Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Which Movies Always Get to You?
Here’s a thesis I’ve held for a long time: we tend to use movies as narcotics. Sure, you might take intellectual content away from certain films, but the point is more often to have a synthetic emotional experience. Comedies are a laughter drug. Romantic films are a love drug. Horror movies are a terror drug — an impulse I don’t really understand, but one that sustains a pretty robust market.
Of course, we’ve all seen plenty of efforts that fail to yield the intended effect. Comedies that fall flat. Romances devoid of chemistry. Horror films that elicit more laughter than fear. So how exactly do filmmakers find that emotional pressure point that makes a film resonate? Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Don Steinberg looks at this question in one specific application: how do movies make us cry? The answer depends in large part on who’s watching:
Researchers are applying science to answer questions about movie-induced weeping. Princeton University psychologist Uri Hasson, who coined the term “neurocinematics,” led a 2008 study that used a type of magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity while watching a film. The researchers used “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”—hardly a tearjerker—in their project. Mr. Hasson and his colleagues identified similar brain activity among people watching the same film, and suggested such research might be useful for the movie industry.
In emotion-research labs, one clip that has become standard is the death scene in the 1979 boxing film “The Champ,” a remake of the 1931 movie. A young Ricky Schroder weeps inconsolably over the body of his father Jon Voight, wailing “Wake up, Champ!” Viewers cry, too. The film has been cited in hundreds of scientific papers.
Scholars also have studied why some scenes strike a chord with women and others affect men more. In “Sleepless in Seattle,” Rita Wilson gets misty describing “An Affair to Remember,” while Tom Hanks counters that he cried at the end of “The Dirty Dozen.” Mary Beth Oliver, a Penn State professor who has studied tearjerkers, asked students to propose movie ideas designed to make men cry. “There were a lot of father-son kind of things,” she says. “There were a lot of athletes. There were a lot of war films.”
When asked which films choke them up, many men cite depictions of against-the-odds valor or understated affection, like “Rudy,” “Brian’s Song” and “Saving Private Ryan.” Women name relationship dramas like “Steel Magnolias” or “Beaches” or “When a Man Loves a Woman,” in which Andy Garcia tries to preserve his marriage to an alcoholic Meg Ryan.
Guilty as charged. I can’t think of many scenes that will still get to me after repeated viewings, but one is surely the elderly Private Ryan in the eponymous film (the younger version of whom is played by Matt Damon) standing in the cemetery at Normandy and asking his wife to assure him that he had lived a life worthy of the sacrifice that was made for him:
How about you? Which movies are guaranteed to get you every time?
Published in General
I’ve only watched it twice, so it’s hard to say if it will continue to wreck me, but the end credits of Lone Survivor which shows actual footage of Mike Murphy at his wedding reception as well as real-life pictures of all the SEALs killed, turns me into rubber.
Troy, I also cry like a baby every time I get to that scene in Saving Private Ryan. Of course, it may correlate with the fact that by the time I get there it’s usually around three in the morning.
Lastly, in a tender moment from You Can’t Take It With You, Lionel Barrymore is telling Jean Arthur about her deceased Grandmother:
She laments, “I wish I’d known her. What was she like?”
He nods toward the mirror and says, “Look in there.”
I’ll go further and say I actively avoid romantic “tearjerkers” because I cannot stand them. I’m much more likely to be moved watching sports movies or war movies. They don’t leave you feeling icky and are inspiring rather than depressing. One exception is the little-known (very funny) comedy Nothing in Common with Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason. The scenes showing Gleason’s slow failure as an elderly businessman are hard to watch, and later scenes with his son are touching. No sports, no war, but a very good story all the same. Another in the father/son category is Frequency with Jim Caviezel and Dennis Quaid.
Some others:
Seabiscuit
Henry V
Cinderella Man
Chariots of Fire
I fully expect the upcoming film Unbroken to be a killer.
The Great Santini
1776
A Man For All Seasons
High Noon
Defiance
I know the film has had some detractors here, but the last scenes of 2001 always pack an emotional punch for me. The Strauss really helps.
James Lileks: “Pixar also has a way of opening the spigots; as a Dad, I have a hard time not misting up just thinking about the very last moments of “Monsters Inc.” The song sung by Jesse in “Toy Story 2″ is just brutally sad. “Up” may rip your heart out, but that song puts it in a blender and sets it on puree. ”
“I can’t lose you again! I’m not… strong enough!” — Mr. Incredible, AKA Bob Parr. Counterbalanced, of course, by Brad Bird’s wonderfully over-the-top performance as “E.” Directors taking a role in their own movies is always risky. It paid off that time.
Things that make me cry in movies:
Lifelong lovers being separated (Up, the last episode of John Adams)
Self-sacrifice (Captain America, war movies)
And if I haven’t been taking my depression meds, people getting that big break in training montages where they go from the class failure to the class champion. (Mulan, weirdly enough)
Most definitely “Field of Dreams” but I would also mention “Shadowlands” about C.S. Lewis, his dying wife and stepson. Also, “Brian’sSong”.
I still haven’t seen Cap 2 yet, but I just re-watched the first one and, dang, that was a good movie. The middle hour was a fun-but-forgetable comic book action flick, but the 45 minutes through his transformation and bond-selling and the last five were just fantastic.
