A friend recently told me that Up in The Air--the new movie with George Clooney about a man obsessed with taking airline flights--was sentimental Hollywood sap.  "It bullies you into feeling certain emotions," he said.

That seemed half-way to a good definition of "sentimental": art that bullies you into an emotion. But you probably still have to ask what it means to be bullied into an emotion.

That is: What's the difference between art that forces you to feel and art that inspires you to feel?  After all, all art is made to evoke an emotion, or an emotionally charged response to some thing in life.  An artist makes her film because she's thinking about something with a positive or negative value for her. She almost certainly wants you to feel something about what she's saying.

Maybe one definition of sentimental art is that it simplifies the experience that inspires emotion, as well as what emotions are composed of.  I'm thinking, for instance, of a cheap romance novel in a supermarket checkout lane.  The first page might introduce me to a lonely woman sitting at the ocean shore whose hair is whipping around her head.  She's watching an orange sunset, sad about the men who have left her.  The book would strike me as "sentimental" because it relies on prepackaged images and ideas, like the assumption that women are sad without men, and the way a woman's whipping hair conveys desperate feelings, and the convention of the poignant sunset.