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July 13, 2008October 3, 2021

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

I wasn’t online much this week, so I didn’t see a whole lot of weirdness. But:

:: Someone made a trombone out of glass. It’s a really cool video to watch, but the background music is lousy. (via)

:: I suppose that in the current housing market, actually putting effort into selling the house is probably useless, huh? Hence a blog of nothing but bad photos from real estate listings. Wow. (also via)

:: I was looking for weirdness at Warren Ellis’s site, and while it isn’t weird, I sure do like this picture.

OK, that’s all.

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July 10, 2008October 3, 2021

Something for Thursday

This is one of the most achingly beautiful settings of a traditional song I have ever heard. It is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Shenandoah”. It was used in the end credits of the movie Nixon, but I first heard this setting my freshman year of college when our choir did it.

Try and find something wrong with the world after listening to that.

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July 9, 2008October 3, 2021

Ewwwwww! (teevee edition)

I was going to do a lot of comment on the various EW lists that they’ve got circulating, but I think I’ll do this one last post and call it a day on that subject. (Unless anyone’s really dying to hear what I think of, say, the “New Classic Death Scenes” or something similar.) I’m just doing the teevee list now; I won’t be doing the music list because I own exactly five of the albums on that list. (For fun and kicks, try and guess which ones!)

Anyhow, here are my thoughts on the teevee list. (For comparison, check out SamuraiFrog. His teevee tastes diverge sharply from mine on a number of instances, but on others we’re in total sync. Which is what you’d expect, I guess.) I won’t be bolding anything; just the list plus comment.

1. The Simpsons

Yeah, it’s a great show. That’s granted. No, I’m not going to state what everybody already knows – that its greatest years are now far in the past (imagine, this show is going to reach a point next year where two full Presidencies will have elapsed since its strongest episodes aired), but it’s still pretty funny and of generally high enough quality to warrant continued watching.

2 The Sopranos

I never saw a single episode. I’ve long noted that my interest in mob stories is practically non-existent. Whenever I say this to people, the invariable response is “But it’s so good!” Well, I’m sure it is. I’m still not interested.

3 Seinfeld

I’m a huge fan of Seinfeld. I even liked the much-maligned ninth season, and I didn’t think the finale sucked that badly (although it wasn’t nearly as funny as it should have been, with that premise). One great moment after another, and lines that I still quote and have recognized when I do so.

4 The X-Files

I loved this show too. Did it go on too long? Certainly, but I don’t think its fall from grace happened nearly as early as everybody else seems to think. I loved the show’s production values, the character chemistry between Mulder and Scully, and all the little touches therein. I loved the impenetrable mytharc too, and the Monsters-of-the-week.

5 Sex and the City

(Never saw a single episode, not once. Although for obvious reasons there’s one episode I might have liked, had I seen it.

6 Survivor

I hate this show. I’ve only watched two seasons of it all the way through, because a couple of years back The Daughter decided that she liked watching the games on the beach, so we ended up watching it. (That was when Rupert was on, and then a season or two later when a guy named Terry went on this big streak of winning every challenge for weeks on end, only to fall short of the million bucks in the finale, losing to some dopey little jerkoff named Aras. I haven’t watched the show since.) I didn’t like how the show basically rewards people who are complete jerks for being able to be the biggest, sneakiest of jerks. The skill set that makes people contenders to win Survivor also makes them complete asses in real life; why root for an ass to win a million bucks?

7 The Cosby Show

I watched a handful of episodes, found it amusing enough, but was never a big fan. Although, I do recall one hilarious bit that had Cosby describing the most horrifyingly inept Little League game in history, “a game which was broken open on a grand-slam bunt”.

8 Lost

Meh. Lots of people wandering around a mysterious island, acting all mysterious and stuff. I’m not a big fan of JJ Abrams.

9 Friends

One of my favorite shows of all time, and I’m not apologizing for that, either. It should have ended a year or two earlier, but I think it’s actually become underrated. At its best it was as funny as anything I can remember on teevee.

10 Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This is continually high on my “get the DVDs and watch it one of these days” list. I saw a few episodes here and there and I was always impressed, but by the time the show came on my radar screen it had already been around for a few years and I just didn’t want to invest the time to get up to speed on a show that had a dense mythology behind it. But I really do want to watch the thing.

11 The Wire Never seen it; not a lot of interest, really.

12 South Park

I was a big fan for a while but then I just fell away from it. I didn’t stop liking it, I just gravitated away. I’m a little surprised it’s still around, though.

