American Beauty is an absolute masterpiece and triumph of a film. In its release in 1999 it was nominated for eight Oscars and won five including Best Actor (Kevin Spacey), Best Director (Sam Mendes) and Best Picture. The director just had this way of taking a, what may seem, boring plot and creating a drama where I could not look away. The movie is about a man, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), who is going through a mid-life crisis. All the people he knows basically push him around, from his wife, to his boss, to his daughter. When he meets one of his daughter’s friends he is attracted to her and that pretty much leads to him saying screw everything I’m gonna do whatever I want. It’s just a very intriguing movie. Something about the casting of the characters and the personalities of them made me feel this great connection to every character. Mendes successfully portrays the average man’s inner conflicts and shows that you don’t need a super-hero to overcome one’s problems. This especially held true for the main character, Lester Burnham. I think that anyone who sees this movie will have a connection with at least one of the diverse characters in the film. Also just the way the whole plot was strung together; the sequence of events, the dreams, the narration, the motifs and everything else was just brilliant. This movie will make you realize a lot of things about people in general and you might, as I did, just sit down and think about it for a few minutes after the ending. See it, I hope it blows your mind as it blew mine.