CRYBABY

Why do certain movies make us cry? I don't mean manufactured weepie dramas, but ordinary movies that don't make anybody else cry...even though you weep every time you see it. Or perhaps it's just me. I cry when I watch Raiders of the Lost Ark and Marion Ravenwood first unleashes that massive anime grin of hers. I cry when I watch the new Star Trek and Leonard Nimoy appears. I cry when Dick Van Dyke and his rugrats sing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or when John Travolta belts, "I've got chills...they're multiplyin...'" I don't cry during Krull, but I cry during Dragonslayer.

Is it nostalgia? Probably. My mother can listen to Casablanca and sniffle through half of it.

While watching Escape to Witch Mountain, the 1975 Disney sci-fi flick, I found myself riveted and often teary-eyed at the travails of intergalactic moppets Tony and Tia as they used their psychic/telekinetic powers to evade the scheming ham villain portrayed with ghastly histrionics by Ray Milland. I was ten when that movie came out, and I remember 10 being a most excellent age, filled with wonder and no idea of the horrors of the world.

Perhaps nostalgia is just a lament to the remembrance of things that are dead.