I was a a sophomore or junior in high school when I had the lunchtime conversation that has stuck with me ever since. I called a friend a pussy for crying at the end of Field Of Dreams, and now I am cursed to become a tad bit teary at the very intimation that a movie I am watching will have a sad (or happy) ending. To that point in my life, when Mike told me that Kevin Costner playing catch with the guy who played his father made him cry, I had never, ever cried during a film. Not even during All Dogs Go To Heaven, or Bambi. Never. And why should I cry? It’s a fucking movie — it’s fake! I called Mike a pussy like you wouldn’t believe. Since that day, everything I watch…TV shows or full-length motion pictures, I have to consciously remind myself that if I allow myself to cry at any point during the experience I will be a huge fucking hypocrite.
I think this calls for a list, no?
10. “The Shining” – I don’t mean the Stanley Kubrick film, I mean the Mick Garris, made-for-TV film from 1997 starring Steven Weber as Jack Torrance and Rebecca De Mornay as Wendy, and some little douche as Danny. If it seems somewhat retarded that I may have gotten misty-eyed when Jack dies in the boiler explosion, that’s because it is. I don’t know if it was the six hours I had to devote to watching “The Shining” (no italics, it was technically a TV show), the painstakingly un-artistic cinematography, or that blink-and-you’ll-miss-it look that Steven Weber gets in his eye right before the boiler explodes (you know the one, recognition/remorse/hopelessness), but I actually had to look away and gather myself before watching the movie’s epilogue.
09. Terminator 2 – What’s more embarrassing than my elementary school obsession with T2 — a movie I’d never even seen — is that it still brings me to the brink of tears whenever I watch Arnold Schwarzenegger being lowered into the molten metal. Throughout my adolescence I always dreamed that somebody would make a worthy film to round out the trilogy. Then I had my dream shattered by the asshole who directed Breakdown and U-571, who made a fucking terrible Terminator movie. Except for the last five minutes, of course, which almost brought me to tears. Watching John Connor answer the amateur radio operator’s calls, foreshadowing the leadership role we’ve known he was destined for for the last twenty years was an awesome way to end the movie. Almost coaxed a tear out of my eye, too! Other than that it fucking sucked!
08. JFK – Kevin Costner’s courtroom speeches at the end of the movie are fucking epic, man. “Authority forgets a dying king…do not forget your dying king.” His character knows that he is fighting a battle that cannot be won, so he implores a jury of his peers to remind their children what happened so that they can continue the search for truth that he alone undertook. He looks at his own son in the crowd and tells him to stay physically fit and eat healthy so that on the day when the CIA’s secret files on the assassination are released, he can go to the Library Of Congress and request them. There’s a lot of emotion in that courtroom, and you’d better believe some of it trickled out of the television screen and almost down my cheeks. But not quite. Because I’m a man, and men don’t cry over movies.
07. Dances With Wolves – Leave it to a movie about a Civil War hero joining an Indian tribe at a time when the US Army was killing and displacing Indian tribes in unfathomable numbers to tug at a man’s heartstrings. There’s that whole side plot with the wolf, which is basically a “man’s best friend” story that ends in death, there’s the love story, and plenty of depressing dialog that foreshadows the removal and forced assimilation that would soon alter the history of America’s Indigenous people. Imagine being the guy that has to tell his new friends that the white men will continue to invade their land in “numbers like the stars”, killing whoever gets in their way and removing the entire population in order to continue their westward expansion. I think the dead wolf is the saddest part. I don’t care when people in movies are killed, for the most part. I don’t think I cried during this movie, but I felt the first stirring of my emotions that would inevitably lead to tears if I wasn’t such a master at stopping myself from becoming emotional.
06. Schindler’s List – I only saw half of the movie, and I can’t say I cried at any point during the first hundred minutes, but that probably would have changed had I not been sick the next day at school when they were showing us the film. It earns a spot on this list because it’s definitely a sad movie, but whether or not that one moment would have arisen when I’d have to grab hold of my pussy of a heart and tell it not to let me cry…I might never know…
05. American History X – Holy shit was I not expecting that ending for the entirety of the film. I remember the first time I watched it, I had come home from school and my sister was crying in our living room, and I asked what the hell her problem was, to which she responded, American History X. I asked if it was good, and she immediately rewound and restarted the movie so that I could see it. Without giving anything away, it’s the first movie on this list that actually elicited a teardrop or two from my usually ironclad tear ducts.
04. John Q – I remember sitting in the movie theater with my then-girlfriend watching this two-hour emotional roller coaster, and she was bawling her eyes out along with all the other women in the room, then Denzel delivered that line about how he was going to kill himself so his son could have his heart, and I swear to God, everybody in the theater groaned. All of us, at the same moment. In that instant I knew I was in for a rough patch of psychological confrontation as I would be forced to endure a heartbreaking climax. On top of that, right before Denzel was going to shoot himself, he asked for a moment alone with his son. That was when the remaining 5% of the movie audience that wasn’t already crying started crying. I think I might have let slip a tear or two, but I don’t remember exactly whether or not I was able to contain it. We’ll say I cried two tears. But that was all.
03. Pan’s Labyrinth – Even though the movie opens with a harbinger of things to come, it’s still really gut-wrenching to watch the final scene of the film unfold. Two things that struck me while watching this film in the theater with Sam and Lindsey were the number of parents who had brought small children with them figuring that “fairy tale” was a ubiquitous term (only to find it was a brutally violent story), and how close I came to shedding a tear as the film hurtled towards its ending. The second time I watched it was last summer with Ilya, Nicci, Sari, and Phoebe, and…I don’t know if it was the pot we smoked first or what, but that time I actually had to look away and start telling myself jokes to keep myself from shedding a tear.
02. Field Of Dreams – The movie that caused me to create this list. I must have watched Field Of Dreams twenty times growing up, and I never once saw it as anything other than a cool, ghost-centric film about baseball. Then I had that talk with my friend Mike in high school, and suddenly everything changed for me. The next time I watched it (which must have been three or four years after the conversation), I found myself drawn to the whole father/son subplots and, naturally, the end of the movie got me all choked up. Thanks a lot, Mike — wherever you are — you stole one of my favorite movies and turned me into a sentimental fag.
01. Life As A House – Do not see this movie. Seriously. I saw it with my girlfriend at the time, and — I shit you not — she started crying during the preview for the movie I Am Sam and did not stop crying until long after the credits rolled more than two hours later. I should have known what I was getting into, the preview doesn’t pull any punches: A man diagnosed with terminal cancer tries to build a relationship with his misanthropic son. You know he dies at the end, the hundred and fifteen minutes leading up to the death are just a mind-fuck. I didn’t cry in the movie theater when I saw it (I was too busy trying to tell my girlfriend to shut up and deal with it), but I wound up watching it one night after college (why, I don’t know) and I wept like a baby at the end. Saddest movie ever.
Burl Ives – A Little Bitty Tear – (buy this album)
Frank Zappa – Go Cry On Somebody Else’s Shoulder – (buy this album)
Flipper – Nothing – (buy this album)
Spiritualized – Stop Your Crying [Live] – (buy this album)
More Dogs – Never Let Them Catch You Crying – (buy this album)
