I Swear I Wasn't Crying

I got my NetFlix account in February of 2009 and like a kid in a candy store I proceeded to fill my queue with the films I'd been sorry to have missed in the past few years.  Not all of them were knock-outs, but I remember those first few weeks very fondly as I was extremely excited to see each and every film that arrived.  Until the tenth film, The Namesake, arrived even my less than stellar entries were good.

My first Netflix film was Everything Is Illuminated and it started a trend that I wasn't anticipating, namely that I began to seek out films I thought might be tear jerkers.  I was a bit down, possibly depressed, due to the fact that I had just moved into a new living situation after my second divorce.  A friend that I cherished had died in a most tragic way exactly one year prior and at this juncture I was completely unable to cry and boy howdy did I need too.  So after watching Everything Is Illuminated and feeling that near miss of weeping it gifted me I set out, more or less consciously, to get films that might, maybe, make me cry.

Not everything I rented was designed to bring tears, mind you, it was just something in the back of my head. I powered through The Fountain for the first time and while I loved it and it has become one of my favorite films, it didn't bring about the weeping.  Once was another one that was a fantastic film but didn't even get me close.  Clearly love lost wasn't the ticket for me.

A couple of months into my NetFlix kick I saw The Fall and that, for me, was a game changer.  Tarsem was a director I knew only from The Cell, which I had enjoyed for it's visuals but found the story to be fairly uninspiring.  With The Fall I felt like Tarsem had found a story that paired perfectly with his strong visual sense and created something astoundingly beautiful and moving.  It didn't work either and to skip ahead in the story, no film succeeded in making me cry. Several films, like The Fall, caused a few tears to drip drip drip down my cheeks but I wanted a full on boohoo that I never achieved from watching movies, regardless of their quality.

The point of this, though is that I find that emotional response is key to my enjoyment of a film.  Some people really just want to watch shit getting blown up and maybe some badass kung-fu, but at the end of the day that amounts to little more than flashing lights to me.  I'm not saying that all films with badass kung-fu and shit being blown up are devoid of emotion, far from it, but when you boil down a movie to the bare spectacle and forget the rest of it, I find my interest fading.  For an example of this I'd ask you to watch the trailer for Battle: Los Angeles and then go watch the movie.  The trailer hints at maybe a human story, some sadness and maybe a little bit of depth; I had fairly high hopes for it.  What we got was, instead a bland two hour gun fight that did little, if anything, to stir the soul.

I'm not going to start talking about how we need this sort of input because of our miserable modern lives or any of that stupid shit, I'll leave that for people slightly more pompous than myself.  I will say, though that emotional connection is key to enjoying art.  It doesn't mean that it has to be designed to move you to tears, that just happens to be what I enjoy, but any emotional response other than general hatred of the wasted time taken by the garbage you just watched is fairly important.

Anyway, this is an important criteria for me and the absence of that emotional connection is largest reason why I'll react negatively to a film.  The inclusion of emotion will also turn me on to a film that might otherwise be poorly received.  Sunshine was a good example of this, seeing as how it lost it's way there toward the end with the space slasher stuff that showed up out of no where, but the final shots of the movie, Capa meeting the Sun and touching the face of creation/destruction/God/whatever and standing there as time goes wonky and "everything becomes unquantifiable" is so moving and awe inspiring that it brings it all back around to the promises made at the beginning of the film.  It's one of the most moving endings I've seen in recent years and largely why it rocketed up to a small obsession for a while.

Anyway, I could talk forever about each and every moment that meant something to me in each and every film that's ever touched me, the point though is that they did.  For me it's rarely, if ever, about the spectacle and a few guilty pleasures aside, it's almost always about that feeling I get from the events, relationships, and struggles of the humans portrayed within.