How many ways can you say "f**k you?"

Rating: Null/10 (24 November 1999)

My God! For all the positive press "American Beauty" has attracted, it certainly struck me as an elaborate series of defiant set-ups, with Kevin Spacey as the one who gets to dispatch all the straw men. He finds work dehumanizing, so he gets to "tell the truth" in his job evaluation, then blackmail his employer for a year's salary for his severance. He finds his wife's obsessions with materialism intrusive and suffocating, so he jerks off while she sleeps, and rants about the furniture and their bloodless marriage. He later gets her under his thumb when he catches her in an amorous embrace with another man...
The only graceful note in the whole tirade, is that he DOESN'T f**k the nymphette, who miraculously transforms into a vulnerable woman/child.
Hey. I give it a five out of ten. Go see "The Insider" for a film with the strength of its convictions.