Cataloging "BBM"

It was sitting, innocuously enough, in the stack of gift DVDs, and I knew I had to treat it like any other cataloging duty. Watch the credits and nothing more, to verify the art director, the costume designer, and whatever else the previous cataloger had included in the record.

Okay, so I watched the first few minutes. The first full scene. Okay, the first...several minutes. Sometimes the credits show in the beginning, right?

(But I knew they didn't. I know these scenes by heart.)

I stopped when Jack and Ennis began to gather the sheep, because I'd be opening a whole can of teary, crying worms if I started that part of it.

I took a deep breath, and though I could have just gone back to the chapter selections and chosen "End Credits"...I didn't. I pulled the cursor on my Windows Media Player forward, so it would stop at that final scene. At Ennis and the shirt, and the wardrobe door, and straightening the postcard. I knew it was coming, but good golly, the power that moment has on me!! I couldn't have predicted the swell of emotion, nor the tears just below the surface. And I even missed the famous shirt scene...I had stopped right when he touches the card, and closes the door, and that damned plunky music is playing.

Didn't matter that I missed the shirt. I was choked up instantly.

My co-worker was talking the other day about films that make you think about them differently than any other...that when you leave the theatre, you think "WOW. That was some kind of movie." It happens to me almost never, and I don't know that I expected this one to, either. I only knew that I had to see it the instant it came to Columbia (delayed, of course, because of the subject matter)--but that perhaps had more to do with the lead actors than anything else. I don't see movies in theatres very often, and I never go alone.

Somehow, I knew I needed to go to this one--and I knew I needed to be unencumbered by a partner stifling any of my raw emotion.

I'm so glad I did. It was the kind of intensity, that opening night showing, where even someone crackling their candy wrapper was hushed. When I drove home late that night, James Blunt's "Beautiful" was on the radio immediately after I started up the car, and its lyrics were so perfect.

I'll never forget it.

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Addendum:

I know this movie isn't for everyone. But I stand by this: it's just a love story. It's Romeo and Juliet that happens to other people. After awhile, I didn't even pay attention to genders--and I'm not speaking as a super-liberal either (because I don't think I'm too extreme that way). I think if someone knows they'll probably be offended by the subject matter, they shouldn't see it, because they most likely will be. However, it certainly, certainly helped me to understand how love really can happen between two people who don't expect it to, and who struggle because of it.