“Superman…” (from Iron Giant) - I bawled my eyes out and it makes me tear up just thinking about it.
At least I don’t break spoiler boxes, and also manage to properly reply to threads.
Says the guy who replied with a television show into a thread about movies. :smack:
I have never cried while watching a movie or TV show, or while reading a book, unless they were nonfiction or a documentary.
Telling people this often results in comments like the one I’ve quoted. Apparently to some people, the idea that I just don’t get that emotionally invested in fiction is in itself a ridiculous emotional reaction.
(I’m actually a very sentimental person, and I cry while watching news or reading the paper all the time. But I just don’t get deeply affected by fiction, although I enjoy it well enough.)
Very true. Anyone who didn’t at least well up should be evaluated by a professional for sociopathic tendencies.
I’m lucky in that my wife and I share (for the most part) the same taste in movies, I’m not afraid of having a genuine emotional reaction to movies, and she doesn’t believe that tears are “unmanly”. The first film we saw together was The Elephant Man and we were both in tears. That film, like Up, could serve as a Voight-Kampf empathy test and could readily identify the Replicants (or Vulcans) in the audience. Hell, I’m getting misty-eyed reading the
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(The Elephant Man (1980) - Quotes - IMDb).
One time where I had an emotional reaction that nobody else in the audience shared was the film Crumb. I saw it in the theater with my wife and some friends. I’m a huge Crumb fan and loved the film. But in the end credits, when I discovered…
…that Charles had killed himself…
…it turned me into an emotional wreck. Maybe it was because I had come to know Charles Crumb from Robert’s comics, how beaten down he had been by bullies at school, his decent into insanity and how he had retreated from life.
While watching the movie Signs in the theater, each time I got startled/scared by the action on-screen, I yelped, jumped in my seat, and KICKED the seat in front of me, scaring the piss out of the girl sitting there. I mean, the damn thing was so Hitchcockian, what with the not-seeing of the aliens and all, and it was just freaking me out. So embarrassing. I kept apologizing to the poor girl and laughing at myself, and then BAM! I’d get scared and do it again. Oy.
Very different reaction here. I was watching Harrod Blank’s Wild Wheels (an artsy movie about decorated cars) in a theatre, and there were two segments about very religious men: one who had mounted an enormous cross in the bed of his pickup truck, and another who had plastered his car with hundreds of Bible quotes and pictures of Jesus. The movie is lighthearted in tone, and the audience was amused, but I was suddenly enraged, and actually walked out – the first time I have ever done that. My artist girlfriend was baffled, and I tried to explain, more or less as follows.
I am an atheist, but I generally respect the beliefs of others, particularly those whose faith has led to a life of seeking and understanding, and service (or at least benevolence) to others. But I am distressed by the way religious feeling sometimes causes people to pour out their substance to propagate what is, in my view, a lie. These men spent hours every day, for years, impoverishing themselves, preaching “the word” – trying to spread belief and nothing more. The waste of their lives was a tragedy, the greatest tragedy of Western civilization writ small, and these people were LAUGHING!
I don’t think my girlfriend really got it, and it doesn’t really feel ridiculous even now. Butr I definitely overreacted.
Hope a short qualifies . . .
I cannot bear to watch Wallace & Gromit’s The Wrong Pants anymore. I just can’t bear to see how Wallace thoughtlessly betrays his best friend for the evil penguin. Poor Gromit sleeping outside, all alone, finally forced to leave home . . . I know it’s supposed to be funny, but it’s really upsetting to me. An imaginary clay dog!
In A.I. I cried like a baby when the little android is begging his mother not to get rid of him and at the end. It was manipulative emotional porn, but it worked.
Well, lessee…I, too, thought there were velociraptors around every corner and felt the need to scan for them after seeing Jurassic Park, I wept during that opening montage in Up, and can guarantee a tearful reaction to Homeward Bound.
Now, going in another direction–I was so disturbed by Silence of the Lambs I started shaking. I wasn’t frightened or “BOO!” scared, I was seriously disturbed by the entire thing. What particularly distressed me was how Hannibal–who I saw as simply eloquent evil–was portrayed as a hero of sorts. That seemed so…wrong. When he said he “was meeting a friend for dinner” and the audience cheered, I was horrified–are they saying this man deserves to be eaten by this monster?
Yeah, I know. I was 18 at the time, for what it’s worth. Good flick, but affected me more than anything else I’ve ever seen. I had occasional SOTL-inspired nightmares for years after.
I almost threw up when I saw Star Wars ep: 2 because the writing and acting were atrocious.
Cliffhanger did make me throw up. Maybe something to do with vertigo or something.
At the end of Dancer In The Dark I cried like a baby for about 20 minutes, just alone in my bedroom, sitting on the bed, bawling my eyes out.
After seeing Revolutionary Road for the second time I was a bit disturbed and needed to get my mind off the film, and I was a bit messed up by wrecked sleeping patterns, so I went on a huge cleaning spree… at 4am on a Monday morning.
I cried at the end of Head On although nothing particularly tearjerking happens, I think it just hit a little bit close to home.
I’d say those three reactions are justified at a push but still a bit ridiculous.
I cried during The Dark Knight - damn you Michael Caine!
I lost it a few times during Ladyhawke… and at the end of Little Miss Sunshine, though I really don’t know why.
Many of these aren’t ridiculous at all. One was pathological, but I won’t say which.
This may belong in the latter category. My only defenses are- I’m easily vulnerable to emotional manipulation & even moreso when I was a teen…
crying when Strawberry Fields is raised from the dead by Sgt Pepper in the BeeGees/Peter Frampton movie of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The travesty of the whole thing was a reasonable reason to cry. Sadness or joy over something that actually happens in the story was not.
Not as ridiculous but still kinda silly- in WARLOCK II:THE ARMAGEDDON when a modern Druid has to kill & raise his son & the minister’s daughter kills herself so she can be raised, so they can both be Mystical Warriors against the Warlock, that chokes me up also.
I’ll get you next time, Gadget! slams fist onto the table
Gee, let me think…
I am kind of notorious for ridiculous emotional reactions to movies, so this is not an easy one for me to answer. I have been known to burst into tears during completely innocuous moments in film and television and I can’t really explain it myself.
The most memorable one I can think of is when my Aunt took me to see Beethoven. I was nine. I’m not really a major animal lover, but for some reason I became hysterical when I thought the dog was going to get hurt. I was a smart kid, I knew we were watching a family film and that the dog was really going to be okay, but I nevertheless felt this impending sense of dread. I kept compulsively asking her if he was going to be all right. I was crying so loud that 18 years later when I bring it up she recalls, ‘‘God, I was so embarrassed.’’
There’s a not-well-known movie called Losing Isiah with Jessica Lange and Halle Berry, about a white woman who adopts a black child from her drug-addicted mother, then has to give the kid back. There’s a lot of stuff in the movie about whether children should be placed with their “own race” (something I vehemently disagree with). I have an adopted black sister, and it hit home very very hard, but even so my reaction was out of proportion to the movie. I wept all the way through, and didn’t stop bawling for a couple of hours afterwards.
During The Dark Knight, I jumped out of my seat and clapped when they revealed who was driving the truck with Harvey Dent in the back.