13 Freaks and Geeks

I really need to see this.

14 The Daily Show

I love it when I see it, which isn’t often.

15 The Oprah Winfrey Show

Meh. I’ve never understood how Oprah’s become the 800-lb gorilla of, well, everything.

16 Arrested Development

I always missed it during its brief stay on the networks because its time slot always coincided with either something else or The Daughter’s bed time. I’d like to see what the fuss was about.

17 The Office (U.K. Version)

I’ve seen a few episodes and liked it.

18 American Idol

OK, I’m still a fan. And I liked Taylor Hicks. And that clicking sound you hear is my readers now clicking the “Back” button on their browsers. (This season of AI was pretty disappointing, though.)

19 ER

When it was good, it was great. It had seven or so really terrific seasons, then a few years where it fell on hard times, and then it just started to downright stink. Two major events on the show made me start to lean away from it: the death of Dr. Romano (as horrifyingly bad a moment as I’ve ever seen on a scripted teevee show, from a writing standpoint), and the resolution of the Reese Benton custody battle. But I hung in there a few more seasons anyway before I finally admitted that the show was a shell of its former self, with old interesting characters replaced by boring new ones; increasing reliance on the stunt-casting of older notable actors as “terminally ill geezers of the month” (always in time to provide epiphanies to whichever cast regular was in most need of an epiphany at that moment); lazy shit like the “Let’s send some other character for a life-changing stint in Africa!”; and so on. Ensemble shows are hard to keep going over the course of many years, even if, as in the case of ER, they’re designed to allow for the rotation in of new ensemble members to replace old ones. New characters have proven interesting (Dr. Pratt, for example), but at times the cast has become so bloated that newer characters simply blended together, and in any case, no ER cast has ever had the same mix of chemistry that the original group did. ER is apparently ending this coming season, but it should have ended five or six years ago.

20 Beverly Hills, 90210

Never watched it.

21 Roseanne

I hated this show. I never once found it funny, and to this day, when I catch it in reruns, I still fail to laugh.

22 The Real World

I watched three seasons: LA (season two), San Francisco (season three, the one with Pedro and Puck), and London. Then I pretty much stopped. I liked the show well enough, but I finally got irritated with that little doofus from the London cast, the playwright kid, who spent all of his five months in London sleeping. Dude, you’re in London. WTF?! (The other American guy, the one who was befuddled because he couldn’t find Ranch dressing in London, was pretty amusing for a while.)

23 The West Wing

It was my favorite show for a while. The first two seasons and a chunk of the third were brilliant, but then Aaron Sorkin started to peter out. Season Five had a couple of strong episodes and a lot of “Meh” episodes, but the last two years seemed to figure things out again.

24 Star Trek: The Next Generation

Ahhh, I loved me some TNG! We always watched it in college, with the new episodes on Sunday nights and re-runs the rest of the time. Quite a bit of it doesn’t hold up quite as well nowadays, but quite a lot of it holds up damn well indeed.

25 Miami Vice

I watched an episode or two. I didn’t get it.

26 Chappelle’s Show

Huh? Don’t know it.

27 Law & Order

Not a big fan. I tend to see an episode a year, and I’m good.

28 The Larry Sanders Show

Heard good things, but never saw it.

29 The Shield

Ditto.

30 Late Show With David Letterman

I love Letterman, although I don’t watch him often anymore at all because it’s hard for me to stay up that late. I’ve always liked his off-kilter sense of humor. True, he was probably funnier ten years ago than he is now, but so’s anybody.

31 The Civil War

I never watched this, mainly because I’ve never been terribly interested in the Civil War. I know that it’s a period of history that commands immense fascination for many people in America, but it leaves me cold. (Civil War enthusiasm also seems to run hand-in-hand with Confederacy fetishism, which is always something that confuses me since the Confederacy was, by definition, treasonous.)

32 Gilmore Girls

I never watched it, but I’ve been told repeatedly that it’s very well written, so I want to check it out one of these years.

33 My So-Called Life

I adored this show, even as ambivalent as I was about my own high school experience. MSCL was brilliant work, but even though it’s better remembered now for its single, nineteen-episode season, I tend to view it as a dry-run for the deeply brilliant Once and Again that would come along six years later.

