A few powerful movies

Rating: 10/10 (27 January 2000)

'American Beauty' is one of the finer moments in cinema. A day after seeing it my mind is still ticking over. I went in expecting something like David Lynch's 'Blue Velvet', you know, something bitter and black, and although 'American Beauty' is a little of that, the focus was somewhere altogether different.
I found the parallels between 'American Beauty' and 'Fight Club' scarily similar, though from different angles. Both preached a flavour of existentialist anarchism (anti-conformity, if you like) but in 'Fight Club' the message was painted with bleakness and masculinity, whereas in 'American Beauty' a rose was used to highlight the point.
Briefly though, I've seen very few movies that touched something within me and reassured me that my stance and ideas were worth living for. 'Dazed and Confused', 'A Clockwork Orange' and 'Fight Club' are about the only other really notable movies that have had a similar effect on me. Maybe being an impressionable teenager has a little to do with this, but regardless of who you are I doubt you'll leave the cinema without having been given something from 'American Beauty'.