A Good Weep

A friend gave me a video tape of a film called One True Thing starring Meryl Streep, Renee Zellweger and William Hurt.  It had all the required pathos and over-acting that makes for a good weepy and weep I did in buckets.  I cried for a whole afternoon – it was interminably long – and had a marvellous time.

Some people like to go to feel-good movies to make them, surprise, feel good, me I like a good weepy.  Nothing like other people’s miserable lives/catastrophes/illnesses to make you feel so much better about your perceived miserable, disastrous, unhealthy life.

Some of the films I have happily wept over:

Bambi/Dumbo

Dying Young – Campbell Scott dying of cancer takes on Julia Roberts as a nurse, they fall in love, and not surprisingly he dies but still there is hope right until the end.

Beaches – Bette Midler dies of cancer.

Steel Magnolias – Julia Roberts dies young, Sally Fields plays the mother.

Terms of Endearment – Debra Winger….you guessed it….dies leaving behind young children.

And the Oscar goes to: Legends of the Fall, starring a young friskily handsome Brad Pitt.  That day I discovered there was no end to the amount of tears a human can weep and sloshed my way home from the cinema to promptly sleep a solid twelve hours. 

It is no coincidence this friend put the “movie” as she quaintly calls it in her American accent, in my letterbox yesterday as I am convinced that true friends read your moods, unconsciously knowing when things are not so great, when you need to be just left alone, when you need a long phone call where you can whinge and groan and know someone is listening OR in my case a good blubber which cheered me up no end.   

People come and go in our lives.  Some you think will be around for ever but turn out to be red herrings with forked tongues and don’t stay the course and some just plod along, always there in the background, always ready to forgive, never letting you drift away, never crossing the line of decent behaviour and respect and always, always urging you forwards.

Thank you Marie.

PS: Can anyone recommend any other films?