My own personal Lent officially ended when I went on a heavy bout of movie watching.

I started out with “Dawn of the Dead”. Great zombie movie, and enough gore to keep you wincing. Even before the opening credits start to roll, we get treated to an aerial view of a truck crashing sideways into a car and then crashing into a gas station, thereby causing everything in the vicinity to explode. If that’s not a great opening for a disaster movie, I don’t know what is. Other scenes that I really liked:
* Ving Rhames chooses the next zombie to kill by writing “Jay Leno” on a whiteboard. The sniper stuck on another roof, picks the zombie that resembles Jay Leno the most. It was pretty funny, almost like a macabre “Where’s Waldo”. I’m sure there’s a postmodern allusion in there about celebrity status and the plebian desire to see celebrities get their come-uppance, but I’m not going to go into that.
* The arrival of the truck with a few survivors to the mall. It’s a satisfying feeling to watch the truck back up into the standing zombies and see the their heads go splat !

The second movie was “Mystic River”. Great performances by Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. But the ending left me feeling ambiguous. Hmm, maybe I need to watch it again for it to make any sense. Great study of characters, though.

But the piece-de-resistance was “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. I was buying tickets, and I forgot the name of the movie. The couple who bought the ticket after me forgot the name of the movie too! This seemed to set an appropriate tone for a movie about forgetting. It was funnier than I expected. It’s a great movie about love and the lengths one can go to, to avoid remembering past love. It chaotically plunges into the darkest recesses of the mind(quite literally) and brings back past memories. Jim Carrey (Jim Carrey’s memory image) leads his ex-girlfriend, Kate Winslet (Kate Winslet’s memory image, to be more precise) through the maze of his mind to keep the doctors from finding her and erasing her. The ending is very satisfying and the beginning scenes make more sense when the last minutes of the movie roll in. If you’ve ever truly thought you loved someone in the past and tried simultaneously to forget and remember him/her, this is the movie for you! Even if you don’t belong to the previous category, you should just go see the film for its novelty and technique. Heck, go see it if you want to see Kirsten Dunst dancing in her underwear!

Well, fun-time’s over. Like the Jesus-dude who died and came back to life today, it’s time to start a new cycle.