American Beauty Alternative Cinema?

"American Beauty" I don't believe can be classified as "alternative cinema." It is, in fact, like Alan Ball's "Six Feet Under" still quite mainstream if a bit off-kilter and quite creative. It was released and marketed with heavy promotional advertising -- they knew they had a box office winner. Alternative cinema winning an Oscar? That likely will happen. My prediction for the Oscar this year: "Alexander."

American Beauty
But then you have to look at the fact that take away all the money and the big actors and then you would class american beauty as alternative cinema. it covers issues that as a society we are not used to. Masturbating in the shower for example, it was not something that was done in a joking way more of a serious issue so it is something that will shock us as an audeince more. American Beauty is not a film that lays it all infront of you, as an audience you need to look much further and really concentrate on what is happening.
Surely these are aspects of Alternative Cinema?

American Beauty
But then you have to look at the fact that take away all the money and the big actors and then you would class american beauty as alternative cinema. it covers issues that as a society we are not used to. Masturbating in the shower for example, it was not something that was done in a joking way more of a serious issue so it is something that will shock us as an audeince more. American Beauty is not a film that lays it all infront of you, as an audience you need to look much further and really concentrate on what is happening.
Surely these are aspects of Alternative Cinema?

Going back to "Carnal Knowledge" and "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice" mainstream film after the demise of the studio system has explored sexual morays pretty thoroughly and even though Alan Ball wrote a script that was his own sardonic, irreverant view of American life it is not all that original. The dialogue is incredibly well written as it is in "Six Feet Under" (and by multiple writers other than Ball) and the story had a new twist on looking at homosexuality among other themes. Alternative Cinema has to by definition be other than a commercial Hollywood product, an independent film. Although Miramax finances movies, for instance, are perhaps efforts which the big studios like Paramount or Universal would reject does not necessarily make it "alternative cinema."

Here's one definition:

http://www.hi-beam.net/fl-defs.html

Sam Mendes who directed the movie from the Alan Ball screenplay has a good track record, "Road to Perdition" being his last offering and he is going to bring Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd" to the screen (although there is a video of the stage production, in fact two). I don't think you can take the name actors out of the mix as that belies the film being alternative cinema. All these classifications are, of course, subjective. There are several sites on the Internet if one searches Google and none of the films come close to being anything like "American Beauty."