And the lighting was so delicate; and the location manager was a stand-out; the gaffers first-rate; and craft services yummy.
American Beauty was hackneyed, simplistic story-telling and a disgusting attempt to malign middle-American family values.
Filmmaking is an art form.
Do you even have a clue who owns Miramax; who controlled David Selznick; who Preston Sturges's step-father was?
If you're going to even attempt a knowledge of film you should be aware that the entire reason for film's existence in the past century has been for PROPAGANDA. Art has always finished a distant second.
But most of all, you obviously aren't aware of the identity of the grandfather of American Beauty's director, Sam Mendes. Alfred Mendes is a major British socialist/elitist who has written volumes against Bush and is responsible for more than half of the trash on the WEB today about Bush. Google him; it's an education.
In Hollywood, no one is as they seem.
Film 101 didn't do you much good. Maybe you'll have better luck next semester.
All the branches of Establishment PR power function, IMHO, to make myths. Sometimes the myth is reality--Reagan as good guy, proven out in real life--but the myth is built more-or-less independently of reality.A topical example of myth is the "courageous liberal writer" fighting for freedom of speech and freedom of association against viciously repressive Senator McCarthy. In real life the threat posed by the senator was actually to real Communists, many of them now known explicitly to have been actual agents of the Soviet Union.
But the whole PR apparat went into overdrive to build that myth, in which all each part of the apparat scratched the backs of all the other parts. In the resulting popular mythology, all parts of the PR apparat become heroes except for whatever remnant of character here and there (e.g., Ronald Reagan) refused to go along and get along.
The appeal of the myth is so powerful that few have the character to decline its allure.