Day 19: Film that made you cry the hardest

Sad movies are in my genes.  If you know anything about my Mom, you know she only wants to watch a movie if it makes you laugh so hard that you cry, or if it is so mind-numbingly depressing you actually NEED to sit through the entirety of the end credits just to compose your red splotchy eyes and sniveling snout.  And I when I was growing up, it was basically required family hazing that every so often we would have to put our busy lives on hold so we could sit down as a family and watch a movie that made us feel genuinely terrible for being alive and healthy while being foolish enough to think our trivial problems had any bearing on what true sorrow actually is.

And the saddest movie of them all is Schindler's List.

1. It's about the Holocaust. Traditionally the most depressing of all movie genres (The War is Evil and Genocide is worse Genre to be specific)
2. The whole plot line is bleak the entirety of the movie, despite the fact that one lone character manages to have hope throughout the movie.
3. It's about bad things happening to good people.  And not bad things like losing your car keys, bad things like being sent to death camps to watch your family die.

And Lord Voldemort is the Villain.

I watched Schindler's List for the first time 3 days after my 13th Birthday when my Mother decided that I was old enough to understand it.  Let me tell you, it is not Birthday fare.  I cried the entire evening onward after the scene where Schindler breaks down on the train tracks because of his gold pin.

As if that weren't bad enough, my middle school made us watch it that same year as the end of the year Spring Movie.  Because that's what every young, 13 year old Jewish girl wants to do at the end of her last year of Middle School: Watch the saddest movie ever made with 300 gentiles.  (On a side note, I firmly believe that the middle school administrators wanted to specifically torture our class, because the year before they made us watch The Patriot, and like the class after us got to watch like Finding Nemo.)

Anyways, it has gotten to the point where if I just hear the violin solo from the film there's a 70% chance that I will immediately burst into tears.  Brilliant Film, but Hard to Watch (Not based on the book Stone Cold Bummer by Manipulate).