Film blog

No, goodness me no, these are temporary, honourable aberrations where the men of the house let their guard down to show that they care. That they have a heart, albeit one calloused by tabs and that extra strong lager they keep talking about. You know the drill. Fat Newcastle United fans in replica home kits weeping inconsolably in the empty terraces following the latest home defeat to Hartlepool. That's allowed. It's football. A man's game. But one freighted with such drama that a fully-fledged emotional breakdown is part and parcel of the Saturday afternoon ritual.

But where men really have to show steely resolve is the cinema. That social minefield where they might have to utter the time-honoured explanation "I'm not crying - I've just got something in my eye" at the end of Marley & Me as a vindictive wife/girlfriend heaps on the mockery. Of course, it would be un-gentlemanly to point out that they, yes they, were reduced to pitiful nervous wrecks when little Len DiCaprio slipped quietly beneath the freezing waves in Titanic. It's probably best not to get into a fight, though.

Of course, there is a small, select list of movies where it's permissible for the chaps to reach for a hankie and mop red-rimmed peepers. There's Bambi, an anklebiting, emotion-wringer featuring a harrowing scene when the little mite's mom is taken out by a hunter. This heart-wrenching sequence is regularly cited by psychiatrists as a young child's first major trauma. So it's ok for a little lad to have a quiet wail. But not after they get to six years old, of course.

It's a tricky time for lachrymose-leaning boys with Uncle Walt snaring the unwary with Dumbo and Pinnochio whilst adolescence sees them running the gauntlet of heartstring-yankers and more manipulative fare as such Lord of the Rings (mind you any right-thinking youngster's reaction to the impending death of a hobbit would be unbridled laughter). There are even reported cases of vulnerable petrolheads bursting into uncontrollable tears as the credits rolled on Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.

And no man - no man - could have failed to have been moved when the Mafia totalled two E-type Jags and an Aston Martin convertible with an excavator in The Italian Job. Yet this week a film comes out that sets the bar as far as tear floods are concerned.

On the face of it Up is a children’s film, pure and simple. Critics will sing its praises for the reach-out-and-touch computer animation and a story that challenges rug rats rather than patronising them. However, shortly after the beginning, there is a brief sequence that will go down in cinema history as one of the most lachrymose of all time. We’re talking oceans of saline, here.

Briefly sketching in the octagenarian character Carl (voiced by Ed Asner), the film-makers wordlessly rewind back to his youth and a marvellous marriage to a wife that – tragically – was never blessed with children. We then see them happily step into old age until Carl is left alone. It’s simple... but so stunningly effective that A&E wards will be chocca with emotionally stricken cinema audiences nursing bruised cheekbones. Significantly, it’s not just women who will be moved. Up manages the Herculean feat of making grown men cry like never before.

Apart from this grown man, of course. Yep, not me. No way. No way siree.