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Kindle Notes & Highlights
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.
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
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 go fuck himself, and blackmailed him for $60,000.”
It’s more about sadness and loneliness than about cruelty or inhumanity.
He may have lost everything by the end of the film, but he’s no longer a loser.
The noise in the dark is almost always scarier than what makes the noise in the dark.
Instead, it tries to see into their lives, to understand that for unlearned men who had lived so close to the harsh realities of farming, life and death itself had a more fundamental meaning.
All of those reactions, I think, are simply different ways of avoiding the central fact of this film, which is that it comes closer to reflecting the current state of race relations in America than any other movie of our time.
His thoughts are organized as Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, as extrapolated by Morris, and one wonders how the planners of the war in Iraq would respond to lesson Nos. 1 and 2 (“Empathize with your enemy” and “Rationality will not save us”), or for that matter, No. 6 (“Get the data”), No. 7 (“Belief and seeing are both often wrong”), and No. 8 (“Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning”).
LeMay observed to him that if America had lost, they would have been tried as war criminals.
The effect of The Fog of War is to impress upon us the frailty and uncertainty of our leaders.
Lesson No. 11: “You can’t change human nature.”
Whenever a serial killer or a sex predator is arrested, we turn to the paper to find his neighbors saying that the monster “seemed just like anyone else.”
It shows us people who want to be loved, and who never will be—because of their emotional incompetence and arrested development.
We get the sense of warehouses of strangers—of people stacked into the sky in lonely apartments, each one hiding secrets.
Happiness is harder to take, and yet equally attentive to the suffering of characters who see themselves outside the mainstream—geeks, if you will, whose self-images are formed by the conviction that the more people know about them, the less people will like them.
Arthur and William are working harder, perhaps, than anyone else in their school—for jobs that, we are told, they have only a 0.00005 percent chance of winning.
“Do you ever ask yourself how I get by on $268 a month and keep this house and feed these children? Do you ever ask yourself that question?” Yes, frankly, we do.
But another question is how she finds such determination and hope that by the end of the film, miraculously, she has completed her education as a nursing assistant. Hoop Dreams contains more actual information about life as it is lived in poor black city neighborhoods than any other film I have ever seen.
It is as clear as day that the only reason Arthur Agee and William Gates are offered scholarships to St. Joseph’s in the first place is because they are gifted basketball players.
They are hired as athletes as surely as if they were free agents in pro ball; suburban high schools do not often send scouts to the inner city to find future scientists or teachers.
And when he has to drop out of the school because his parents have both lost their jobs, there is no sponsor for him. Instead, there’s a telling scene where the school refuses to release his transcripts until the parents have paid their share of his tuition.
The morality here is clear: St. Joseph’s wanted Arthur, recruited him, and would have found tuition funds for him if he had played up to expectations.
When he did not, the school held the boy’s future as hostage for a debt his parents clearly would never have contracted if the school’s recruiters had not come scouting grade school playgrounds for the boy. No wonder St. Joseph’s feels uncomfortable. Its behavio...
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Like all coaches, he believes athletics are a great deal more important than they really are, and there is a moment when he leaves a decision to Gates that Gates is clearly not well prepared to make. But it isn’t Pingatore but the whole system that is brought into question: What does it say about the values involved, when the pro sports machine reaches right down to eighth-grade playgrounds?
For both, there are reversals of fortune—life seems bleak, and then is redeemed by hope and even sometimes triumph. I was caught up in their destinies as I rarely am in a fiction thriller, because real life can be a cliffhanger, too.
He spends a lot of time adjusting his glasses or resting his fingers on his temples, as if to enhance his tunnel vision. He never meets the eye of the camera, or anyone else. Even when a casino security guard is firmly leading his fiancée away from his table, he hardly looks up to notice that she is there, or to say a word in her defense.
It allows the audience to share in the delicious sensation of getting even.
Roger & Me does have a message to deliver—a message about corporate newspeak and the ways in which profits really are more important to big American corporations than the lives of their workers.
A spokesman for GM has attacked this scene as “manipulative.” It certainly is. But Smith’s treacly Christmas ceremony is manipulative, too, and so is the whole corporate doublespeak that justifies his bottom-line heartlessness.
It is about revenge and hatred, about mothers and sons, about loneliness. It suggests that family ties are the most important bonds in the world, and by the end of the film, Clayburgh will discover that Hershey is closer to her “dead” husband than most city-dwellers are to anybody.
