One of the best movie I've ever seen.

Rating: 10/10 (11 May 2012)

This movie is fantastic. Sure this movie has fantastic acting and directing and music and all that jazz, but it also possesses unique qualities that typically are only found in Indies. This rare gem (not using the cliché lightly) combines the great standard aspects found in a blockbuster with the profound feelings found in a good independent film.
It's quite philosophical. Mainstream movies tend to not rely on "deep" thinking like riskier movies do. I know people like to say "If you enjoy philosophizing, you'll LOVE this movie!" about their favorite films, but I believe in this case it's true. I left the movie with a deep sense of enlightenment. I admit I bought into it harder than I believe the average person would (I believe due to a great cynicism of society.) I wouldn't call American Beauty ground-breaking, but it did shake me somewhat.
It drives home its main idea without being preachy, which is pretty hard to do. It starts subtle and keeps growing to the end.
American Beauty also has some roots in forests Hollywood doesn't tend to grow it, another nice fruit. As liberal as I feel I am, I (embarrassingly) admit I felt a little uneasy about some elements of the movie. But I view that as a good thing.
I think the main reason people might dislike this film is because of its corny aspects. American Beauty does have a couple cheesy elements, but most of them are purposely cheesy. But I admit American Beauty does fall victim to two too noticeable slapstick-like instances that seem out of place because the rest of the movie is so good. I was so enthralled by the movie that when these gimmicks happened I was pretty upset. It's not as though other popular movies wouldn't have these occurrence, it's that while watching this movie seems too good to have them. I got the feeling that, in one of the scenes, the director kept re-shooting the scene and telling Spacey to be MORE obvious. But I can't stress enough that I felt this way in literally two scenes.
This is definitively a lasting film. I watched 13 years after it was released and loved it. Even though it's not totally exactly perfect, I gave it a 10/10 because of rounding errors.
I highly recommend this movie.