American Beauty in retrospect.
I can think of few other films that struck such awe, and now inspire such vitriol. Unlike other contrived winners, like, say, Crash, whose repugnant qualities are immediately apparent, American Beauty’s badness, its slickness, its insistence on its own profundity, was enough to bamboozle many of us as teenagers. I believe it’s one of the earliest firsthand experiences my generation had with changing our minds about a movie we loved.
