Just watched "American Beauty".  It's a great movie.  It isn't about
lust, it isn't about sex, it isn't about old men lusting after young
women.  It's about people hurting each other for no good reason.  It's
about beauty; it's about vision; it's about life, and finally it's about
redemption.  It made me squirm, it made me hurt, it made me cry.  It also
made me laugh and dream and hope.  It is a great movie.

The characters were superbly wrought. There were no _bad_ people,
just people.  There were no _good_ people, either.  Just a lot of
basically decent people who are thrashing around in their lives trying
to find something resembling happiness.  Trying to do the right thing,
and sometimes senselessly hurting those who mean the most to them.
It highlighted the broad class of human misery caused by misunderstanding.
Misunderstanding brought about by hearing but not listening; seeing,
but not understanding.  Throughout the entire movie, a single thread
of beauty; witnessing the beauty that surrounds us; the beauty that we
have become jaded to, because it is so common place.  We are steeped in
a world of beauty, but we go through so much of our lives without just
looking at it.  We live in contempt of the beauty that surrounds us,
of the love that is given to us, and the life that we live, because all
these things are familiar.