Word: americanizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Ricky represents the filmmaker as foreigner. By using his camera as a tool of estrangement, he reacquaints himself with reality, seeing it in a new way. That is, after all, the job of a filmmaker: to present the audience with a new view of an old world. In American Beauty, Mendes succeeds wonderfully, turning our eyes not only to the hollowness and pains of suburbia but to the underlying beauty we can discover if we look a little closer...
This phenomenon, according to Juliet B. Schor, consumer theorist and author of The Overspent American, illustrates a widely-known fact: paying with credit cards is "a relatively painless type of transaction" which has been shown to increase the amount people purchase...
...embarrass any actor onscreen with him who isn't as dexterous or willing to get their hands dirty. Norton, thank God, will probably never be in a movie like You've Got Mail because his intensity would just liquify all the fluff. He's like the Miranda Richardson of American cinema--too good for 99 percent of it, so we just wait patiently until he finds a role he can sink his teeth into...
...Fight Club starts out funny. The first 30 minutes are overwhelmingly perfect. Like the beginning of American Beauty, the opening sequence whirls you through time, taking you in and out of the narrator's (Norton's) yuppie disillusionment. Poor Edward Norton--his character isn't even given a name. Food good reason, since his identity consists of what furniture to buy, what shoes match his suit, and which dinette set best fits his non-existent personality. In this yuppie's life, IKEA is synonymous with orgasm. Enter Tyler Durden. Brad Pitt takes on the challenging role of this American psycho...
...fall in love with Norton's narrator. We shouldn't see him as the righteous crusader, the man who can do no wrong. Because when we take every punch Norton takes, we lose our sense of detachment. We lose that ironic distance--the distance that makes a movie like American Beauty such a compelling psychological portrait. There's no seeing the forest from the trees here because of Norton's intensity and ability to elicit endless empathy. We're his unconditional ally. But after being pummeled by Fight Club into bloody submission, we're just begging for mercy...