A phony manifesto against ugliness and falseness;fun watching,like a good TV series' episode

Rating: 7/10 (19 April 2008)

Seen a second a time, and at another age, this film seemed quite phony and very overstated and over-explicit and unnecessarily smarti.e., smart in a way that only covers and hides and cannot overcome the trouble.
It is maybe a funny entertainment, an amusementit acknowledges, in a very overstated way, the ugliness and the phoniness of a society, and the need for beauty. But it's not really superior to the problems that it pretends it does unmask. It is smart and pretendedly agile in a MTV waythat is,the wrong way; and, most of all, it is obviously, stridently unsubtle and clamorous. Spacey gives one more time a powerhouse performance, something electrifying and worthy of a better usage.
It's not a creation, but a product. The theme needed a Truffaut, to give it the infinite dimension it requires.
One feels the director is surpassed by the amplitude of the subject, that required a real competence. Made as it has been, A. Beauty looks like one of the smart sitcoms that won so much acclaim. It pretends to denounce what is phony and unsubtle and ugly and void in the livesthe spleen and the neurosis. It explores several reactionssex, guns, drugs, career , vanity, etc.. It uncovers hidden contents of the ordinary lives. But everything in the product itselfthe bitterness, the perspicacity, the fun, the quickness, the intuition of splendorsis cheap, phony and banal and far from overcoming the object described.
Yet Spacey does a breathtaking role; the phony moments of poetry are though enjoyable and deserve being developed in another cinematographic project; Mrs. Benning is quite sexy; Mrs. Suvari's hips and thighs are gorgeous.
As such, the film is little more than a precipitation of ideas previously in solution in the very world it pretends to dissect.