Spectacular!

Rating: 10/10 (2 June 2002)

SPOILER ALERT---although it was released in 1999, so if you were ever to see it, you SHOULD have watched it by now!
With all movies, you have to suspend some disbelief, but above all accept the movie in it's own terms.
Here, we have a movie that satirizes happy, American suburbia, the corporate world, personal values (a homophobe having homosexual feelings, a teenage model sexing her way to success), enthusiasm (Janie being on the dance team), and society-defined responsibilities (not smoking pot, not having sex with a teenager, and just punching the 9-to-5 clock like a good little adult). Is it successful? In my opinion, yes. Why? A satire can use as many clichés as people say it uses and still be original and funny. I believe the movie succeeded in that.
The film's cinematography is what media production classes in college should use as textbook material.
The acting, from Spacey and Bening to the teens and to the supporting cast, frosted and topped with cherries an already excellent screenplay. Many a movie painfully shows their actors not connecting with the script---nary a line of dialogue, a character nuance, nor a detail of a situation passed by or flew over the heads of this cast.
And, of course, only a theatrical director could bring such brilliant stage vision to the screen. Every scene could have easily been presented in a proscenium-arched stage, a feat sadly not attempted by filmmakers. (Envision, if you will, the bathtub scene on a stage filled with fog, the music pulsating the theater...or the house and stage going dark with the gunshot, with the next visual: Lester's corpse bleeding from the head on the table).
ANALYSIS: It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. GRADE: A+