| Author | Message | ||
     Mbfg (Mbfg) Username: Mbfg Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 62.255.207.128 |
Just a (long) thought and a personal question, especially for the big, tough, steel-jawed blokes on this message board. We're back into the crying season, "The Voice", "Britain’s Got Something Resembling Talent" and so on. How many times will we see floods of anguished tears and howls of "I've let everyone down! My dreams are in tatters this is all I’ve ever lived for!" etc. etc. My immediate response is get yourself some likeminded musicians, form a band, then slog your way to the top by playing pubs where everyone is watching Sky sports and grotty clubs with three people in the audience and build up a following and work hard for what you want. But, of course, God forbid that these folk should ever have to sully themselves by playing anywhere other than a TV studio in front of millions and the O2. Anyway, sportsmen do it, “Big Brother” contestants do it, people on scummy game shows do it, everyone seems to collapse into floods of tears when mummy won’t buy them the toy they want. I’m not given to such frequent displays of emotion. I was brought up to pull myself together and act like a man and so forth. Good and bad advice I must admit, but keeping your emotions to yourself can have its upside. However, the other Saturday I lokked through YouTube for the aria "One Beautiful Day" from "Madam Butterfly" as part of my research for Des Lewis’s "Classical Music Horror " anthology (Please let me get into that book, it’s all I’ve lived for, oh God, I will let so many people down if I don’t....) and suddenly, from the first note I was crushed into a weeping wreck. It was the sheer aching, tortured beauty of the piece. I have no idea where this sudden outburst of raw emotion came but come it did, unstoppable. So you tough guys (and gals) out there, anyone else experienced art that has broken you down like that? (apart from excrutiatingly bad writing of course) Regards Terry | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.23.197 |
Lord, yes! Just a sampling of examples: the final scenes of Make Way for Tomorrow and Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Ordet... the third movement of Beethoven's last quartet, Bach's Ich Habe Genug, the ending of The Cunning Little Vixen (which apparently had the same effect on the composer)... | ||
| Christopher Overend (Chris_overend) Username: Chris_overend Registered: 03-2012 Posted From: 217.33.165.66 |
Visually, I get very moved by Van Gogh's Sunflowers. I don't know why. But he seems to have captured both the fragility and beauty of life in that picture. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
Ya big softies!  No, seriously, it's good to see what moves you men to tears. Keeping to the song title theme of the thread title, I'd say it's different for girls. Particularly since I reached a certain age and my hormones started doing odd things, I could blub for England at the Olympics. A sad song. A sad story. A sad film. Upsetting news reports. I can even cry over cartoons and some adverts! Anyway, I guess it's better out than in. Beats me how you men can bottle up your emotions the way some of you do. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.176.101.61 |
We just go on a killing spree every few months, Caroline... | ||
| Christopher Overend (Chris_overend) Username: Chris_overend Registered: 03-2012 Posted From: 217.33.165.66 |
Sshh! You'll be telling her golfing holidays are really drinking sessions next! | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
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| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.18.174.156 |
I'll let you into a big secret, Caroline. Men are the real softies and the real sufferers when it comes to emotion. We have been strait-jacketed by society's mores to hide it but hide it we cannot. Women are a hell of a lot harder and tougher, emotionally, than we could ever hope to be. | ||
| Pete_a (Pete_a) Username: Pete_a Registered: 07-2011 Posted From: 108.231.165.81 |
Oh, I'm a huge cry-baby and damn proud of it. It's what I go to art for, be it literary, pictorial, or musical, be it highbrow or lowbrow. I'm significantly less interested in being made to think than I am in being made to feel. That said, it's usually the transcendent rather than the tragic that moves me to actual tears. | ||
| Simon Bestwick (Simon_b) Username: Simon_b Registered: 10-2008 Posted From: 86.24.166.73 |
The ending of Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire. Still one of my favourite films, but I very rarely watch it because it always packs such an emotional punch. The opening scene of A Matter Of Life and Death. The ending of Thomas H. Cook's Instruments of Night. There are many more, for I too am a complete soft-arse when you come down to it.  | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.25.43.252 |
Live performance of Beethoven's fifth. Awesome. End of Schindler's List (yeah, yeah). The King's Speech (it has personal meaning). 'Chasse Neige' by Liszt. An episode of The Street about a drug dealer. Etc. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.156.210.82 |
The Road - book and film. Any book or film to do with father/son relationships (for personal reasons). | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.145.211.19 |
Actually there's been a few times in 11.22.63 that i've welled us a bit. Filmwise the end of donnie darko - original not director's cut - makes me cry a bit. The combination of that song and then the understated conversation between gretchen and the boy on the bike - when he waves to donnie's mum i'm gone every time. I'd also in with zed's choice of the road. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 194.66.23.11 |