34 24

I saw seasons Two and Three, and I haven’t much bothered since then. I admire the show’s production values, but from what I hear the last couple of years the writing has suffered. I also find the Jack Bauer fetishization that you see in the commentary of the political Right in this country astonishingly creepy. “Jack Bauer has to torture people!” goes the refrain. But I’d like to see a show that details what everyday life in Jack Bauer’s America would be like after the country has witnessed nuclear terrorism, a President declining to run for a second term after a scandal, his successor dying aboard Air Force One, his successor being removed from office after criminal activity, the assassination of that first President after he’s left office, and the rise to power of that first President’s own brother. I think the country would be really messed up if that stuff all happened.

35 CSI

I used to be a big fan, but kind of fell by the wayside the last couple of years. The original show’s the best, but the one I watch faithfully now is CSI: Miami, mainly because I like looking at Emily Procter and Eva LaRue, and because I derive enormous entertainment pleasure from David Caruso’s overacting and posing. It also featured my single favorite “Oh, bulls***!” moment in CSI crime investigations: in one episode, the killer had taken a photo with his finger partially covering the lens; they were able to resolve that smudge into a readable fingerprint. Yeah, right. This last season ended beautifully, though: since the iconic image of the show is Horatio Caine putting on his sunglasses, they did a cliffhanger where Horatio is shot on an airport runway, and as he’s lying on the ground bleeding profusely, the camera pulls back away from him…and through the broken lens of his sunglasses!

36 thirtysomething

Never saw it, but want to, seeing as how it’s by the same creative team as My So-Called Life and Once and Again.

38 Beavis and Butt-head

I loved it and found it terribly funny. Thing is, there really are kids like this in our schools. Kids who aren’t really dangerous, who don’t pose much of a threat to anyone, but who also just aren’t ever going to amount to anything much at all and who don’t really care about that either. Their antics can be hilarious, as this show demonstrated. My favorite episode had the boys participating in their school’s fundraising candy sale; they have to sell candy bars for two bucks each, but they don’t want to do the legwork to sell these things, so their elegant solution is to sell candy bars back and forth to one another for the same two dollars. That cracks me up just to think about it.

39 Six Feet Under
40 Mr. Show

I don’t know either of these.

41 Frasier

I loved this show for a long time, too. I think it went on too long, but I don’t think it slid into badness the way so many shows that outlive themselves do; it just kind of settled into a bit of routine for its last two or three seasons where it was dependably amusing but never as good as in its earlier years. Still, it provided many, many wonderful moments in the time it had, and I do think it went out on a very strong note, with Frasier’s romance with Laura Linney and one of the best series finales I’ve ever seen.

42 L.A. Law

It was a really good show for a few years, and then it started to bog down, much in the same way that ER did: cast bloat, interesting characters swapped for not-interesting ones, increasingly bizarre storylines, and one of the most staggeringly awful moments in teevee history (the death of Rosalind Shays, of course). I hung with it until the end, but man, was that last season bad.

43 Late Night With Conan O’Brien

I see it so rarely that it doesn’t even make sense to discuss it. I have a DVD of highlights from it around somewhere; I should watch that one of these days.

44 Jeopardy!

Yeah. Ken Jennings? I coulda taken him. I know this because on at least twenty of the seventy-eight nights (or however many there were), from the non-studio lit and no-audience and no-cameras friendly confines of my living room, I whipped his ass!

45 Curb Your Enthusiasm

Never saw it.

46 Homicide: Life on the Street

I watched a couple of episodes and was uniformly underwhelmed. It felt like BaltimorePDBlue to me.

47 30 Rock

I’m not sure if it’s been around enough to be a “new classic”, but it’s one of my favorites of shows on now. Not only do I think Tina Fey is one of the cutest women on the planet, but I think it speaks greatly of her that this, her big moment on teevee as a creative force, cheerfully makes her the butt of many, if not most, of the jokes. (Contrast with the same season’s Studio 60, in which Aaron Sorkin created a monument to Aaron Sorkin.) I actually wrote a bit of rant here first, having misread the title as 3rd Rock from the Sun, which I didn’t like very much.

48 Ally McBeal

Bleeccchhhh! I hated this show, as I tend to seriously dislike anything David E. Kelley does. I don’t like his writing.

49 Twin Peaks
50 Baywatch
51. Melrose Place

Didn’t watch any of these.

52. Felicity

More “Meh” from the pen of JJ Abrams.

53. Will & Grace

Funny for a season or two. After that, just shrill and repetitive.

54. Moonlighting

I never understood the fuss over this show.

55. Pee-wee’s Playhouse

Or this one.

