8 Films that Seemed Good When We Were Young and Impressionable

I happened upon Requiem for a Dream at the local video store, and I'm pretty sure I was filled with tears by the end. It was so damn sad the way heroin fucked up all the characters lives, and the editing seemed so awesome. The score by the Kronos Quartet really tugged my heart strings.…

By Dan Hoffman

Updated 14 years ago, April 13, 2011

American Beauty

(1999) dir. Sam Mendes

The Academy Award winner American Beauty is generally well-liked by many and obviously received stellar reviews upon its release. But the fact is, it hasn’t aged very well. The floating bag sequence seems a little ridiculous, and as I saw more and more films, I realized that suburban malaise and strife is a common theme that goes back as far as the technicolor melodramas of Douglas Sirk from the ’50s. Not to mention that compared to Todd Solondz’s films Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) and especially Happiness (1998), American Beauty seems tame by comparison. It’s not that Mendes’ film is bad – it’s just that it’s not as great as we thought it was.