美国丽人英文影评

1美国丽人 American Beauty"American Beauty" is a comedy because we laugh at the absurdity of the hero's problems.And a tragedy because we can identify with his failure--not the specific details, but the general outline.The movie is about a man who fears growing older, losing the hope of true love and not being respected by those who know him best. If you never experience those feelings, take out a classified ad. People want to take lessons from you.Lester Burnham, the hero of "American Beauty," is played by Kevin Spacey as a man who is unloved by his daughter, ignored by his wife and unnecessary at work. "I'll be dead in a year," he tells us in almost the first words of the movie. "In a way, I'm dead already." The movie is the story of his rebellion.We meet his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), so perfect her garden shears are coordinated with her footwear. We meet his daughter Jane (Thora Birch), who is saving up for breast implants even though augmentation is clearly unnecessary; perhaps her motivation is not to become more desirable to men, but to make them miserable about what they can't have."Both my wife and daughter think I'm this chronic loser," Lester complains. He is right. But they are not without their reasons. At an agonizing family dinner, Carolyn plays Mantovanian music that mocks every mouthful; the music is lush and reassuring, and the family is angry and silent. When Lester criticizes his daughter's attitude, she points out correctly that he has hardly spoken to her in months.Everything changes for Lester the night he is dragged along by his wife to see their daughter perform as a cheerleader. There on the floor, engrossed in a sub-Fosse pompon routine, he sees his angel: Angela (Mena Suvari), his daughter's high-school classmate. Is it wrong for a man in his 40s to lust after a teenage girl? Any honest man understands what a complicated question this is. Wrong morally, certainly, and legally. But as every woman knows, men are born with wiring that goes directly from their eyes to their genitals, bypassing the higher centers of thought. They can disapprove of their thoughts, but they cannot stop themselves from having them."American Beauty" is not about a Lolita relationship, anyway. It's about yearning after youth, respect, power and, of course, beauty. The momenta man stops dreaming is the moment he petrifies inside and starts writing snarfy letters disapproving of paragraphs like the one above. Lester's thoughts about Angela are impure, but not perverted; he wants to do what men are programmed to do, with the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.Angela is not Lester's highway to bliss, but she is at least a catalyst for his freedom. His thoughts, and the discontent they engender, blast him free from years of emotional paralysis, and soon he makes a cheerful announcement at the funereal dinner table: "I quit my job, told my boss to - - - - himself and blackmailed him for $60,000." Has he lost his mind? Not at all. The first thing he spends money on is perfectly reasonable: a bright red 1970 Pontiac Firebird.Carolyn and Jane are going through their own romantic troubles. Lester finds out Carolyn is cheating when he sees her with her lover in the drive-through lane of a fast-food restaurant (where he has a job he likes). Jane is being videotaped by Ricky (Wes Bentley), the boy next door, who has a strange light in his eyes. Ricky's dad (Chris Cooper) is a former Marine who tests him for drugs, taking a urine sample every six months; Ricky plays along to keep the peace until he can leave home.All of these emotional threads come together during one dark and stormy night, when there is a series of misunderstandings so bizarre they belong in a screwball comedy. And at the end, somehow, improbably, the film snatches victory from the jaws of defeat for Lester, its hero. Not the kind of victory you'd get in a feel-good movie, but the kind where you prove something important, if only to yourself."American Beauty" is not as dark or twisted as "Happiness," last year's attempt to shine a light under the rock of American society. It's more about sadness and loneliness than about cruelty or inhumanity. Nobody is really bad in this movie, just shaped by society in such a way they can't be themselves, or feel joy.The performances all walk the line between parody and simple realism; Thora Birch and Wes Bentley are the most grounded, talking in the tense, flat voices of kids who can't wait to escape their homes. Bening's character, a real estate agent who chants self-help mantras, confuses happiness with success--bad enough if you're successful, depressing if you're not.And Spacey, an actor who embodies intelligence in his eyes and voice, is the right choice for Lester Burnham. He does reckless and foolish things in this movie, but he doesn't deceive himself; he knows he's running wild--and chooses to, burning up the future years of an empty lifetimefor a few flashes of freedom. He may have lost everything by the end of the film, but he's no longer a loser.2美国丽人 American BeautyIt’s a tricky business to leave American Beauty feeling all right, but the film works very hard