56. Desperate Housewives

I actually liked the first season. Everything since was dull, and I stopped watching entirely last year.

57. The Amazing Race

My current favorite reality show! My only wish is that they’d put in a new rule that when you get to a locale, you are forbidden to get locals to either drive you to your destination, ride with you to show you the way, or drive ahead of you so you can follow them. Had this been the case, there’s no way the loathsome Dustin-Kandace duo would have ever been near-winners twice on the show.

58. The Tonight Show With Jay Leno

I like Letterman better. I also found it appalling that The Tonight Show was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s forum of choice for announcing his gubernatorial run.

59. Battlestar Galactica

I’ve got to see this. I was highly impressed with the pilot TV movie.

60. Xena: Warrior Princess

Snore.

61. The Office

Also not sure if it’s a classic already, but I sure like it. But how much of that is Jenna Fischer’s presence? Hmmmm.

62. House

Like it. New classic? Dunno, but I like it.

63. Mystery Science Theater 3000

Loved it, once I figured out what the concept was. Like everybody, I spent a year channel-surfing past MST3K and wondering why these crappy movies were always on with these shadows in front.

64. The Osbournes

Never watched it.

65. Family Guy

I hate this show. The only times it’s made me laugh were in moments involving the evil-plotting baby; everything else is stupid Simpsons retread crap.

66. Grey’s Anatomy

Now here we have the opposite problem with ensemble shows: the ensemble isn’t big enough, which led this past season to some real dramatic constipation on the show. They added two new characters of consequence, but that wasn’t enough since they only replaced another character who’d already left for spin-off heaven. I still think that Grey’s beats the pants off ER right now, but I can see it seriously falling from grace if it doesn’t add some spice next year. They’ve been playing the same storylines for too long now.

67. Planet Earth
68. Jackass
69. The Colbert Report

I’ve never seen these. Colbert’s on too late.

70. Everybody Loves Raymond

Now, it was often a very funny show. It really was. Its characters were quirky and played off each other in fun ways, and the cast had real chemistry which helped. But the show was just a well-done sitcom. Maybe it stands out because it was just about the only traditional sitcom that was being done well (aside from Friends) in the time it was around. When it went off the air (it too had a well-done finale episode), someone on a message board I wrote described it was “the show that changed the sitcom forever”. That could only be uttered by someone who’d never seen any other sitcoms before.

71. Friday Night Lights

Never watched it.

72. NewsRadio

Obviously it wasn’t as good after Phil Hartman’s death. But then, my favorite character was always Stephen Root as the owner of the station. Maura Tierney was also a standout.

73. Oz
74. Wiseguy
75. Project Runway
76. In Living Color

Never watched these.

77. The Golden Girls

Ick. Never liked it.

78. I’ll Fly Away

Saw it occasionally in college. Nice, but forgettable. The cute blonde girl would later do a couple of seasons of ER, which ended when a crazy patient stabbed her to death.

79. The Comeback

Never even heard of this.

80. King of the Hill

I think this show is underrated, or was in its prime. I haven’t seen a new episode in several years.

81. Murphy Brown

Funny for a while, then became boring.

82. The Hills
83. Absolutely Fabulous

Never saw them.

84. Northern Exposure

It took me a while to figure this show out. The Girlfriend (later The Wife) loved it, so I watched it by proxy, but it really took me a season or two to get into it. Then I loved it.

85. The Kids in the Hall
86. Prime Suspect
87. Deadwood

More in the “never watched” category.

88. Malcolm in the Middle

Now this was a funny, funny show in its first few seasons. I fell away from it after a while, but it was a favorite for a while. It had this habit of being mildly amusing for most of an episode, with one truly inspired moment that would make the entire show.

89. SpongeBob SquarePants

Weirdly amusing, in my opinion. I can totally understand why some people hate it.

90. Dawson’s Creek

Crap. Total crap. Kevin Williamson’s writing annoys the hell out of me.

91. Mad Men
92. The Ben Stiller Show
93. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy

Yet more that I never watched.

94. Married…With Children

Meh. Amusing, but not great.

95. Designing Women

Didn’t like it.

96. The Arsenio Hall Show

This was very popular in college; it was always on at that timeslot in the dorm lounges. I don’t remember why.

97. Party of Five

Aside from letting me look at Neve Campbell, I don’t remember much about this show.

