Maybe I wasn’t clear: I think you have to be living some form of that life, or have lived it in some way, to truly appreciate the film. Those who have never been trapped in that stultifying kind of situation will just see his behavior as idiocy.
I’ve always loved the movie (still do, although my love is more tempered now) and I saw it for the first time as a teen girl. I think Lester’s character is understandable to more than just guys going through a mid-life crisis. But, whatever, this isn’t the “Defend movies suddenly no one likes” thread. 
Critical reception of the film was lukewarm and the only thing anyone praised was Alan Rickman. Rotten tomatoes has the film at 59%.
I think what people are seeing is that the fans rave about the film when it comes out, while the critics are pointing out problems. But who listens to critics? But then, as the buzz wears off, the critics turn out to be right. The Phantom Menace got a 57% at Rotten Tomatoes and is a prime example of this.
Movies like Crash. Shakespeare in Love and The Crying Game are all terrific films, but people tend to have trouble dealing with films dealing with serious issues. Crash is disliked mainly because so many people thought Brokeback Mountain deserved the Oscar, because people don’t understand the concept of “dramatic license,” and because others didn’t understand what the movie was trying to say and criticized it for what they thought it was saying, when the points it made were far more subtle.
The backlash against Shakespeare in Love wasn’t because it was a serious movie. It wasn’t a serious movie, at all. It’s a light hearted romantic comedy. But it won out against Saving Private Ryan, which was Very Serious. Also very inferior, IMO. But I knew a number of people in real life who said that SPR should have won, because WWII is more important than Shakespeare.
If you look through a list of all the movies that were ‘big’ at the time, I daresay 2/3 are completely forgotten or seldom seen. There are Important Films and Movies Folks Like. (Kate Winslet won best actress for “The Reader”. I don’t know anyone who has seen it, and I haven’t heard a peep about it since 2008, it seems to have disappeared.)
Take a look at Nobel prizes for literature some time. And get ready to do your best owl impression. (“Who?”)
Then follow up with the writers who didn’t get one and work on your Porky Pig splutter. (“W-W-What-the-the-F-F-F?”)
There was an article in the New York Times recently on movies which were initially panned but over time have garnered praise from some critics (the purpose of the article apparently was to rehabilitate “Ishtar”).
Which leads me to wonder what movies ever flopped initially, were “rediscovered” by critics and then sank once again into deserved mediocrity (I’m hoping that in another 50 years this appliles to “Vertigo”).
Oh man, but Secrets and Lies and Lost In Translation are so great!
I agree that it has been fashionable for some years now to trash on American Beauty, though I think that is undeserved.
On the Dark Knight thing, I disliked the earlier Christopher Nolan Batman movies even though I had really loved his first two films and am generally an easy mark for superhero movies (I even liked Superman Returns). So I finally gave up and did not even see The Dark Knight Rises.
ETA: Agree about Vertigo!
There are still people who think *SPR *is the greatest war movie evah! They are remembering the first 20 minutes and forgetting the rest of the movie, which is your typical war movie cliches. Shakespeare In Love, OTOH, holds up quite well for the light comedy it is.
I think the backlash against American Beauty has little to do with the movie itself, and lot more to do with the fact that the public has grown sick and tired of Kevin Spacey. If he hadn’t made** Pay it Forward, K-Pax **or Under the Sea, people would probably like American Beauty more.
I violently agree on both counts.
William Shakespeare: Good title.
Christopher Marlowe: Yours?
William Shakespeare: “Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter”. - Oh, yes, I know, I know.
Christopher Marlowe: What is the story?
William Shakespeare: Well, there’s this pirate…
Oh, yes. The Great Kevin Spacey Backlash of 2006 which has forced the once revered actor to retire in quiet seclusion to the half-constructed pleasure fortress on a remote island in the South Pacific…
Seriously? However much you or anyone else may have connected with American Beauty, it was in any technical sense a poorly constructed film filled with clichéd characters and implausible situations, and is pretty much the benchmark for how and why voiceover narration should be used sparingly if at all. An ardent repressed homosexual/Nazi memorabilia collector Marine father who drug-tests his kid but doesn’t insist on seeing him pee in the bottle? An wound up and insecure real estate agent who has sex with a similarly superficial agent and then publically tramps around? A fed up worktron who gets a year’s severance simply by accusing his boss of sexual harrassment without a single shred of evidence or independent eyewitness? The vamping daughter’s friend who is secretly a virgin and lusts after–of all possibilities–Kevin Spacey? Uh huh. Compare this to the little seen but excellent The Secret Lives of Dentists and it is obvious how clunky and contrived it is.
You may like it despite its faults–I love the hell out of Big Trouble in Little China, and that film is no masterpiece–but it falls well short of being a great movie on any objective scale.
Stranger
Not even Nobel Prizes - start going through this list year by year and see how far you have to go before you’ve even heard of the majority of titles.
Joke all you want, but besides playing the voice of a robot in Moon, Spacey hasn’t made a good movie and/or a successful one since 1999. The man’s a punchline.
Like I said, a bit too precious…
I’m not sure The Phantom Menace is a good example of this. Everyone I know who saw it and was over the age of 20 or so was incredibly disappointed immediately. If anything, it seems like opinion of it is creeping ever so slightly up as the people who enjoyed it as children (and many children really did enjoy it) get older.
Anyone who thought the characters in American Beauty were implausible or behaved implausibly really should watch the film again after they get out of high school.
For one thing, while they have have been a bit stylized, you can say that about nearly every character in nearly very serious movie made; we may have moved away from the extreme hamminess of vaudeville, but even the most grit-tastic film still uses a stylized visual language and depictions. We just accept it, but I assure you any film of the present era will look stiff and artificial when viewed 40 years from now.
There are a lot of broken and half-broken people in the world who can manage a pretty good “sobriety” most of the time, but mask bizarre thoughts, actions and behaviors even weirder than anything in AB.
If you don’t like the film, fine - but dissing it as unrealistic or artificial takes a very narrow perspective.
“Greatest 20 minutes ever!” Is pretty much what I say about Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Don’t get me wrong, I like the movie and the first 20 minutes is perhaps one of the greatest comedy movies ever made, but then it rolls violently down hill and peters out at the end, like a toy car on a Hot Wheels track.
I very much disagree. The Big Kahuna, Shrink, and Margin Call are all excellent movies IMO.
(raises hand in agreement, nods thank you)
How about the films of Frederico Fellini? They were Oscar winners, and staples of film schools everywhere … but conspicuously absent from anyone’s list of favorite movies, because they are pretty much unwatchable.