American Beauty: There's still something about that bag

It's easy to give American Beauty shit for how cringe-inducing it is, and plenty have for its 20th anniversary, with critics and writers falling over themselves to make sure everyone know they thought it was problematic before anybody else.

But even though it hasn't aged well, especially with Kevin Spacey's involvement and his whining privilege and deeply creepy pedophilia, I still find that bit with bag in the wind genuinely moving.

It's a naive way of looking at the world, and plastic bags have never been anybody's idea of cosmic beauty, but the idea that something so simple can symbolise that we don't live in an chaotic universe, unloved and ignored by all of existence, that there is something more to life than that, and that there is genuine beauty in the mundane.

It's an emotion big enough to break Wes Bentley's heart, and at times when I've felt alone in this vast and cold world, it's a sentiment I can't live without.