notion of conforming to the middle-class American ideal; his wife Carolyn (Annette Benning) is trapped within the image of being the perfect wife, mother, and businesswoman; their daughter Jane (Thora Birch) is trapped by gender stereotypes in her blind pursuit of ‘beauty’, exemplified by her want for breast augmentation surgery. The main narrative follows Lester himself as he attempts to break free from his despairingly insubstantial existence—he is 42 years old, is facing possible unemployment from his dead-end job, his daughter openly hates him, and his relations with his wife have gone totally cold. The turning point for Lester comes when he develops an infatuation on his daughter’s best friend Angela (Mena Suvari), flirtatious but ultimately naïve. His lust for Angela motivates him to quit his job, start working out, and start buying weed from his shy documentarian neighbour Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) who lives with his detached mother and violently homophobic father....

...AmericanBeauty
Things Aren’t Always, As They Seem
Americanbeauty (1999, Sam Mendes) is a very unique film with many different themes. The main characters in the film, Lester (Kevin Spacey) and Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening) prove that there is a big difference in appearance versus reality. With the help of Colonel Frank Fitts, (Wes Bentley) we learn that people cannot just be judged by their outer appearance, but rather by what’s inside, because people are not always what they seem.
Lester Burnham serves as the films narrator. He is an almost middle-aged father, husband and advertising executive. Obviously, his marriage with his uptight wife Carolyn is barely hanging on. Their sixteen-year-old daughter Jane (Thora Bucch) is a severely depressed teenager. She struggles with self-esteem issues everyday. At the beginning Lester considers himself an all out loser who is easily forgettable. That is until Lester meets his daughter’s friend Angela (Mena Suvari) after a high school basketball game. He is immediately infatuated with her almost to the point of obsession. Angela, who is the same age as Lester’s daughter Jane, is an egotistical, aggressive teenager. She aspires to be a model and is the complete opposite of Jane. Throughout AmericanBeauty, (1999, Sam Mendes) Lester fantasizes about Angela involving her and red rose petals. A new family moves into the house next door to the...

...Analyse the use of Performance/Mise-en-scène in AmericanBeauty (Sam Mendes, 1999); how is meaning created in my chosen clip?
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