I don’t care for the movie all that much, but the opening scene of Brave made me tear up. The way the father goes, in an eyeblink, from doting Dad, spoiling his daughter to fierce killer ready to throw his life away to defend his family gets me every time. He’s a man who knows his watch never, ever, ends; that he can’t say, “I wasn’t ready”.
Gets me every time. I am a total sucker for heroic sacrifice.
There is nothing strange about that. Mulan is one of Disney’s better animated movies (not in the top 5, but probably top 10), and “How Can I Make A Man Out of You” is partially responsible. They get a lot of mileage out of what is, essentially, a pun.
I always liked it because instead of running away for a boy she’s barely met, Mulan is running away and putting herself at risk out of love for her family.
I believe the story is that Bird did the voice as a means of instructing the casting director (or maybe actors) in the vocal quality he was looking for in Edna Mode. They searched and searched for the right actor, then finally realized they had the gold standard in Bird’s interpretation itself, and they talked him into doing it.
Yeah, the scene when Rogers, pre-super-soldier-serum-throws himself on the “live” grenade when the bigger, tougher men run away won me over. The writer really understood heroism- and showed us that Tommy Lee Jones’ character did, too.
The Incredibles is the best James Bond movie ever made, I have argued to my wife. Half-kidding.
No, sounds about right.
Of course, I’m also in the camp that says Galaxy Quest is the third-best Star Trek movie ever made, too.
Hey, Lileks:
The scene in Monsters Inc. that does it for me is when Sully has to leave Boo and he explains that “kitty has to go now”. That Vrouwe and I saw it in the theatre the week after our cat had died does not help.
Yup. Best acting in Shatner’s career. And it’s not like there’s a shortage of material to chose from.
I’ve always felt that The Elephant Man could break my heart pretty much throughout the whole film.
Wrestling Ernest Hemingway. . . kind of a geezer-buddy film in which Richard Harris plays a salty foul-mouthed ex-merchant sailor who attaches himself in his loneliness to Robert Duvall’s retired Cuban barber in a forlorn Florida warehouse town for the old.
An odd friendship develops despite conflicts over how the sailor treats the fastidious barber’s crush, a young waitress played flawlessly by Sandra Bullock, even as the lonesome sailorman tries to put a move on his landlady Shirley Maclaine, but realizes he is, finally, over the hill and cannot . . . do this any more.
Poignant tale of male friendship, aging, lost loves and loneliness, made holy by the connection forged between the unlikeliest of geezer friends. Gets me every time.
So, SO many.
“Millions” by Danny Boyle a far cry, believe me, from “Trainspotting”
“Young Mr. Lincoln” ’nuff said
“A Bug’s Life” because it’s the “Magnificent Seven”, which was “The Seven Samurai”. Who was it that said there were only seven basic fiction plots?
The scene in The Sixth Sense when Haley Joel Osment and his mother are sitting in their car and he relays messages to her from her dead mother, and she finally starts to believe he can communicate with the dead. That scene always gets me. Toni Collete’s acting in that scene is oscar-worthy.
It gets worse! I’ve watched Harold and Maude over a dozen times and Animal House far more than that.
That was a wonderful film even if it did star Tim Robbins. :)
Rocky I and II.
We’ve been focusing on films that move us to tears, generally, but I would like to mention films here that move me to exaltation, joy and a confidence in the classical virtues every time:
Amelie
Casablanca
The Seven Samurai
Henry V (Branagh or Olivier)
The Maltese Falcon (riveting every single time)
Cocteau’ s Beauty and the Beast
The scene in Dr. Zhivago near the end when Zhivago’s on the bus and sees Lara walking by, and has a heart attack before he can reach her.
Hey, Tim Robbins was also in Top Gun. And both he and his equally objectionable wife were in Bull Durham. It’s the Wagner effect: don’t judge the art by the artist. (Did I just compare Tim Robbins to Wagner? Yikes.)
Two scenes in movies get to me for different reasons. In Saving Private Ryan there is a scene where an American soldier is fighting for his life in a room against a German soldier. Another American soldier is outside the door too paralyzed with fear to intervene while his comrade is killed. The German soldier walks out and looks at the cringing American soldier with utter contempt. To me this scene captures the essential question that every man asks himself; would I be brave enough to save my friend? In my opinion, this scene is Spielberg’s greatest work.
The other movie scene that moves me is the climax Field Of Dreams. Yes it is maudlin and transparently manipulative but it gets to me anyway.
I wonder about that, too. It’s easy for someone who’s never been in a life-and-death situation to brag that they’d be like Rambo. But unless you’ve been in a terrifying situation, you just don’t know how you will react.
I join everyone in nominating Field of Dreams and Saving Private Ryan (and damn you EJ Hill for quoting the closing lines from Field of Dreams – I’m tearing up at work!). But I think it’s true that as one gets older, one finds oneself crying at more movies. I don’t think it has to do with reduced testosterone levels; I think it’s more that there are more things to remember with regret or with nostalgia as one enters the “twilight” of life. I found myself tearing up at the end of Roman Holiday the other night. And, not to change the thread, but I also find myself tearing up at certain passages in classical music – and not ones that should necessarily invoke such a response (for me, one guaranteed passage is the conclusion of Sibelius’s 5th Symphony – no idea why).