to make that possible, despite its dismal representation of suburban living.Scripted by first-time screenwriter Alan Ball (who used to write for Cybill and off-Broadway) and directed by British theater veteran Sam Mendes (Cabaret, The Blue Room), the film features Thora Birch, once Harrison Ford’s school-uniformed daughter in the Tom Clancy movies, now a really pissed-off teen named Jane, living in the generic ’burbs with her hateful and self-hating parents, Lester (Kevin Spacey) and Carolyn (Annette Bening). The poor kid doesn’t have a chance. She’s a morose cheerleader with pale skin and red-red lipstick, as well as a blond, burstingly beautiful best friend, Angela (Mena Suvari, the golden girl of American Pie), also on the squad, who absorbs all attention whenever they’re in the same space.Birch is absolutely brilliant. Her sophisticated performance of Jane’s despair and aspirations — to be like Angela, to be loved by her father or someone resembling him, to be anywhere but where she is, in a room where her mother is melting down before her eyes — save American Beauty from comic, surreal overkill. She anchors the film’s easy-target hysterics in a character whose face — more than any dialogue or situation —registers the dark nuances of adolescent fear, disgust and longing.However, most critical attention has been centered on the movie’s insights into Lester’s horrific existence. This is understand able, as he is the narrator. Right off the bat he tells us, "This is my life. In less than a year, I’ll be dead. Of course, I don’t know that yet. In a way I’m dead already." The language is brutal and lyrical. The scene beneath the voiceover is alarmingly sterile but extremely familiar: an overhead shot of a suburban neighborhood, all the houses alike, all the streets going nowhere. In an instant, he’s sympathetic, the heart of the film. You anticipate and dread his death, and wonder who will be responsible.You’re led to believe that it’s Jane, indirectly or otherwise. The very first shot in the film is her face, on video, pouting. She’s talking to whoever holds the camera, whom we learn later is her boyfriend, a strange, desperate and abused new neighbor named Ricky (Wes Bentley). He affords his elaborate entertainment system by selling pot (to her dad) but he spends most of his time videotaping everyone, in particular Jane at all hours, from any position he can manage, as she crosses her lawn, gossipsin the schoolyard, passes by her bedroom window. In this first scene, she talks about how unhappy she is, and how much she dislikes Lester. "I need a father who’s a role model," she says. "Someone should put him out of his misery." Off camera, Ricky offers to kill him for her.This offer is certainly foreboding, especially since it’s followed by Lester’s announcement of his imminent demise. As the action proceeds, Jane is revealed as being typically teenagerish in her wrath: that is, not convinced that what she thinks she wants is really what she wants. (Angela says that the worst thing is to be "ordinary," and Jane believes her for most of the film, also accepting Angela’s plainly unfounded judgment that she —Jane —is ordinary.) She’s also passive and fearfu l, despite her desperation, characteristics she’s absorbed from Lester and Carolyn (who sells real estate badly and has an affair with the local "real estate king," played by Peter Gallagher). But Ricky, he’s another story: a ticking time bomb, embodying the stereotype that suburban white boys are fast becoming in today’s mass-media eye. His backstory includes a pathologically passive mom (Allison Janney) and a menacing dad, Marine Colonel Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper, devastating in a truly troubling role).F itts’ salient traits are ruthlessness, rigidity and homophobia —the ’90s insta-signs of imminent suburban-guy breakdown — which definitively set him apart from Lester, who genuinely likes his gay neighbors and who becomes remarkably flexible once he loses his advertising job and falls in love with Angela. This latter development comes to resembles Lolita, in that Angela relishes her role as jailbait, misunderstanding it as a means to self-worth (a typical girl’s mistake, hardly pathological in her given en vironment). Lester’s redemption takes up the movie’s length and emotional focus, but he leaves walking disasters in his wake: most obviously, his undone wife andguilt-traumatized child.By the time these results become clear to you, the film will be over. It ends, as it promises in its opening frames, with Lester’s death. The face that will haunt you is Jane’s, as it haunts her father, her boyfriend and her mother. Mopey and dreamy, implacable and lovely, Jane, like Lissa in Best Laid Plans, wants more than she can imagine. If only the movies around them were so ambitious.American Beauty 美国丽人英语影评And there were a lot of great ones this year. I will also say something even (possibly) bolder--that Kevin Spacey gives the performance of his career. And all us movie geeks know that is saying a LOT, given this man's past roles, and his talent. I used to think he was overrated as an actor. Then I figured OK, I see what all the fuss is