Welled up. Damned predictive text. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
Sidney Lumet's film Running On Empty. Recently, watching it on DVD (after seeing it three times on TV over the years), I had to stop halfway through and take a break to calm down. That and – appropriately enough – The Crying Game are my two favourite films, but the latter is much less painful. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
"Filmwise the end of donnie darko - original not director's cut - makes me cry a bit. The combination of that song and then the understated conversation between gretchen and the boy on the bike - when he waves to donnie's mum i'm gone every time." Oh yes, me too. They were playing "Mad World" in a shop I went in to the other day and I just had to walk out before I started blubing all over the place. Zed - father/son relationships? Yes, or in my case, parent/daughter relationships. Another song which seems to be a favourite in shops is Mike and the Mechanics "In the Living Years". Reduces me to tears every time. | ||
| Carolinec (Carolinec) Username: Carolinec Registered: 06-2009 Posted From: 92.232.199.129 |
By the way, perhaps the above explains why I prefer shopping online nowadays!  | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.18.174.156 |
'Once Upon A Time In America' makes me fill up like no other film. The scenes with Robert De Niro revisiting all his old haunts as an old man, backed by that marvellous Morricone score, get me every time. Also the scene at the railway station, the morning after the rape, in which he realises what he has done gets more devastating with every viewing. It's my favourite film and one I deliberately ration myself to watching no more than once a decade. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games, 1952), at the time I saw it, reduced me to a blubbering mess. I won't go back to see if the film still has that effect on me. I also agree with Joel, Running On Empty is a difficult film indeed to see without some crying. I was crying too during Donnie Darko, but for wholly different reasons.  | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.18.174.156 |
I love that film too, Craig. The final scene at the railway station with the little girl desperately searching the crowd for a familiar face. Wonderful movie! Only seen it the once as well many years ago on late night TV and it floored me emotionally. | ||
| John Forth (John) Username: John Registered: 05-2008 Posted From: 82.24.1.217 |
The oddest things. American Civil War dramas - GLORY on the big screen, and Michael Shaara's novel THE KILLER ANGELS - tend to set me off. I think it's something to do with the whole brother vs brother thing. A reading of Ray Bradbury's THE FOG HORN choked me up a few months back, too. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
I must admit, I was tearing up during TOY STORY 3, especially at the lyrical final fifteen minutes or so.... **********!MAJOR SPOILER ALERT!*********** (that means you, Stevie) Perhaps it's just the recent afterglow (it takes time to really judge these things), but I think at this moment, this film is destined to go down as profoundly moving... perhaps one of the most so, ever made. The final 10 minutes or so - after all the action and adventure has subsided - are just heartbreaking, on so many levels, involving so many threads. But one of the central elements of the story from the time the film starts, is already achingly sad: that this group of toys, all but forgotten by their beloved Andy, would willingly, patiently, and never begrudgingly, just "go up to the attic," to wait for some future day in some distant year that may or may never come, when Andy will come back for them again... is almost too much to bear. It's as sad as knowing the truth about Woody, when he's selected to go to college by Andy: he's not the lucky one, as the others think, because there can be no place for him there, either. (But then there is no place for toys in the world of adults, why Woody never could go there, regardless.) But in the film's inspired close, when Andy takes these toys that are, once again as before, resigned to their lonely fate... and instead donates them to the neighbor girl, Penelope, that the film achieves a sublime height it almost seems impossible to have reached: During the time-honored "curtain call," where each character is essentially taking his/her bow to the audience, as Andy describes each in loving terms to the little girl... the filmmakers oh-so-wisely (and, I suppose, necessarily) kept them as inanimate toys - and this, for me, was the moment the tears came forth, because it wasn't sad at all, but so utterly joyous: The filmmakers never show us the conscious toys we've grown to know, reaching that psychic transition; where at first they think they're going to the attic, but then realize in actuality, that they really have had the love of Andy all along, and as well, found a kind of "heaven on Earth": what they're thinking, their simple wonder and joy, is left purely for the audience to imagine... which is of course key to the whole series, the power of imagination... and watching these inanimate, floppy, motionless animals for those few moments, is an indescribable film experience I can't remember often having. As well, there's a whole other level being offered by the filmmakers of TOY STORY 3 here, too, which no one's commented on anywhere I've seen: the movie is perhaps pulling a David Lynch, and saying, maybe... just maybe... all of this film, has been an imaginary fantasy in the mind of Andy, on his way to college. (The film's opening scene is, after all, Andy's fantasy - a key itself to the ultimate mystery?). When Andy is driving away from his toys forever, the film has flipped completely: Andy's the one who's going off into the unknown, the lonely places of the world, and an uncertain future... whereas the toys (and take away the "the) cannot know such loneliness or loss, as they will always have their children.... Rarely are movies this good. Or this wrenching. | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.26.153 |
