Word: spacey
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...prickly Thora Birch-- still 17, no matter what you read--who made the most impression on me. Sweatered in the heat, she told me about making the transition from child actor (in movies like Patriot Games, Hocus Pocus and Alaska) to adult roles, and the joys of teaching Kevin Spacey a thing or two about this gig called acting...
Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) hates his job and the cubicle to which it confines him. He has also come to despise his tense and frigid wife Carolyn (Annette Bening), to mourn the sullen silence that has descended between him and his teenage daughter Jane (Thora Birch), to loathe the sterile suburbia where they all try to make emotional ends meet. Lester masturbates a lot, especially when he gets to thinking about his daughter's friend Angela (Mena Suvari), the American Beauty of the title...
...wait. Sometimes there is salvation in parentheses, especially when they surround the name of Kevin Spacey, giving a truly great performance. He's cynical. He's funny. He's angry. He's rueful. He's a mean truth teller and sometimes a curiously tender one. Best of all, he makes the transitions between these and a dozen other emotions heedlessly, without warning or visible preparation. You never know where he's coming from, or where he's going to end up in a scene. Yet boldly challenging our sympathies, he somehow wins them because, to borrow a phrase...
...appearance of Hickey, a gregarious salesman who never fails to perk them up. But Hickey arrives with a teetotaler's resolve and a revivalist's mission--to get them to cast off their phony dreams. In this career-making role (it helped make Jason Robards Jr. a star), Kevin Spacey gives the performance of his life. Prowling the stage in a half-crouch, his voice oozing with snake-oil self-confidence, using silences as cagily as the torrent of words, he is funny, charismatic and ultimately shattering...
...complex musical tampering: a bass line from one original song is altered for various other songs whose remaining components are then manipulated and layered on top of other tracks. The results: a melodic game of musical chairs with incestuous rhythms scattered across the album's 27 tracks. Ranging from spacey ambient musings to Bowie-damaged indie pop, it all manages to work. Each listen reveals a new depth to the construction. The less focused interludes last just long enough to make you appreciate the hooks when they finally do snag hold. The Olivia Tremor Control, like their more normal friends...