Last week, Lorraine and I saw a couple movies. The weird thing is that this weekend when we were having brunch with some friends we could remember the second film easily, Aliens versus Predators but for some reason we just couldn’t remember what the other film was. I drew a complete blank while Lorraine remembered everything about the event – where we saw it, what screen, what we had for lunch, the popcorn and drinks, the whole shebang – but not the film. Lorraine finally figured it out by going to the web site for the tehatre to find out what played on that screen on that day . . . The Bourne Supremacy.

It wasn’t that it was a bad movie, we enjoyed it . . . perhaps not as ground breaking and a bit more simplistic than The Bourne Identity which we certainly could recall more than a few days after seeing the film.

Evidently, our recent marathon of films and DVDs dealing with memory and identity has gotten to us – of which the Bourne films fit in quite well.

Recently, we have seen . . .

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which is quite interesting in how it deals with memory, identity, and relationships. It is too bad that the film quality in terms of stock and focus couldn’t be a bit crisper, the handheld style and the like was interesting but became distracting after a bit. It was very slow. The idea of erasing a person from your memory is interesting and I’ve had folks request that I help them do just that through hypnosis. I won’t as the process of removing memories is actually a form of repressing them . . . and anything repressed in that way would then have energy that has been unexpressed which certainly could result in inappropriate behaviors or other problems. Best to learn to deal with the negative emotions associated with memories or persons and learn to move on in a more positive framework.

Another foray into memory and identity is 50 First Dates which we didn’t expect to enjoy as much as we did. Who would have thunk that a comedy dealing with a condition so serious or so recently explored in the rather odd Memento which was both thought-provoking and extremely creepy would turn out so delightfully wonderful. Sandler and Barrymore did a wonderful job.

We also recently watched The Butterfly Effect with everyone’s favorite Kelso, Ashton Kutcher, trying to crossover into serious acting credits from his idiotcomedy specialty. Interesting film. Quantum psychology meets chaos theory. Nifty and also creepy. I was disappointed that every time the lead character “travelled” he did something rather creepy and not very nice . . . but we wanted to love him so much. Nice piece about how events shape us.

One would assume these films would have nothing to do with one another as they certainly don’t fit the same genres . . . but the underlying themes of memory and identity tie them together beautifully. They have kind of juxtaposed themselves in my head as a stream of images, but that makes them all the more interesting.