98. MacGyver

This was silly, silly fun. Years ago The Girlfriend (later The Wife) and I visited The Future In-Laws at their home, and I discovered that The Future Sister-In-Law was so big a fan of MacGyver that she could, using the satellite dish, watch the show for four consecutive hours on weekday afternoons, on teevee stations from all over the country, and she often did. (BTW: xkcd from the other day. Heh!)

99. The Bachelor

Stupid, stupid, stupid crap, this is. Remember when everybody was in vapors over FOX’s one-off Who Wants to Marry a Multi-millionaire? Well, now The Bachelor is in its eighth year or something like that. WTF?

100. Saved by the Bell

Oh, come on. Just because we all watched it because TBS had it on for two hours solid each day during the mid-1990s, when we were all being slackers because it was cool to be slackers and all, and thus because of that we all know who Zack Morris and Kelly Kapowsky are, doesn’t make it a great show. Watch it now, and try telling me it’s not complete crap. I dare you. I double dare you!

So Saved By the Bell is on the list. But not Once and Again or Firefly? NYPD Blue? Scrubs? Millennium? What about cooking shows? Like him or hate him, Emeril Lagasse’s shows put Food Network on the map in large part, and Alton Brown’s show is really good. This list stinks.

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July 7, 2008October 3, 2021

Sentential Links #145

This week’s linkage, certified content-rich:

:: I have a big head, apparently.

:: As the comic book movie genre blossoms into a franchise, it’s important to look back at an oddball flick that made a significant contribution to the body of work that is exploding onto the screen.

:: Ah the Adam West Batman…was there a better show ever? Certainly none have been as silly! In any case here is a short list of some of the me ridiculous gizmos and gadgets featured on the show.

:: I inserted the DVD in the machine, pressed “play,” and settled back to watch it. The first shot is a close-up of a man’s face, a doctor, who tells someone she has advanced ovarian cancer. The next shot is a close-up of the woman he is speaking to, saying “yes?” or “and?” I forget which. I turned off the TV. I realized I actually could not watch the movie. (How do I keep forgetting that Roger Ebert is blogging now?!)

:: And I’m tired of the blogs I come to love going dark, and feeling – irrationally – that somehow it’s my linking to them that killed them. (Heh! Let’s see if it works in reverse!)

:: I walked a few yards past the sign to this table, looked up, and lo and behold, right on cue for their cameo montage segment right out of an Esther Williams movie, were about 18 Orca whales close to the shore. Truth in advertising. First shot outta the box.

:: Must be able to talk and work at the same time. (As a former restaurant manager, let me say, HUZZAH!!!)

All for this week. Tune in next week, to hear the Burglar say….

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July 7, 2008October 3, 2021

Unidentified Earth 45

OK, I think we’re at last caught up with all the still-Unidentified locations. It took a while, and many hints, but UI 40 was finally pegged as the Illinois State Police Station in Des Plaines, IL. What’s significant about this location is that, before the building was made into a police station, it was a high school: specifically, Maine North High School, which was where the movie The Breakfast Club was shot. That’s the exterior of the school where the kids are dropped off for their detentions. The library, however, didn’t exist: it was a set built in that school’s gymnasium. (BTW, my favorite bit of Breakfast Club trivia is that the film was shot entirely in sequence.) I’m rather surprised that this one remained Unidentified for so long; I thought my hints were staggeringly obvious.

I’m quite pleased that UI 41 went Unidentified for a while; this one was one of favorite installments of this series so far, and I’m glad it didn’t get pegged in hours like some other ones that I thought might be stumpers and then, well, weren’t. If you watch a lot of summertime ESPN, then you see the occasional baseball game or highlight reel from a game at Boston’s Fenway Park; and aside from the Green Monster, what’s the most notable thing you see in shots of that park, facing left field? Yup: it’s the giant Citgo sign! (BTW, there’s a gorgeous aerial shot of Fenway in the companion book to Ken Burns’s Baseball teevee documentary that includes the Citgo sign, and I was stunned to see just how far from Fenway that sign really is. The shots from inside the park, showing the sign looming over the left field wall, make it look like that Citgo station is pretty much right across the street from Fenway, but that’s not the case: you could pretty much stick another Fenway Park between the actual Fenway and the Citgo sign. Here’s a good aerial photo that shows how distant that Citgo sign really is.)

Finally, it only took one hint for UI 43 to be pegged as the Pike Place Public Market in Seattle. So congrats to the winners; give yourselves all one hundred Quatloos.