I found it moving too, Craig. The other animated film that had me in copious tears was Grave of the Fireflies. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
I have been meaning to catch up with that one, Ramsey - I frankly plum forgot all about it! Must go seek that one.... | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.35.236.200 |
I enjoyed the sad ending, if you know what I mean, but till then I found the action sort of 'standard'. 2 was the best - it had everything the others had and more. A lot of what's been mentioned here was dealt with it Becky's fate. I don't think Weber is going to like Toy Story films, folks. He's quite determined I think. Funny thing is, I agree with everyone depending on my mood. Because I don't fancy watching the Toy Stories today it makes them - in my mind, and temporarily I'm presuming - less good films. As an aside, I watched Peter Jackson's King Kong on blu ray on the projector the other night and loved it more than I ever have. I liked it very much initially but then sort of fell out of love with it, and Jackson, in quite a big way. But this viewing reassures me it's an excellent film. About Kong; I love all three films. There is just Kong, not a single film, for me. Each adds a layer to his myth, and applies to different parts of our brain; the old one is primal/dreamlike, the seventies one cerebral, this last one emotional. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.35.236.200 |
I found Grave of the Fireflies a bit hard going. It's good, and affecting, but one I think it would be hard to go back to for me, unlike Pinnochio which has dark moments but offers light and hope in the mix. | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
What about Toho Studios' monumental 'King Kong Versus Godzilla' (1962), Tony? One of the happiest (crappiest) memories of my childhood that one! Also don't forget the tear-jerking excellence of 'Son Of Kong' (1933) & 'Mighty Joe Young' (1949). But the original tramples all over any of the (still entertaining) remakes simply because it was devoid of forced sentiment and presented Kong as exactly the terrifying monster a giant rampaging gorilla would be, while the human characters remained convincingly free of illogical sympathy throughout. Kong graphically bites the heads off people and drops innocent non-blonde women from skyscrapers but still we root for the beast... as wronged nature's primal avenger. Both remakes lost sight of this fact, bowing to the commercial pressure of having to show a cuddly, sensitive side to the great ape, which is why neither of them can approach the scalp-prickling power of Cooper & Schoedsack's original. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.35.236.200 |
But in the new one he was only nice to one person. I only realised he was quite scary in this viewing. | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.25.56 |
I'll add Another Year - we only just saw it and found the final scenes very moving. | ||
| Mbfg (Mbfg) Username: Mbfg Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 62.255.207.128 |
Tony I love the 1970s "King Kong", which now has a very piercing emotional charge delivered by the shot of the Twin Towers which the ape mistakes for a landmark back on his island (can't remember the landmark). On that note, I remember seeing "AI" shortly after 9/11 and hearing the audience take a sharp breath during the opening shot as the camera panned over a flood-shattered New York featuring a long-deserted and derelict World Trade Centre. Cheers Terry | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.26.84.199 |
I found the final scene of Another Year quite sinister, Ramsey. There's a superb and disturbing line in an Ayckbourn play in which a perfectly happy family, who will do anything for anybody, are described by one acerbic neighbour as "demons". It's weird, because surely nothing could be further from the truth . . . until you realise what he means. I found the end of Another Year to work similarly, the way the Broadbent family are talking about their travels and the joy they take from life, while their hanger-on, that huge fuck-up, simultaneously experiences misery heaped upon misery. Happiness is commonly a relative perceptual matter, especially in Western societies where we have enough to meet basic needs. And in that regard, truly generous and happy people can - in an habitual 'benchmarking' kind of way - become "demons". | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.25.56 |
Indeed, the very last scene is certainly ambiguous. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.131.34.237 |
I've long thought Leigh's films had a creepy undertone. One, Happy Go Lucky, was even subtly Lovecraftian, I kid you not. I think he's excellent. One of our best directors in that he doesn't pander to American tastes and trends. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.131.34.237 |
And it will never happen, but he'd do a great Ramsey film. | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.18.174.156 |
Agreed, Tony. I put him in the same rarified zone of excellence as Woody Allen and Eric Rohmer. I thought 'Another Year' was his most emotionally powerful film since 'Naked', as I expounded at some length on here at the time. It was also extremely funny. |