10:08 p.m. - Tuesday, Sept. 02, 2003
The Bourne Identity
Whoooooa! This Labor Day weekend has been busy. I need to get back into things now. My friend, D, became eighteen on Labor Day, September 1st. I'm usre it was an excitin' day for him. A lot of personal things have been happenin' in my life this past weekend that I don't really wish to go into at this time, but there has been an upheaval in my family and I hope it's for the better this time. Changes have gone into effect, the outcome of which waits to be seen in the near future probably.
I've been doin' some work on my Matt and More group today. I haven't done much of anything on it over the weekend. But I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my members have grown from three to twelve in just a couple of weeks. I know that some of the members are fans from Ryan Merriman's message board of which I am a member. I appreciate their support. On Kaaza I found some MP3s of dialogue from "Good Will Hunting" and I've put those onto the group this evenin'. I hope they will work ok.
I didn't want to get out at all yesterday. I was afraid of runnin' into heavy traffic from the travelers returnin' home from a long weekend. Instead I stayed home and had my own private Matt Movie Marathon. I have nine Matt dvds now, but I only watched two. I watched "Good Will Hunting" and I watched "The B ourne Identity". In fact, I watched TBI four times in total. I was tryin' to figure out what the movie was about. Have you ever watched a movie that made absolutely no sense the first time you watched it? That's how TBI was for me.
Since Matt will be makin' a sequel to TBI next year called "The Bourne Supremacy" I decided that it was time to figure out just what TBI was about. Because without a clear understandin' of the first movie, the second one might be even more confusin'...or maybe not. Maybe they would clear up a lot of things for me in the second movie...or maybe not. Anyhow, I determined to watch TBI until I understood it or most of it. Four viewings later I now have a much deeper apprecation and understandin' of "The Bourne Identity" than I did before.
Without goin' into moment extreme detail, I discovered that in TBI, Matt, who portrays Jason Bourne, is a secret agent but a very special kind, all of which is still questionable to me. Jason has amnesia after being fished out of the ocean with two bullets in his back. He's taken aboard a fishing boat and one of the crew digs the bullets out of Jason's back. It's also discvered while Jason is unconscience that he has a hidden set of numbers on his hip that can be seen by black light.
Jason leaves the fishin' vessel and immediately embarks on a quest to discover his identity while bein' pursued by people he doesn't know who are tryin' to kill him for reasons he doesn't understand. Jason finds that the number on his hip matches the number to a bank account in a heavily guarded bank which requires his finger prints to be matched by computer before he is allowed access to the bank box. It would be too much detail to describe how he finds this information out. And I'm not even sure that I could explain it.
In the box Jason finds thousands of dollars in foreign currency, about five different passports with different names but his same photo on each one and two guns. He takes everything but the guns out and puts it all into a red bag which he carries out of the bank with him. But the people who evidently want him dead are after him once again and in order to escape them he offers twenty thousand dollars cash to a strange woman he finds at the American Embassy tryin' to get a new Visa to travel to America. She is out of money she tells the man at the Embassy and needs the Visa badly. Later, in an alley near the embassy, Jason talks to the woman, named Marie, and offers her ten thousand dollars cash immediately to drive him to Paris and another ten thousand upon arrival there. He has found that he has an apartment there according to one of the passports.
By the time they arrive in Paris, Jason and Marie have developed a friendship. He tells Marie that he has amnesia and doesn't remember anything that happened before the last couple of weeks. From there they are together throughout the movie runnin' from assassins who have been sent after them. Jason finds that he has abilites to fight and to remember things like license plates on six cars at once that are parked outside a restaurant they stop at. He tells Marie he can also tell her where all the exits are located and that their waitress is left handed. Also he can tell her where the most likely truck outside the restaurant is to hunt for a gun to be hidden and he knows he can run "flat out for half-a-mile at this altitude" before he begins to get shaky. He says he knows all of this but can't remember any of his past and he doesn't understand why. This was the part where before I would get confused and everything just became all jumbled up in my mind. Then I was as confused as Jason was.
But after four repeats of TBI yesterday I think I've figured it out probably. Jason ends up havin' to kill one of the agents who is chasin' after him. But before the man dies, Jason asks him who he works for. The dying stranger tells him he works for Treadstone but that he works alone, just like Jason. He adds, "We all do." Hmmm....Ok. Then the man asks Jason if he ever has headaches and Jason tells him all the time. The stranger replies that he has headaches also. Then the man dies.
TBI has brought out that a branch of the CIA in America is involved in this pursuit of Jason. The name of the branch is called "Treadstone".
Now I will put here the review of TBI that is on the back of the dvd. And you can come to maybe the same conclusions that I have reached. Here's the review:
"Pulled from the sea with two bullets in his back, Jason Bourne discovers he has the skills of a very dangerous man and no memory of his violent past. Racing to unlock the secret of his own identity, he discovers the deadly truth: he's an elite government agent. But to the government, Jason Bourne isn't just their property, he's a malfunctioning thirty million dollar weapon. Lethally trained, built to disappear, he's an agent on the run who has to be taken out. Now the government's top operative has become its number one target, in a super-charged, thrill-a-minute spectacular loaded with 'Non stop action!' (Bill Zwecker, FOX-TV)"
So the questions left in my mind are these: Will Jason turn out to be a clone perhaps in the sequel to follow next year? Does Jason have an implanted micro-chip perhaps that allows him to remember certain things when his memory of everything else stops working? That would explain the headaches he and the other agent share in common.
Now that I have a bit more grasp on what is supposed to be happenin' I have come to love this movie!!! I am excited now about the sequel. Wow! Matt was excellent in this movie! If you haven't seen "The Bourne Identity" yet, please do. I highly recommend it. I just imagine that if D had seen "The Bourne Identity", he would have understood it all on the very first viewing. Some of us aren't so swift mentally, hahaha.
There is this one scene in TBI that is so fantastic. Jason is in his Paris apartment and Marie is in the bathroom brushing her teeth. Jason senses that someone dangerous is lurking in the apartment and he goes looking for the unknown person with a sharp kitchen knife in his hand while trying to keep Marie talking so that she and the intruder won't know what he is doing. Then finally when Marie comes out of the bathroom and gets Jason off guard the intruder bursts thorugh a glass window into the room. When he comes through the window and the glass shatters I felt like I'd jumped a mile out of my chair. And every time I watched it I was still stunned by that scene and still jerked when it happened even when I was expecting it.
Well, I know I am drivin' everyone crazy with Matt talk, but...I can't think of anything else. Maybe one day I'll calm down.
