Well Orbeez, let's have a little discussion about movies that have had serious emotional reactions from you, understandable or otherwise.
I'm generally a pretty emotionally literate guy, I'd like to think. I feel a lot and I make an effort to communicate those feelings, not always effectively, but for the most part they're not something I shy away from. I'm cool with crying, it serves its purpose and I've lived through plenty of things worth crying about.
HOWEVER - I just don't get it with fiction. I connect to characters, narratives resonate with me, I cheer and gasp and feel that little tingle when something great comes together for a hero I love in a powerful moment, I laugh when funny man fall down, but crying at fiction always escaped me. I thought it was kinda weird, to be honest. I couldn't understand bawling at an actor pretending to die because I knew it was fake in a way that was somehow different from me being excited when that same actor pretended they were experiencing something good for the first time.
Whale Rider got me pretty close. I saw it when I was 16 and confined to bed in an uncomfortable back brace after a surgery, which maybe caused my "negative" emotions to be heightened, and the climax made my eyes well up a bit. Not enough for tears to fall, but it definitely touched me in a new way. I haven't seen it since, no idea if it's even as good as I remember, but for a long time this was the film I considered to be "the closest I'd ever come."
Lady Bird is a film I talked a little about my connection to back on t2. This film hit me like a sack of lead, I saw so so much of my younger self in the title character, in particular her relationship with her mother and the feelings of being loved out of familial obligation but not really being liked. This film got me to reconnect with my own mum, it inspired me to finally get back into therapy after 3 years of avoiding it due to a diagnosis that was hitherto too scary to tackle head-on - I mean it literally changed and possibly saved my life. I certainly cried later the same day, after upheaving my entire existence. But NOT while watching.
Then one year after I saw Lady Bird, I had moved out of where I was living back to my home town and was living on the floor of an unfurnished studio apartment with my abusive ex and no internet. So we spent a lot of time being very old school and watching actual DVDs we bought for pennies from a shop down the road. One of these films was Minority Report. It's fun, silly, I've seen it before, seemed like an easy watch to take my mind off of everything else that was happening. And then came a scene where Tom Cruise has the pre-cog woman at his ex-wife's house. Future-SWAT bust in and drag Tom Cruise away. The pre-cog, who was snatched from her family as a defenceless child, who has never been in the outside world, who relies on Tom Cruise (her guardian and carer) to survive and achieve even the most basic of tasks, is distraught, having lost the only person she knew and the only person interested in protecting her. And this scene, that I had seen before, in a silly CGI action film, made me fucking weep. That's what it took for me to understand it I guess, just had to be miserable in the exact same way as a psychic orphan in a Spielberg flick at the exact same time as she was.
Now you talk about crying and/or films or I'll think really hard about doing a crime on you and get arrested for it.
I'm generally a pretty emotionally literate guy, I'd like to think. I feel a lot and I make an effort to communicate those feelings, not always effectively, but for the most part they're not something I shy away from. I'm cool with crying, it serves its purpose and I've lived through plenty of things worth crying about.
HOWEVER - I just don't get it with fiction. I connect to characters, narratives resonate with me, I cheer and gasp and feel that little tingle when something great comes together for a hero I love in a powerful moment, I laugh when funny man fall down, but crying at fiction always escaped me. I thought it was kinda weird, to be honest. I couldn't understand bawling at an actor pretending to die because I knew it was fake in a way that was somehow different from me being excited when that same actor pretended they were experiencing something good for the first time.
Whale Rider got me pretty close. I saw it when I was 16 and confined to bed in an uncomfortable back brace after a surgery, which maybe caused my "negative" emotions to be heightened, and the climax made my eyes well up a bit. Not enough for tears to fall, but it definitely touched me in a new way. I haven't seen it since, no idea if it's even as good as I remember, but for a long time this was the film I considered to be "the closest I'd ever come."
Lady Bird is a film I talked a little about my connection to back on t2. This film hit me like a sack of lead, I saw so so much of my younger self in the title character, in particular her relationship with her mother and the feelings of being loved out of familial obligation but not really being liked. This film got me to reconnect with my own mum, it inspired me to finally get back into therapy after 3 years of avoiding it due to a diagnosis that was hitherto too scary to tackle head-on - I mean it literally changed and possibly saved my life. I certainly cried later the same day, after upheaving my entire existence. But NOT while watching.
Then one year after I saw Lady Bird, I had moved out of where I was living back to my home town and was living on the floor of an unfurnished studio apartment with my abusive ex and no internet. So we spent a lot of time being very old school and watching actual DVDs we bought for pennies from a shop down the road. One of these films was Minority Report. It's fun, silly, I've seen it before, seemed like an easy watch to take my mind off of everything else that was happening. And then came a scene where Tom Cruise has the pre-cog woman at his ex-wife's house. Future-SWAT bust in and drag Tom Cruise away. The pre-cog, who was snatched from her family as a defenceless child, who has never been in the outside world, who relies on Tom Cruise (her guardian and carer) to survive and achieve even the most basic of tasks, is distraught, having lost the only person she knew and the only person interested in protecting her. And this scene, that I had seen before, in a silly CGI action film, made me fucking weep. That's what it took for me to understand it I guess, just had to be miserable in the exact same way as a psychic orphan in a Spielberg flick at the exact same time as she was.
Now you talk about crying and/or films or I'll think really hard about doing a crime on you and get arrested for it.
12 x
~Bless Our Orb And Its Heart So Savage~