Word: suburbia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...AMERICAN BEAUTY Yes, some of the shots at suburbia are cheap. Yes, Kevin Spacey undergoes an all too familiar mid-life crisis. But Sam Mendes directs with vivifying freshness, and Spacey's wicked performance as the cynical, bedeviled protagonist is hands down the year's best...
...reputation for his ability to exploit his character's internal conflicts in any time or place, be it Jane Austen's England in his 1995 release Sense and Sensibility, or the alienated '70s suburbia of 1997's The Ice Storm. Yet his latest project, Ride With the Devil, based on Daniel Woodrell's novel Woe to Live On, reflects the damage too much praise can have on a director. All that distinguishes Ride with the Devil as anything other than a glorified action flick is a splattering of historical nuances and the occasional flirtation with character complexity...
...laboratory. He gives the boy scissors for hands until he can finish his work but dies before attaching the new hands. The boy lives a lonely life in the castle until he is discovered by an Avon lady (Dianne West), who takes him home to the pastel-colored suburbia below. The boy, dubbed Edward Scissorhands, tries to fit in this retro-'50s environment and falls for a the Avon lady's daugher, a local cheerleader (Winona Ryder). Adhering to the fairy tale style, true happiness is not to be had by an outcast like Edward, and he is soon driven...
...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...
Hata's outward and inward lives are patterned like a trompe l'oeil, one of those tricky designs in which images emerge or recede with changes of perspective. Now a contemporary American suburbia is the focus; now a 1944 Pacific outpost turns the future Bedley Run into background...