American Beauty is a film I never tire of hating; I can fall out of bed and discuss how shitty it is.

Mere praise of the movie is enough to get me going, as I did today at Blogcritics.org:

American Beauty was terrible: a hollow yammering fake of a movie that had nothing to say about life in suburbia, and an extremely snide, smug way of not saying it. It was nothing but a collection of platitudes. It was the kind of movie educated liberals could look at and find confirmation for every muddle-headed notion they ever had about the middle class. It was dishonest, too; when the blonde girl at the end announces she's a virgin I felt like throwing up my hands. At times it was just stupid, such as that wet dream of Kevin Spacey's with the girl in a tub of rose petals -- only art directors have dreams like that. And don't get me started on the performances, especially Annette Bening's, which was a case study in histrionics.