Up, of course; many others have mentioned it.
What heartless bastard wouldn’t turn on the waterworks when these two cartoon old-timers put off their dreams just long enough for the Grim Reaper to swing his scythe and send one’s soul all a-drifting?
It stabs because you know many people in real life will do the same thing, including YOU: defer dreams for stability, until the cancer or some such dreaded ailment whisks you or your loved one into Hades. Many of us make this decision in our own lives every day, while the threat of death, debilitation, and disease hover over us like white noise.
Inside Out actually made me cry. A grown man! That’s two for Pixar, ya sneaky tear-jerks.
Lastly, my girlfriend and I wept like imbeciles at Titanic when we saw it in theaters. We couldn’t even get up to leave we were so embarrassed and taken by surprise. Even at 18 and 19 we were completely cynical and hard of heart. But we didn’t even dare leave our seats until the end of the credits, attempting to regain our composure, looking at one another shrugging our shoulders and mouthing the words, “I don’t know, I have no idea. What’s wrong with us?”
BUT: here’s some non-obvious creepers I don’t think were mentioned.
They’ve always gotten me in the feelies!
Jacob’s Ladder. The final scene, when Tim Robbins takes the hand of his dead child, Gabe, to ascend the staircase into the Light. We know that all the terrifying and mysterious things Robbins’ character has experienced are an illusionary mental phenomena brought on by his dying brain. Dreams of what his life could’ve been, loves he might have had, accomplishments and aspirations that might have been his.
All those possible paths snuffed out by circumstance and lived only in the mind of a man on his deathbed. And all of this sound and fury a product of a human being trying to cling to life and refusing to accept death. In the end he gives in and is at peace, even though we can assume the Light, or “Heaven,” is just as illusory as his previous phantasms.
Or I guess you could also understand it as a genuine spiritual journey? It’s not nearly as dark that way.
World’s Greatest Dad. Probably nobody mentioned this one because pretty much nobody saw this one. This is a dark comedy by Bobcat Goldthwaith, starring Robin Williams. Williams plays an English teacher father who dreams of writing a great novel but doesn’t have the talent. He finds his teenage son, who he both loves and thinks is a douche-bag, dead from auto-erotic asphyxiation (he choked himself dead while masturbating).
To give his son some dignity in death and save himself some humiliation as a father, he writes a suicide note for his son. Then, discovering his son’s journal, he publishes it. It becomes a huge hit, and Williams gets to enjoy all the fame and notoriety he craved, all on the back of his dead son (who he loved and loathed in equal measure).
The scene in question is during a talk show when Williams is being interviewed about this situation. The issue is so complex, and so difficult to express, and so filled with confounding and contradictory feelings, that Williams vacillates between true sobbing and hysterical laughter, then both at the same time. It’s this beautiful expression of the comedic absurdism of life and its true tragedy and pain.
I don’t know about you, but this scene seems like the genuine article. You can see Williams tapping in perfectly to a truly difficult emotion that a lesser actor, with less emotional depth, could never reach. It was really startling the first time I saw it because it wasn’t a performance. Whatever Williams was trying to bring out, he brought out, and it was truly moving.
Bladerunner. The grandaddy of all scenes that hit you in the feels! Bladerunner, the original, when the replicant Roy Batty tosses off a poem at the moment of death.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
It’s a reminder that all the beautiful things we’ve done and experienced will be forgotten, diluted into the ocean of time and space. Except for that now we have social media. So all those moments lost in time will be selfied and collected on a Facebook server!
Time to die!