BLINDSPOTS:
Movie Reviews for Visually Impaired People

"American Beauty," rated R and with a running time of just about two hours is a movie that challenges us to question our definition of beauty.

Lester, played by Kevin Spacey, has lived a ho hum life for twenty years. He knows he's boring and believes he is hated by his wife and daughter, but when his company asks him to quietly leave the business, well, he decides to shake up his life. Caroline, portrayed by Annette Bening, is Lester's wife. She keeps a picture perfect home and garden with picture perfect roses and is always working at looking good and making money. She's upset when she hears that Lester's been fired, but slowly but surely becomes undone when Lester begins to make wild changes in his life.

From the visually impaired point of view. "American Beauty" started out with a very nice narrative at the beginning but went downhill pretty quickly afterwards. The scenes had a good bit of dialogue and the voices were clearly distinguishable. This was good. However, the movie had an increasing number of visual scenes with just silence or some music. These visual scenes called for constant descriptions from my sighted assistant. The same music did accompany similar fantasy scenes that Lester was having, so I did have an idea of what was going on, but I still needed descriptions with specific information.

There were many scenes where the next door neighbor was filming. This was confusing at first and caused me to ask lots of questions. For your information he is a slightly strange neighbor with an innocent love for art and beauty.

The story's interesting if not pathetic and the characters are quite memorable, but I still can only give this picture a 4. It was difficult to follow. Might be better to rent this one in a few months and enjoy it as a video in your own livingroom.


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