Pretty bad movie for us kooky liberals, too...

Rating: 4/10 (4 November 2005)

It amuses me that comments from any user giving this film a rating of less than 8.5 (the weighted average) are classified as "Hated it"! '8' still looks like "thumbs-up" to me. I think "American Beauty" is criminally overrated, but whatever.
I gave it a '5' years ago, based on its technical merits and some amusing moments. For the record, I am an unabashed liberal and left-winger, and, in my opinion, "AB" is pretty much the proverbial Emperor's New Clothes. There are no teeth in this satire: everyone has a warm place to sleep and plenty of food to eat. Let's see what Lester would do without the $60K. The various sexual idiosyncrasies are plot devices, not actual character traits. And who cast Mena Suvari as "the babe"? Puh-leez!
Future film historians will have a good laugh over the Best Picture Oscar for this nonsense. Like someone else commented, there is no movie if these knuckleheads bothered to lower their window blinds occasionally. About as emotionally engaging and meaningful as a bag of Cheese Puffs.