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I can’t say I’m into chick flicks per se, but I did like THE JOY LUCK CLUB, which I saw with my girlfriend at the time, who was also Chinese. I had a very positive reaction to TERMS OF ENDEARMENT once upon a time, too.

I will, however, admit to crying in movies. I’m not sure that’s the sort of thing you meant to be discussed on this thread, but when I read your post I equated “chick flick” with more sentimental fare, and you did mention “eye-sprinklers,” so...

It doesn’t happen often. It takes the right film and the right circumstances. I cried through a goodly chunk of THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, which I regard as one of the finest films ever made, and the best film version of a Tennessee Williams play ever. Huston hit it perfectly. The sadness of Burton’s lost thrashing soul, that speech of Deborah Kerr about boating on the lake with her lonely salesman, the old poet reciting his last work. That stuff just tears me up.

I recently saw Grigori Chukhrai’s BALLAD OF A SOLDIER for the first time, and was weeping in that one, too.

There are moments in IKIRU that have the same effect.

But the one that wrings me out and leaves me for dead is SLING BLADE. I am Southern born and bred, and I’m sure that has a lot to do with it. I saw it for the first time at an East Side theater with the same Chinese girlfriend. She tends to be rather guarded with her emotions. I am not overly demonstrative myself, but “guarded” is not a term that would apply to me. Well, from the first speech – and I mean the very first, the one that opens the film – I was tearing up. I didn’t even know why; the impact of it blindsided me. And the girlfriend was asking, “Are you all right?” And I was saying “Yes, yes.” And it kept up; I couldn’t turn the waterworks off throughout the whole thing, really. By the time Billy Bob was telling Lucas Black about burying that baby in the woods, I was rocking back and forth in my seat, sobbing right out loud. People were looking at us. She kept asking, “Are you all right?” And between sobs I was sputtering, “Yes, dammit! I’m only crying!” What an experience.

The punch line is that my eyes were literally swollen shut the next day, and I had to go to work. I was forced to make up some horse manure about having an allergic reaction to something or other. I wasn’t going to “explain” to a bunch of people who think I’m borderline certifiable to begin with how I bawled like a baby all through a movie about a retarded guy who hacks people up. That’s how they’d see it, anyway.

I’ve watched it since and had the same reaction.