Hate Mail - Imagine a Cynical Old Sophisticate Poseur Like You Turning Out To Have A Head Full of Corn Syrupy Nougat

There is real sentimentality but that's an honest experience that individual people can have about things they've actually experienced in real life and people they've really known, especially their life with their family and friends.  Real sentimentality is a private emotion it's not for a mass audience. That's an important part of the distinction.  That's not what I'm criticizing,  I completely respect that.

There is also an artificial kind of sentimentality that Hollywood movies, television, musical comedy specialize in and that is a cheap, commercialized, cloying substitute for the real thing, peddled to a mass audience.   The techniques of that are the bread and butter of many movie composers and virtually all directors.  The more accomplished ones can juxtapose that with the equally artificial means of rousing cheap patriotism or cheap faith or cheap sex or any of the other cheap versions of emotions Hollywood has always been in the BUSINESS of creating for a profit. 

There is a real distinction to be made between the kind of cheap sentimentalization and watered down emotion of most movie making and the expressive heightening of emotional content and meaning that real art engages in.   The one is why I hated the movie that turned the story into a horse-opera and love the real opera that presented the tragedy of Annie Proulx's story with far greater fidelity to her art and also the art of the real composer.  

You can consume cheapened, watered down crap if you want to but I can note the difference between that and real art if I want to.  It's a free country, for a few more weeks, at least.   I'd say, "grow up" but I think it's probably far too late for that.