I’m struggling to see the computer monitor today. My eyes feel like they’re full of sand. Why, you ask? Well, last night my boys and husband went to the video store armed with a rental coupon, and they came back with Marley and Me.
Now I love dog movies. We have a one-year-old Border collie named Speed (above) who is a sweet, energetic, brilliant little dog-boy. He loves to play with the kids, keeps my husband on his toes and takes long de-stressing walks with me. He’s healthy and happy and radiates his joy to the world. But I lost my 14 year-old Border collie, Mick (below), only a year ago, and a movie like Marley and Me cuts way too close to the bone for any hope of me watching with dry eyes.
So I cried last night. Not just a little, mind you. I sobbed, the kind that wrack your whole body. And this morning, my eyes look like I’m about to die of some horrible allergy.
It’s funny. I used to judge how good a movie was by how much it made me cry. Old Yeller comes to mind, another dog movie. In school we used to watch this old movie called The Nine Lives of Tomasina, about a cat who dies and comes back to life. I could never hold it together for that movie, even though I risked looking stupid in front of my friends. But lately, with the exception of Bridge to Terabithia, I haven’t bawled at a movie. Cried, yes. Tears stream down my face at touching commercials, for crying out loud. My name is Ann, and I am, most definitely, a crier.
Of course, in my youth, books were always worse. I remember sobbing at the end of The Hobbit, when one of my favorite characters met his demise. Jane Eyre had me in tears throughout. And The Black Stallion’s Ghost left me a blubbering pre-teen mess, among many, many others novels of all kinds. More recently, tears have been more scarce, as have books that have sucked me in so completely (the price of being a writer who analyzes every word). But I cried while reading Tess Gerritsen’s The Sinner, and last summer Marcus Sakey’s At the City’s Edge had me weeping twice. But the biggest cry inducer has to be romance. I can’t even name the number of romance novels that left me in tears. Good tears, of course.
So how about you? Are you a crier? Which movies get you? How about books? Do you like tear inducing entertainment, or do you avoid it at all costs?
Old Yeller is the same way with me and I remember 9 Lives of Thomasina (boy, is that telling our age!), there's only a few that make me cry today, Steel Magnolia's and Terms of Endearment come to mind. That's probably why I watch a lot of comedy's.
ReplyDeleteChristy by Catherine Marshall made me cry, I read that in 6th grade and more recently Brenda Novak's Dead Silence.....I cried 3 different times because of the tragedy that the main character went thru in early life.
I don't watch movies, but a good book will often get the tears flowing.
ReplyDelete