This is why people deride Hollywood...

Rating: Null/10 (8 January 2001)

And I'm from LA too!
I hated this movie. Why? To tell the God's honest truth, I can't entirely tell why. It's not poorly produced or directed or acted. In fact, it's rather well made as a film. The acting is quite good from such a stellar cast. The symbolism and nuance and shading is quite deep.
No, I hate this movie because of the message, if it has one, that it conveys, what the writer was trying to say, the way it portrayed people, what this movie means and why Hollywood likes this film.
Basically, this film is a quite frank, and I would say somewhat fearful, message from Hollywood about what it thinks about people and what they ought to be. Hollywood hates suburbia, normalcy, families, convential sexuality, the people who were popular in high school, the military, etc., etc., etc. So, their response, lets show them for what they "really" are. Let's say that they're all repressed and degenerate and we are the normal, good, healthy people. Of course, none of this is reality. Hollywood is, especially at the "creative" level, populated by the quiet artsy kids who spent too much time alone in high school and came to Tinseltown as refugees so need to fire a backshot here. This was this movie's inside joke to it's own, "See, those people out there in Middle America aren't so normal and happy. They are shallow, lonely, screwed up, full of hate and angst, etc. They should ditch the kids, move out here, get a pair of leather pants and a big bag of pills and do what will make them 'happy'." This message is pretty thickly laid on from the get-go, and it reeks of agenda, of having been written by someone filled with fear and urgency about communicating this "message". This is why the movie got the Oscar, Hollywood got the joke, got the message, and appreciated it, appreciated deluding themselves into believing that maybe they really aren't so out of touch and that everyone out there on the other side of the screen is also trapped in adolescence and hedonism but since they're repressed about it, it's the people at night on Santa Monica Boulevard who are "normal". It was a major shot in the culture war here, and apparently Hollywood will never be disabused of it's own circular logic, since any dissent is simply dismissed as the "surface level" or "living in the '50s" and we are all required to "look closer" at what Hollywood thinks.
I'm reminded of what Oscar Levant said about Hollywood: "Beneath the phony tinsel of Hollywood lies the real tinsel."
Some spoilers below.
Watching this film, yes, I can pick out everything I don't like. But, just in the general sense, I get a nagging nauseousness and uneasiness watching this. It's just something in the film, something about degeneracy and irresponsibility at every turn. I really wonder how anyone could actually contrive some picture of life where no one is mentally above the age of 13. The writer obviously wasn't. No one in this film seems to be able to think more than 5 seconds down the road, look deeply within themselves or do the work with themselves or do much more than react, rather than act to their circumstances. And the characters, all, without fail, were at best one-dimensional. They were nothing more than cardboard cut-outs, archetypes from what someone thought they were supposed to be. We have the not-happy, burned-out dad in the middle of a midlife crisis who snaps and just wants to do his own thing, the mom obsessed with the nice house and finding her own inner "strength" ("I had to grow up in a duplex!"), the normal daughter caught in the middle, the flirty, sex-obssessed cheerleader tart who, big surprise, is still a virgin despite all her bluster, the creepy, film-student kid who can't see ugliness anywhere, the big, tough, I-hate-homos-but-secretly-am-one (another big shocker), Marine officer, and all the rest. In a general sense, I didn't like, on a personal level, anyone in this film, couldn't identify or understand a one of them. It hit me when I realized that there isn't one character in this film, if they were a real person, that I would want to know.
No real creative thought or originality was put into these characters. They were, in the most basic and dry sense of the word, placed there simply to send a message, used as vehicles for an agenda, and not as characters in and of themselves. The flirty cheerleader and the colonel are my favorite. The girl is unoriginal as hell, the joke told in every neighborhood. And the colonel, is both an inside joke for homosexuals and liberals and serves to send the "we hate the military and masculinity" message from Hollywood. Also, note that the two homosexual couples shown in the neighborhood seem to be the only normal, well-adjusted people in the film (although they're only shown for a few minutes each).
I almost wondered about this film in the way people talk about Hollywood and it's liberal Bolshevik agenda. But, in that sense, this film was a failure in the sense that it was clumsily executed. This movie shows that the culture war has gotten to the point where Hollywood's bolshies are simply too far away from the people they are trying to propagandize to be effective, they can no longer craft something that can be understood and accepted by the population. This isn't the sort of sneaky, tightly crafted, New Institute of Social Research Frankfurt School stalking-horse sort of thing that the media could do in the 30s to destroy Western culture. This film paints in too-broad strokes and comes out too obvious and strong in its attempt, too far away from people at large and their lives, and so it misses the mark. Hollywood got the joke with this film, so they gave it an Oscar, but Middle America wouldn't.
That's why this got the Oscar, Hollywood reacted to a message it wanted to hear, wanted to be flattered by, and so goofed. Like I said, it's a pretty clear shot in the culture war, how far they've degenerated away from anything American or normal. This isn't culture.
BTW, a little footnote, things can get funny in a cultural war when they start moving in both directions. We don't totally notice this sort of sly, under-the-radar sort of maneuvering, but not everyone in "the industry" has become totally corrupt. If you watch the Oscars, Mel Gibson, maybe Hollywood's best "stealth conservative", was presenting the Best Screenplay Oscar, which went to this film. When Alan Ball, the Broadway-veteran writer (which tells the whole story about him and why he wrote this film...) came up, note that ole Mel didn't shake his hand, want to get close to him, and seemed distinctly uncomfortable around him. Surprise, surprise! This from the producer and star of Braveheart and The Patriot. Funny indeed!