If you're a manly man, and I mean a real MANLY man like yours truly, then you don't cry at the movies. Oh, it's okay for a manly man to cry in some situations, such as when your favorite football team is the St. Louis Rams or when your arm is broken but you're too proud to tag out of the wrestling match. Or if you're eating a really, really hot chicken wing (I know those aren't real tears). I'd also accept a tear or two when you run our of beer during a Dirty Harry marathon. But crying during sad movies? Your beard was not invented to collect tears, son.
There is one exception to this rule. Manly Men are allowed one flier - each Man has one movie that hits them in their weak spot. (Not THAT weak spot.) Once in a lifetime there'll be a movie that just strikes a certain chord with a man. When it does, he'll be blubbering like a baby. Because these movies are usually Braveheart or one of the Godfather films, you can cry during them without losing any of your Man Cred.
This all stems from Film School Rejects' Mr. Hand posting a list of movies that made him cry. I'm not one to cast judgment, but, dude: Titanic? Moulin Rouge? You don't just admit that stuff.
So what movie makes your humble blogger, the manly (strong, handsome, not-afraid-to-die, etc) Zombie cry?
Let's get a big-ol' John Bonham drum roll, please.
Zombie's tearjerker movie is:
Transformers: The Movie (1986)
If you've seen it, you know the scene I'm talking about. The whole movie has a body count roughly equal to your average John Woo/Chow Yun Fat flick, but the one death that's the granddaddy of them all: the death of brave, badass Autobot leader, Optimus Prime. The Optimus Prime of the 1980s wasn't the watered-down version we got in the (pretty good) 2007 movie - the cartoon Prime was all kick-ass all the time.
I'm including a clip, in case you're uninitiated or just need a refresher course in awesome. I'm going to set it up, like they do on Late Night. In the movie, Autobot City is just getting their shit ruined in a surprise attack by the Decepticons. Optimus Prime arrives on the scene and just kills the hell out of about fifty of the bad guys without breaking a robo-sweat. Then he goes to stomp out Megatron (the Transformer equivalent of Shooter McGavin) and right before he's about to strike the killing blow, rookie dumbass Hot Rod gets in the way and Megatron gets in a nasty, unfair hit our hero just can't recover from.
What you're about to see here, folks, is the saddest, most gripping death scene ever filmed. Just watch and understand:
What the hell, really?? How is it okay for a kid to see that? A kid that probably went to the movie wearing an Optimus Prime t-shirt and holding his action figure? And when his lights go out and he turns all gray at the end?? What the hell?
I remember spending lots of afternoons crumpled into a fetal position on the couch, a crushed child mourning the loss of his robot hero. Some children first learned about death and mourning from Mr. Hooper on Sesame Street; I learned it from Optimus, Ironhide, Wheeljack and crew. That last shot of Daniel Witwicky crying before it fades to black? I was Daniel Witwicky. We all were Daniel Witwicky.
So now I'm throwing this all out to you on the World Wide Web: what movies made you tear up? Is it A Better Tomorrow? Maybe Rocky IV? Or possibly Terminator 2? This question goes out to all of the Manly Men and the lovely ladies in our audience.
5 comments:
Nice post Zombie. I've never cried during a movie because I obey all man laws. Man law #238: No crying during a movie, ever. Crying = 1 or more tears slipping from your eyes. Tearing up is permitted, but at one movie per three months. If you exceed that you forfeit your manhood for one year.
Now that we've established all that, I teared up like a bitch during a scene in a Korean war movie called Tai Guk Gi. The English title is Brotherhood of War. In the scene our two main characters, two South Korean brothers, are forced aboard a train that is going off to the northern battlegrounds of the Korean war. They cry through the windows of the moving train at their mute mother as she tries to keep up with them. The mute mother can't scream, yet she manages to display a perfect sorrow through her face and what little noise she manages to make. Her sons, although grown men, wail for their mother like little children. Good movie. You should check it out.
Zombie, I'm actually going to go with "A better tomorrow" - seeing chow limp out of that parking garage... soul-crushing, it's the only word for it.
sorry you had to live through the death of prime again to write that post - but we all make sacrifices for our art.
I'm not ashamed to admit it: Monster's Inc. gets me every time.
I can't remember actually crying during a movie in a very long time - though when I was 4 or 5, I remember being scared to tears during a particularly gruesome scene in one of the Conan movies (now, I'd laugh at it).
For some reason I can't explain, my eyes always wet during parent-child reunions, such as in MAN ON FIRE. Gets me good. Don't know why. I certainly have never experienced anything like that... what with not having children and all.
The last ten minutes of Big Fish always reduce me to a sobbing, gelatinous mess. Regardless of whether or not I've watched the whole movie up until that point.
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