American Beauty (Sam Mendes 1999)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about American Beauty (1999) is not (to my surprise) watching it through a low-level but persistent hangover and half-closed eyes which enable you to pretend you are drifting off to sleep rather than watching the film, nor is it Sam Mendes’s cunning bait-and-switch, where the film starts off being less terrible than you have spent the last decade and a half assuming it is but then becomes far more terrible than the darkest nightmares about it which have plagued you for the last decade and a half, no, the best thing about American Beauty is that it is now in my past (I don’t have to finally bring myself to watch it, because I have done that now, unlike Revolutionary Road (2008), the other Sam Mendes movie I have to get through today for work reasons…