However, UI 44 is still Unidentified! Hooray for me! This location may, or may not, figure in an upcoming movie. I won’t know until the movie comes out, but I suspect at least one scene may take place here, although whether there’s an establishing exterior shot of this locale will be unknown.

And now, at long last, the new installment:

Where are we? Rot-13 your guesses!

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July 6, 2008October 3, 2021

Two hundred thirty two

I took a break from posting, so I didn’t have any Fourth of July-related content up here on the day in question, but here are a couple of things:

:: Isaac Asimov on The Star-Spangled Banner. It wasn’t what I expected, and it’s a good article, even if I still don’t care much for the song.

:: I’ve noted before my deep dislike of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”, but it’s the new classic that’s heard on each and every one of our patriotic holidays these days, so I just grind my teeth and get through it. It’s become a staple in our church, even. And as I’ve also noted before, it pains me that this song just isn’t heard much anymore.

:: From a year and a half ago, Garry Wills on the overuse of the term “Commander in Chief”. I couldn’t agree more.

:: Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams, delivering a speech at the end of the movie Amistad. (Video and audio links at the site linked.)

Happy birthday, America, two days late.

(No Burst of Weirdness this week, by the way. It’ll return next week.)

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July 3, 2008October 3, 2021

Something for Thursday

UPDATED below.

This is among a handful of songs that spring from my very earliest memories of childhood, when my parents would put their favorite records on the stereo. Frank Sinatra recorded many better songs than this one, but few of those mean as much to me.

I’m always impressed by how Sinatra always, and effortlessly, turned each song into its very own story. He doesn’t just stand there singing or snapping his fingers or doing any of the other “standard singer” stuff; instead he shows what it would look like for the person expressing what the song is saying, what their facial expressions would be, and their gestures. For Sinatra, each song was its own little drama, and he acted it out beautifully.

UPDATE: Geez, I went live with this post and then within twelve hours the video was taken down because of a copyright issue. Because someone might not make a quarter or two because a single Sinatra performance was online. Anyway, you can (for now) hear the song here, but it’s not a live performance so you don’t get to see the stuff I was talking about above. Oh well.

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July 2, 2008October 3, 2021

Sculpture on Paper

My long-time Internet friend Robert John Guttke has been toiling away as a full-time, professional artist in Minneapolis for over thirty years. He’s worked in a number of different media, but his most enduring successes seem to have come from his photography. He specializes in the nude human figure, both male and female, and he’s about to have his first ever public showing of his work at an art gallery, in San Francisco. (He also wrote “When the Bluebird Sings”, one of the most highly regarded episodes of the old CBS fantasy teevee show, Beauty and the Beast.)

If I have any readers in that neck of the woods, treat yourself and go see Robert’s work, starting tomorrow and running to the 16th of this month. I find his work amazing.

(Good luck, Robert! May this open many doors for you, old friend!)

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July 2, 2008October 3, 2021

Blubbering….

I’m not sure how I missed this, but Jason has a list of movies that make men cry. I’ve bolded the ones that do, in fact, make me cry like a little girl who’s just had her lollipop stolen by the creepy old guy who owns the local nuclear power plant.

It’s a Wonderful Life

No, not really. I’ve never liked this movie all that much.

Schindler’s List

Last time I watched it, I didn’t cry at the right scene, but the film still moved me terribly. I know that the “I could have done more” scene didn’t happen in real life, but it’s still a terribly emotional scene. For me, even more emotional is the cast members accompanying their people they’re playing in laying rocks on Oskar Schindler’s grave. That always gets me.

Frequency

I haven’t seen this.

Dead Poets Society

What phony tripe this movie is. It’s the desk-standing, “O Captain my Captain” scene that’s supposed to be the tear-jerker, but as I’ve noted previously, this comes after these kids have already signed the paper getting Keating fired. It would have been more fitting if Keating had said, “Yeah, day late and a dollar short, fellas.”

Forrest Gump

I refuse to hate this movie, even though it feels like I should, or something. First time I saw it I cried when Jenny died; for Forrest to wait for her his entire life only to lose her when he finally got her struck me as terribly sad.

The Natural

I haven’t seen it, despite its being filmed in Buffalo. I stink.

The Shawshank Redemption

One of my favorite films, but it doesn’t make me cry. It fills me with a deep sense of fulfillment, as if some rightness in the cosmic order has been restored when it ends. I can think of few films that give that sense of satisfaction that this one does. (Although I do think it should have rolled the credits with Red’s bus heading down the road. We just don’t need to see him meeting Andy on the beach; it simply isn’t necessary and the whole point is that at long last Red has learned to hope again.)

