Although no way near as personal and powerful as some others' experiences here, I teared up something shocking at the scene in the first Transformers movie, with all of the Autobots streaking through the sky and landing on earth. For some reason that moment in the movie struck a chord in me, and it appears from other people that I wasn't alone in this.
Possibly one of the most depressing movies I've ever seen, and one that haunted me so much that I had to talk to a friend about it the next day, was Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl. It's a Chinese movie directed by Joan Chen, about a young girl who is sent to live in an farming village during Chairman Mao's redistribution of populace campaigns.
Xiu Xiu was a city girl who longed to go back, and lives with a good-hearted man who has been emasculated during the war, and who is in love with her, but she won't have a bar of this country bumpkin. Meanwhile, she ends up sleeping with a variety of officials who promise her that they can help her go home. They are obviously using her, but she's so desperate that she thinks she's using them. It ends with her having an abortion, after which she asks the farmer to set her free by killing her. He buries her in the rock-bath he made for her earlier in the movie.
After that, I swore to never watch any remotely depressing movie ever again. The Autobots coming to earth was a happy kind of tears. That horrible Chinese movie was something else.
I've seen this one too, and you're right, it was very depressing.
One scene that stole my breath was from
The Last Samurai, when you see the Samurai coming out of the forest in the early morning mist in slo-motion, with their katanas held high.
Galloping on proud horses, their banners held high, screaming out the ancient battle cries of their ancestors, they truly evoked the image of another day, one of honor and fearless courage. What a georgeous scene.
That's why I felt like sh*t when they were all killed at the end of the film..I SO wanted them to win.
