This Friday evening a friend who wanted to get out of the office told me that he hadn’t been to a theatre in a long time. Actually I haven’t been to a theatre in a long time and he hasn’t been to one in a very long time. We decided to watch some movie, any movie. Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2 couldn’t be the one for various reasons – I watched it this morning – and after striking through every other movie playing in the nearest multiplex I stumbled upon Allen Coulter’s Remember Me. The title was desperate enough to match our impulsive neediness, and I vaguely remembered Roger Ebert’s review.
The hour-long schmooze before the delayed start and the three-hour-long drunk confessions after it overshadow the movie, but they didn’t need to. I wouldn’t anyway remember anything about the movie apart from its title. The good thing about the movie is that it is mediocre enough to shove me out of my slumber and tempt me to at least show the snarkier side of me. Though being snarky is my first nature, as I show every now and then, it is hardly satisfying being so for an insignificant movie that no one would remember. I am going to try something “different”, as we Indians – filmmakers and moviegoers – like to say.
Within a few minutes of the movie I got bored enough to embark on my own journey making vague references from any given scene. It was largely a purposeless and unconscious act of recalling recent movies and books through Remember Me. Being a fan of Marcel Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past (which I haven’t read) and of the concept of involuntary memory, I found the exercise engrossing enough.
Update: Below is only a list of several things that I remembered, and not a description of any of the memories corresponding to them. This makes it boring. It makes sense to delete the post, but I’m tempted to preserve it for posterity. If it stirs any of your own memories, that may give this a little more value.
When the opening scene was set in 1991 and the next scene in 2001 I remembered the many anachronisms that commonly feature in the Goofs section of IMDB.
During the introductory scene of Robert Pattinson several girls sitting beside me gasped in delight on seeing his face. When he bent across a bed to reach for the phone his pajamas fell below the hips. I remembered all the metrosexuals consciously buying low waist jeans to ostentatiously wear and unconsciously walk around in them. Once I saw his face clearly I wondered whether he looked paler in the Twilight series and I couldn’t remember how he looked as Cedric Diggory. Most of all I remembered the year-old interview in which Stephen King declared that Stephenie Meyer couldn’t write worth a darn.
When I saw Lena Olin in the next scene I remembered her tattoo in Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate. I was saddened to see how much older she has become in a decade and remembered Kamal Hasan in Gautham Menon’s Raghavan. Later when it was mentioned that her character is a social service worker she reminded me of Urmila Matondkar in Jahnu Barua’s Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara.
During the post-funeral scene when all members pieces of the Hawkins family sat at a table, I remembered JD Salinger’s Catch in the Rye. When it was clear that the only person Tyler cared for was his sister Caroline, the image grew more intense. I quickly wrote off Tyler as the real empty phony, but continued to think of little Phoebe Caulfield whenever Caroline entered a scene. I also remembered Coraline, which I’ve neither read nor watched. (After watching the entire movie, I wish it had been about Caroline Hawkins, about her loneliness and “freakishness” and her way of dealing with the tragedies in her fragile life, because that character had a vivid story arc and because Ruby Jerins can act.)
During the classroom discussion in a Global Politics class about morals and ethics in the recent wake of terrorism (2001, before Sep 11th) I remembered the classroom discussion about the nature of fantasies in a Philosophy class in Alan Parker’s The Life of David Gale. I wondered why there is hardly ever a second discussion in a similar setting in such movies.
When I heard Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich coming from the Craigs’ TV, I was sure that Sgt. Craig must have had a better time watching that movie than I would watching this one and than Ally would with Tyler on their first date.
When Ally started getting intimate with Tyler, I wondered why and how many girls fall for the damaged types. I invariably remembered Dr. Lisa Cuddy, Dr. Allison Cameron and Stacy Warner, and winked at Dr. Gregory House. Of course, Tyler only resembles a violent vampire eternally sucked by teenage angst. Later, whenever Ally looked happily in love with Tyler, immediately after his displays of anger, I was reminded of the few such women I’ve heard about in real life and felt sorry for them.
When I saw Chris Cooper sulking alone in his apartment as Sgt. Craig, I remembered his several lonesome characters like in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty and Billy Ray’s Breach, and realized that I’ve never seen him play an upbeat character.
When the interval began I remembered an old Little Hearts advertisement. Reporter: “Which part of the movie did you like the most?” Moviegoer: “Intruvall.”
When Caroline was shading a drawing with a pencil while talking to her brother’s new girlfriend the soft scratching reminded me of couples rocking on beds, and then the scene where young Forrest Gump sits on the front yard listening to the sounds coming out of the room with Mrs. Gump and the principal inside, and inevitably of the subsequent grunts that the boy himself makes.
Pierce Brosnan showed a paunch in the movie. I don’t know whether it was a prosthetic, but the word (and he himself) reminded me of his panache, more as Thomas Crown than as James Bond. When Charles Hawkins missed his daughter’s art gallery exhibition, I imagined the irony of his Thomas Crown character enamored by Claude Monet. When he finally took Caroline to the museum, I remembered James Stewart looking dazed in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. When he argued with Tyler and Ally that some Yankee team member was not fat but only big-boned, I may have laughed louder and longer than anybody else in the theatre, thinking about Eric Cartman’s claim that he was not fat but big-boned and Stanley Marsh’s retort that Jay Leno’s chin was big-boned and that Cartman was a big fat ass. When the family album scrolled on Charles’ office desktop, I remembered Brosnan’s deceased first wife and their three sons. (The word ‘deceased’ is used in the movie once, by Chris Cooper.) When Tyler told Ally that he came from a family of Irish musicians, I wished that they had kept the Irish accent of Pierce Brosnan. The Irish connection sprang several other memories like its great works of literature (I recently completed James Joyce’ Dubliners. Involuntary memories play a significant role in his works like Dubliners and Ulysses.), the current golden age of Irish crime, the beautiful Irish accents, of how Meryl Streep disappointed me with her accent in Pat O’Connor’s Dancing at Lughnasa, and of the Magdalene Asylums.
During the scene in which Tyler was sitting in a theatre, apparently wondering why he is sitting there, I empathized with him. (Or did the director empathize with the audience?) I remembered another recent mirroring of the character in a movie with the audience, in a scene in James Cameron’s Avatar.
Towards the end of the movie, I remembered that namedropping books and writers was regular early on in the movie and quickly died down. Rereading this very post, I realized that it may have been for the best.
When one of the main characters died at the end of the movie, I thought not about Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay, but about K Balachander’s antulEni katha and Mark Rydell’s Intersection. I have been particularly impressed by the latter movie (which I never saw completely), where the death of a character significantly alters the outcome of the movie, and it was not how the character died but under what circumstances the character died that made a difference. After thinking for a long time I also remembered VN Aditya. In all his movies that I’ve seen he gets the hero or heroine stabbed and then promptly recovered, and it felt insignificant in all of those movies. In Remember Me as well, the death is in the Sep 11 attacks. “What a croc of shit!” I thought, and remembered the wonderful monologue in Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman. It would’ve made no difference had that character died of dysentery (like in Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima), for the aftermath is only a montage of closed ones dealing with the death in due course of time. This also reminded me that I haven’t yet read any Sep 11 literature, and decided that John Updike’s Terrorist should be an especially good choice.
After walking out of the theatre I remembered that I seldom watch movies about teen angst as I can neither appreciate it nor tolerate it. This movie actually doesn’t fall under teen angst, for neither of the main romantic pair is a teen (both are college students), but the movie seems targeted on teens.
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