Big Fish

I’ve had the DVD for two years and still haven’t watched it. Gotta get to it; I’ve heard naught but good about it.

Seabiscuit

I haven’t seen this.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

This whole trilogy is full of weepy moments for me. Just a few: when Frodo and Bilbo are reunited in Rivendell; when Frodo tries to leave Sam behind at the end but Sam just marches into the water after him; Eomer’s arrival at Helm’s Deep; Sam’s “It’s like the old stories” speech; Pippin’s terror at being taken by Gandalf away from Merry; the lighting of the beacons; Gandalf’s meditation with Pippin over the nature of death (“And then you see it: white shores….”); the charge of the Rohirrim at Pellenor; Theoden’s fall and Eowyn’s victory over the Witch King; “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you!; when Aragorn leads all of Gondor in bowing to the four hobbits.

The Passion of the Christ

Nope. I ended up fast-forwarding through some of it; Christ’s forced march to Golgotha with the Cross takes forever, and by the time they’re nailing him to the thing, the entire movie has for me become a bit desensitizing. I also noted something else when I watched the movie: during the more violent parts, like when the Roman soldiers flog Jesus, I actually found myself admiring the make-up effects of the movie. It’s supposed to be a horrifying moment, but I found myself wondering, “Wow, how did Gibson manage to simulate the whip actually biting into Jesus’s skin and ripping giant chunks out of it?” (I seem to recall another blogger mentioning this, but I can’t remember who that was.) I just didn’t find this film all that emotional; it was quite the opposite for me. Cold and distant.

(And there was one moment that stood out like the proverbial sore thumb. When Pilate has the Jews choose between freeing harmless Jesus and murderer Barrabas and they choose Barrabas, a shocked Pilate glances at Jesus, who gives him this stare back that seemed to me to be Jesus basically saying, “You got any other bright ideas?” It kind of pulled me out of the movie.)

ET: The Extra-Terrestrial

When I first saw this at the age of ten, I cried long and hard during the death scene. After that, I never cried during that scene again, knowing that ET wasn’t actually dead. (He was only mostly dead, har har!) But to this day, I cry immensely during the final farewell. In fact, I can actually work up tears if I just listen to that entire, magnificent “Adventure on Earth” cue that John Williams wrote for the film’s last fifteen minutes. I always lose it at the exact same moment: after Gertie and Michael have said their goodbyes to ET, and then the mother and the “Keys” guy arrive just in time to look on as Elliot approaches for his farewell. Without fail, I start sobbing right then.

And I’ve noticed a couple of other moments that make me cry, earlier, before Elliot’s “talking to dead ET” monologue. When ET is crashing, the first time they put the defibrillators on him and shock him, we cut to Gertie, who visibly jumps with surprise at the violence of the electricity being blasted through ET, and then she immediately starts to cry as only a little girl can. And so do I. And then, a minute or two later, as Elliot is looking on in total helplessness, having been shoved aside by all the doctors and officials, his mother comes up behind him, unsure of the reaction she’s going to get – and he just throws his arms around her. I lose it there, too.

8. The Green Mile

No crying here.

7. Saving Private Ryan

I’ve beaten this movie up a couple times in the last week, so I’ll have done; but it didn’t make me cry. The Normandy stuff was incredibly visceral, of course, in the way that I think Mel Gibson wanted The Passion to be but didn’t quite pull off.

6. The Pride of the Yankees

I haven’t seen this.

5. Rudy

Ugh. Especially Jerry Goldsmith’s bore of score, relentlessly pounding that one tune into our heads, over and over and over and over again….

4. Braveheart

I didn’t cry at this. I love the movie, but it didn’t make me cry.

3. Brian’s Song

I haven’t seen this.

2. Old Yeller

This movie, along with The Yearling, only made me cry tears of anger if any tears at all. “Boy becomes man by learning how to kill his beloved pet” is vomitous, nonsensical crap. I hate this movie, as you can tell. (There’s a really funny episode of Friends where Phoebe walks in as the others are watching this movie and sobbing away, and Phoebe doesn’t get it because it turns out her grandmother who raised her would invariably turn off sad movies before they got to the sad part so Phoebe’s always thought that infamously sad movies actually have happy endings. In her attempt to re-educate herself she watches Pride of the Yankees and is horrified when the baseball player gets Lou Gehrig’s Disease; someone else says, “Er, Phoebe, that actually was Lou Gehrig. Didn’t you see it coming?”)

