 How does the author feel about American Beauty?
Apparently, Lester doesn't realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd know what he has lost. But American Beauty doesn't feel primitive. A merican Beauty is so wittily written and gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something archetypal--maybe even the Great American Movie. That's the theme here, too, and it's extraordinarily potent, at times even heartbreaking. In movies like sex, lies, and videotape (1989), the protagonist has to put away the video camera to "get real"; in American Beauty , it's Ricky Fitts, the damaged stoner videomaker next door, who sees beauty where nonartists see only horror or nothingness.
 It is wittily written and gorgeously directed.
 It is moronic or insane or both.  It is wittily written and gorgeously directed.  It is lustrously hip and aware.  It is an invigorating last of counterculture righteousness.