about. Now, he's up there with my favorite actors of all time, with James Woods, Steve Buscemi, Robert Deniro...probably in the top 5.I was lucky enough to see a free screening this afternoon and boy, am I glad I had the privilege. In fact, this review might not even be that coherent- it's one of those movies that blows you away so much that you have trouble even putting your feelings into words.The plotline sounds trite when you first describe it (it did to me when I first heard about it), Spacey plays a man who describes himself as a loser, with Annette Bening as his horrible, shrewish, self-absorbed, pathetic b*tch of a wife. His daughter is not all that likeable either, despite the fact that you can understand why she turned out this way, with her as a mother. Just when you think you've met the most dysfunctional family in the world outside of "Happiness", you find out about the family who just moved in next door. At first, the strange son seems like the most messed-up member of their brood, but after you get to meet his ex-military, abusive, homophobic, terrifying father and his withdrawn, sad, headcase mother, you realize he is the most normal member of the household by far. Then, the filmwriters toss in Kevin Spacey's lustful obsession with his daughter's sexkitten cheerleader friend, which trust me, is a lot more fun, entertaining, and amusing than it sounds when you read about it. Soon, he is having the most entertaining, amusing midlife crisis ever seen in the history of cinema. He just doesn't give a ***k about what he does or says anymore, and you only wish you could get away with doing the things he does.I found myself laughing out loud in this movie so many times, most of it horrified, amazed laughter at what is happening and the things that are coming out of the character's mouths, especially Spacey's. He had at least a dozen lines that had every member of the audience in hysterics and actual applause and cheers.I can't say enough good things about this movie. You think, after the first five minutes, that you know how the movie will end. Well, Spacey's opening narrative does give it away, but trust me, the events unfold in a way that you will NEVER see coming. You will swear you can see what a character is going to do next, what violent or self-destructice act they will commit, but you turn out to be wrong.Without getting too pretentious here, the movie lives up to it's theme/tagline of "...look closer". THe characters are not what they seem, up until the end, and even then they surprise you. At least two characters that you are POSITIVE you have figured out, do or say something that turns all your preconceptions of them upside down, while making your jaw drop, and your heart ache. You will leave the movie with a smile, though, and that is maybe what I expected least of all.影评作业"American Beauty" is a comedy because we laugh at the absurdity of the hero's problems. And a tragedy because we can identify with hisfailure--not the specific details, but the general outline.The movie is about a man who fears growing older, losing the hope of true love and not being respected by those who know him best.Lester Burnham, the hero of "American Beauty," who is unloved by his daughter, ignored by his wife and unnecessary at work. "I'll be dead in a year," he tells us in almost the first words of the movie. "In a way, I'm dead already." The movie is the story of his rebellion.We meet his wife, Carolyn , so perfect her garden shears are coordinated with her footwear. We meet his daughter Jane , who is saving up for breast implants even though augmentation is clearly unnecessary; perhaps her motivation is not to become more desirable to men, but to make them miserable about what they can't have.American Beauty" is not about a Lolita relationship, anyway. It's about yearning after youth, respect, power and, of course, beauty. The moment a man stops dreaming is the moment he petrifies inside and starts writing snarfy letters disapproving of paragraphs like the one above. Lester's thoughts about Angela are impure, but not perverted; he wants to do what men are programmed to do, with the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.All of these emotional threads come together during one dark and stormy night, when there is a series of misunderstandings so bizarre they belong in a screwball comedy. And at the end, somehow, improbably, the film snatches victory from the jaws of defeat for Lester, its hero. Not the kind of victory you'd get in a feel-good movie, but the kind where you prove something important, if only to yourself."American Beauty" is not as dark or twisted as "Happiness," last year's attempt to shine a light under the rock of American society. It's more about sadness and loneliness than about cruelty or inhumanity. Nobody is really bad in this movie, just shaped by society in such a way they can't be themselves, or feel joy.He does reckless and foolish things in this movie, but he doesn't deceive himself; he knows he's running wild--and chooses to, burning up the future years of an empty lifetime for a few flashes of freedom. He may have lost everything by the end of the film, but he's no longer a loser.。