the saddest movie ever

Do not watch "Hachi: a dog tale" unless you have either a) no human heart beating in your chest, or b) two boxes of tissues and no problem with a sleepless night or two following the movie. This is the first movie in which I bawled my eyes out in at least 40 years. Based on a true story about the faithful Japanese Akita Hachiko, it's about a dog (Hachi) who forms an incredibly tight bond with its owner and accompanies him to the train station every day. Hachi then goes home and returns to the station at precisely 5:05pm every day when the train pulls in and his owner returns from work. Well....one day the owner keels over from a heart attack and never returns...not on the 5:05 and not on the 7:00 pm train. You can guess the rest: Hachi returns to the station EVERY DAY FOR NINE YEARS, waiting for his owner to come back. The townspeople give him scraps of food, pet him now and then and make sure he has his basic needs taken care of. But Hachi only has eyes on one spot: the exit door of the train station at 5:05 every evening....until the very night in the middle of winter, soft snow falling from the sky, when he closes his eyes, dreaming softly of playing with his owner and departs this world for doggie heaven.

The movie is slow, with gorgeous music, very softly photographed and will simply rip the heart out of your chest with pure sadness. The only solace I found after watching it was cuddling with my dog Hugo, holding him close, stroking his head and whispering into his ear. As Rudyard Kipling - the most keen observer of the emotions of men and beast - said: "If you want to know true sadness, get a dog"