The movies that make you verklempt

So, I went to see True Grit this weekend with a friend of mine. Quite good and looks beautiful-several scenes could be stills you hang on your walls. The ending had that distinct Coen Brothers melancholy tapering off. And is evidently true to the Charles Portis book which I've been wanting to read.

The movie was therefore by my reckoning kind of sad but my friend had this intense reaction to it. He's kind of really in touch with his emotions in a way that makes me feel that I have a ball of Turtle Wax for a heart in comparison. We went to eat and he said he was choked up about the movie. And yes definitely. He started crying in the restaurant. My food came. I wondered if it was rude to eat. I decided it wasn't.

I didn't have that reaction to this particular film but there are certain films whose mere mention will start to choke me up. I tried to make a list. I feel it is incomplete so if I am so inclined and I don't find searching the blog for it maddening, I will add to it over time.

• What's Eating Gilbert Grape?: that one scene where Johnny Depp introduces his reclusive obese mother (Darlene Cates) to his girlfriend Juliette Lewis and she tells her by way of apologizing for her size, "I wasn't always like this" to which the girlfriend says, "Well, I wasn't always like this." I can't think of a more perfect response. 
• Au Revoir Les Enfants: ok I'm kind of cheating because how can Nazi shit not choke you up? But that final scene where the Priest is being led away from the school along with the Jewish students and teachers he harbored there AND the fact the story is at least partly autobiographical for director Louis Malle. Oh God. Pause for Kleenex. 
• Saving Private Ryan: Heroism, cowardice, sacrifice, Tom Hanks says "Earn this" and dies. 
• Gardens of Stone: the final scene where James Caan tells his girlfriend Angelica Houston he's asked to be deployed to Vietnam and she says, "I know."
• Farenheit 911: I don't care what anyone says about Michael Moore. It hits me in the gut to see that woman overcome with grief on the Washington Mall over the death of her son in the stupid fucking war.
• Philadelphia: A friend of a friend described the scene to me where Tom Hanks shows his Kaposi legions on his chest in court and how that scene made him break down in the theatre (he told me this story when we were at visiting hours at a funeral home which is kind of weird for several reasons including I don't even remember why I was there.) I thought the scene didn't sound that tear-jerking. Then I saw the movie at the dollar theatre. Yes, it is that tear-jerking. And then the freaking Neil Young song they play at the end.

A co-worker and I once decided that the Christmas Claymation special "Nestor the Long-Eared Donkey" sent our whole generation into therapy. If they were still airing it today, I'd probably still cry every year when Nestor's mother died. Although its Christian propaganda nature would probably just cause me to shun it entirely.  You know what Rankin Bass special they unjustly did stop airing is "The Year Without a Santa Claus." Brilliant. I see both it and Nestor are on YouTube. Goddamn it, stop looking at me with those big sad eyes Nestor. I am not watching you.

(Good grief, ABC Family thinks they have to edit Nestor to make it suitable for broadcast? Didn't I see a clip of their show about teen mothers on The Soup where a girl tells her mother that she had amazing sex and that's why her daddy died?)