I’ve always wondered if George RR Martin was making fun of Old Yeller in A Storm of Swords, when Daenerys hires an army of soldiers who have been methodically desensitized to just about everything through their lives. The guy in charge tells her how each soldier is given a puppy when he reaches manhood, and as his final test before being allowed to become a soldier in this army, he is required to kill his dog.

1. Field of Dreams

You’d better believe it! At three points, even: when Ray realizes that Doc Brown can’t return to being a ballplayer; when he realizes that the catcher is his father; and, of course, “Dad, you wanna have a catch?”

Jason also gives some movies that make him cry, so I should do the same. I used to be really bad about crying at movies when I was a kid; The Wizard of Oz did it, and Snoopy Come Home was positively traumatic. Dances With Wolves used to have me in a waterworks as soon as Cisco’s death, but in more recent viewings, I hold it together until the very end (but Wind In His Hair’s cries of friendship from the clifftop still get me, to this day). I admit I got seriously choked up during the slaughter of the Jedi in Revenge of the Sith, and while I haven’t cried at that sequence watching the film at home, I still find it a terribly emotional scene.

Let’s see, what else? Oh yeah, An Affair to Remember, the obvious last scene, when Cary Grant is about to leave when he suddenly says something that makes him put two and two together and realize why it was that Deborah Kerr wasn’t at the Empire State Building like she’d said she’d be. Beauty and the Beast does it now and then. I haven’t seen it in a very long time, but I remember Shadowlands being quite the tearjerker.

As long as we’re talking tearjerking stuff, a lot of episodes of teevee shows have had me all weepy. A bunch of Once and Again episodes do it (the big catalyst here being “There Be Dragons”). ER, in its hey-day, could uncork a good weeper about once a season; there was Dr. Greene’s baby-delivery-gone-awry in season one, the EMT guy who suffered third degree burns over ninety percent of his body in the season two, Carter-and-Lucy-get-stabbed, and the episode when we learn that Dr. Greene has died. That was a masterful episode that I thought a wonderful send-off for Dr. Greene, so much so that the next episode, which backtracked a bit to show Dr. Greene’s last days, felt superfluous to me. In the episode in question, at the beginning, Carter reads a letter Dr. Greene has written from Hawaii, where he’s gone to live out his last days [brain cancer]. It’s a warm and funny letter, but then at the end Carter grabs one final sheet and says, “Oh, Elizabeth [Dr. Greene’s second wife] wrote something here too…” And he’s silent for a moment, and we know what’s coming: “Mark died this morning at sunrise.” The rest of the episode shows the rest of the ER staff struggling with the news that Mark is gone; Carter posts the entire letter on the main bulletin board, and at the end of the episode, we briefly flash forward a year to see that the letter is still there. That was a great episode, back when ER was actually good.

Let’s see, what else? The West Wing had some teary moments too. “In the Shadow of Two Gunmen” opens with the aftermath of the assassination attempt, and the way Toby catches himself when he finds Josh and, after telling him to get up, realizes that Josh is bleeding profusely from his gunshot wounds, always gets me; so does Mrs. Landingham’s death later that season. And yeah, on Friends, I usually tear up a bit for Chandler’s proposal to Monica.

Star Trek? A few times, but not that often. I find that the climax of “The City on the Edge of Forever” unfolds too quickly for tears (not a fault with the episode, just a fact about the way it’s done). The DS9 episode “The Visitor”, though, is extremely moving, despite the technobabble that pads out its running time.

And then there’s that old family chestnut, Little House on the Prairie, which always had a lot of attempted tear-jerking moments. I think they tended to try too hard, though; sometimes it almost became laughable. (Poor Alice Garvey’s fate was so over-the-top that I found myself wondering if I was supposed to take it seriously, and the final episode where the people of Walnut Grove dynamited their own buildings while singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” in order to thwart some kind of evil capitalists very nearly had me on the floor in stitches.) But there was a very fine episode guest-starring Patricia Neal that was quite the weeper, and the all-time champ for this show was an early two-parter when Laura is jealous of her new-born baby brother’s attention so she prays for him to die, and when he does, she runs away to climb a mountain where she meets an angel played by Ernest Borgnine. Yes, it’s exactly as cheesy as it sounds, but wow, does that one lock my personal floodgates in the “open” position.

Well, that’s about it. I’m basically an emotional basket case. What can I say?