I tear up fairly easily during movies. It's embarassing. I don't understand it really. Only that something about what I'm watching by-passes or jumps over whatever walls of cool intellect I usually have erected during my normal, non-movie watching life.
Some recent examples include one of the endings (of the 3 or 4 false ones) to The Return of the King. Merry, Pippin and Sam find out that they're not only saying goodbye to Bilbo and Gandalf and Galadriel but also Frodo — forever. Seriously, I had to gulp down a sob. And that was the second time I'd seen it. In Prague, even, surrounded by what seemed like bemused and restless Czechs.
I even teared up when the normal folks on the El train in Spider-Man 2 reached out their hands to keep an exhausted Spidey from falling after he'd saved them. I'm nuts, right? Maybe it's only during hokey cinematic moments like these I allow myself to be a blubbering sucker; the rest of the time I'm a blunt asshole.
In a totally different vein during a documentary film I saw yesterday I did more than tear up, I blinked and two thin streams of salty fluid trailed down my cheeks. The moment was not during Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, although that film provided some harrowing emotional highs as well; no, it was watching Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, the world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer, in the amazingly effective and convincing The Corporation, admit to having a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus conversion and in a speech to a convention calls himself and fellow CEOs, "plunderers" of the earth. I found it inspiring to hear him argue level-headedly, passionately and eloquently about the necessity of sustainability while making it clear that our current economic system is anything but sustainable. Further, and here I'm paraphrasing: "In the world I want to live in and the world I want to give the children of the future the way I conduct business for profit would be criminal."
Easily as inspiring is the struggle of Bolivian peasants to wrench control of the water of their country — from U. S. corporation Bechtel —redefining it as a human resource and not a commodity. But then, this whole movie is instructive as well as being inventive, coherent and entertaining both as cinema and provocation, even moreso than Moore's film; based on Joel Bakan's book of the same name, The Corporation proves decisively that the documentary form is the most vibrant and vital it's been worldwide in quite some time.
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