Today I came to the conclusion that there is too much information flowing into my brain on a daily basis, and it can’t quite handle it anymore. Have I ever been able to handle it?
Last weekend, while movie surfing on Apple TV, we came across the movie RED, with Bruce Willis, Richard Dreyfus, John Malkovich and Morgan Freeman. Since these are four great actors, with Freeman and Malkovich being some of my favorites of all time, and with the movie RED 2 just coming out, it seemed like a good idea to watch RED and get ready for the sequel.
We checked the Tomatometer and it showed a solid 72, which definitely qualifies for an “okay to watch” in our house. The trailer looked funny and action packed. The last thing I did is make sure I had not already watched it, so I searched my blog (this one that you’re reading right now). Since I review every movie I watch, new or old, it would, of course, be here. I didn’t find it.
So – watching RED was a go.
As I watched the movie, I did remember certain vignettes, like John Malkovich living in an underground bunker that he accesses through a car wreck, poignant images that stick in memory. I kept saying to myself that I had seen this and that part before. Perhaps, I imagined, I had seen sections flipping through the channels at a hotel. But there was not enough substance to my memories that I lost interest. I enjoyed the movie to the end.
As I always do, I then make a draft blog entry so I would not forget to review it later. That was last week.
This Sunday morning I decided to finish the review. I went to find a suitable photograph, and I found one:
This definitely characterizes the movie, shows the four main actors in a hilarious scene – don’t you love Morgan Freeman playing the head of state of a banana republic?
Before I post a photograph, I save it in a directory called “Blog Material” on my computer, from where I upload later. As I saved it as “RED.jpg” it gave me an error. There was already such a file. So I just changed it as “RED1.jpg” but I now was curious. What could I possibly have saved as RED.jpg before?
Doing a quick search I found that the very picture I had just saved – the one I had deemed characteristic of the movie – was already saved as RED.jpg. Hmmm.
Could I possibly have….?
I searched the blog again for “Movie Reviews: RED” and bingo – there it was from February 13, 2011. I must not have spelled or searched correctly when looking just before renting the movie.
This is bad:
- I watched a movie all the way through.
- I reviewed the movie.
- I didn’t remember I did either.
- I watched the movie again.
- After watching again, I still didn’t remember I had watched and reviewed it.
- I sat down to review it again.
If I hadn’t saved the picture with the same name, I would literally have written another review. Now I wonder how it would have come out.
Perhaps all this means is RED is an unmemorable movie. Would I have forgotten watching Schindler’s List? Or Avatar?
Or am I undergoing information overload?
Memory is an ephemeral mystery.
It must not have been that good of a
movie….didn’t leave enough of a ‘memory impact’. You just have ‘selective memory’, at this age we start doing involuntary data dumps to clean up our ‘hard drive’!
Almost the opposite happened to me. Did you read “Stranger in a Strange Land” in the sixties? Of course you did. Did I? Of course. Everybody did. I knew who Michael Valentine Smith was. I groked the slang. I shared water. I tried to be a Fair Witness. So of course I grabbed up the longer, uncensored version when it came out in the ninties. Somewhere in the middle of the first chapter, it gradually began to dawn on me — I had never read this book! I was thrilled! Not only did I get to read “Stranger” for the first time, but read it the way Heinlein intended — with all the “objectional” parts put back in.
Amazing. I read Stranger in a Strange Land when I was in my early 20s. I groked it – but I remember little. Yes, I now need to read the objectionable parts… another book on my reading list.