AMERICAN BEAUTY: "Roses" - with Aislinn and Tobin Addington

Explicit content warning

06/27/22 • 88 min

2 Listeners

1999: The Podcast

American Beauty was 1999's Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards. And it was an unstoppable behemoth when it came to end of year accolades, cleaning up as well at the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs, SAG, and more. Critics practically tripped over themselves digging deep into their vocabularies to properly articulate the film's genius.

And yet, 23 year later, the consensus seems to be that the film is...bad.

So what happened (beyond the dark revelations of Kevin Spacey's long history of terrible, abusive behavior and sexual assault)? And is there anything left to make American Beauty a film that can still be appreciated? Is anything about American Beauty still beautiful?

This week, John and Joey are joined by the Addington siblings, Aislinn and Tobin, co-hosts of CageClub's very own The Contenders podcast.

They discuss their journeys from loving and then really, really hating Sam Mendes and Alan Ball's strange, misguided, ambitious, and hopelessly outdated failure.

And yet, 23 year later, the consensus seems to be that the film is...bad.

This week, John and Joey are joined by the Addington siblings, Aislinn and Tobin, co-hosts of CageClub's very own The Contenders podcast.

They discuss their journeys from loving and then really, really hating Sam Mendes and Alan Ball's strange, misguided, ambitious, and hopelessly outdated failure.

Previous Episode

THE SIXTH SENSE: "Dead People" - with Books in the Freezer host Stephanie Gagnon

The Sixth Sense was 1999's most unexpected phenomenon. And it really was a phenomenon.

Filmed on a $40 million budget, the film made a respectable $26 million its opening weekend, but great reviews and word of mouth propelled it to a $293.5 million domestic box office gross and a worldwide gross of just shy of $673 million.

It was the only movie to stay #1 for 5 weeks aside from The Phantom Menace, and, most impressively, it made at least $20 million all five weekends it was #1, making more than $29 million its final weekend.

Not bad for a decidedly not-action movie centered around Bruce Willis, a year after Armageddon and then at the early stages of the waning days of his star power, and a relatively obscure child actor named Haley Joel Osment, and written and directed by an almost entirely unknown filmmaker named M. Night Shyamalan.

So much of The Sixth Sense rests on its legendary plot twist, so already knowing how it ends, we invited Stephanie Gagnon, host of the horror book podcast Books in the Freezer, to join us in taking another look at the movie to see if it still holds up as a haunted horror movie.

Check out Books in the Freezer here.

Next Episode

FIGHT CLUB: "Soap" - with Amanda Moore

1 Recommendations

Fight Club may well have been 1999's most important box office bomb. With a budget of $65 million, the film barely made back half that at the domestic box office, and barely cleared $100 million worldwide.

Yet it remains one of the cult classics of the 1990s, and people often remember it being a lot more successful than it was. A lot of that has to do with the format that would define film in the pre-streaming era of the late 90s and early 00s: DVD.

Its themes of toxic masculinity, cultural decay, overbearing capitalism, fascism, and how all those things are expressed in violence seem particularly relevant today.

And so this week, John and Joey invited Amanda Moore (aka Frank) - who spent a year infiltrating the world of the alt-right and neo-Nazis and has spent her time since exposing them and writing about her experience - to talk about her love of the film and how well it reflects what is happening beneath the surface of American culture today.

You can find Amanda on Twitter @noturtlesoup17 and on TikTok at noturtlesoup17