The theme for this weekend was pretty much summed up in two words - Bourne and Police. With The Bourne Ultimatum coming out this weekend, I suggested to my family that we should go see it, but none of them had ever seen a Jason Bourne movie, and it didn't make sense to see the third in the series until you'd seen the other two. So Friday night I stopped at Best Buy on my way home and picked up The Bourne Files, a three-disc set of the first two movies, The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy with a bonus DVD in a mock expandable folder. It's on sale for $14.99 this weekend, plus you get $5 for using a Mastercard, which make it less than $5 per movie - you can't beat that! I had actually purchased The Bourne Identity separately about a week ago from Borders for $11 (before I knew about the three-disc package) but since I hadn't opened it I was able to return it on Saturday and get my money back.
So Friday night we watched The Bourne Identity, and everyone seemed to like it - it's definitely my favorite of the three. Some of us wanted to just plow ahead and watch The Bourne Supremacy that night, but as it was getting late, we decided to watch it Saturday afternoon before going to see the third movie at the theater Saturday night, which we ended up doing. We came out of The Bourne Ultimatum at the theater only a couple hours later than we'd finished the first movie the night before. After three Bourne movies in about 24 hours, we figure the next one should be called "The Bourne Redundancy".
Now, I'm a big fan of spy movies, if you consider James Bond a real spy. I've seen every Bond movie ever made, some of them more times than I can count. I also loved Sneakers and I was even a big fan of the Bond spoof TV show Get Smart, which is coming out on the big screen next year. But I have to say there are few spy movies as smart and contemporary as the Bourne movies. Unlike Bond and some other spy movies, Bourne movies are totally serious. No quips, no corny punchlines, no laughing in the face of danger. In the Bourne movies death is a real threat (except when Jason Bourne is driving a vehicle, apparently) and the violence is brutal and realistic. But what I really like about the Bourne movies is how the character is so smart - he's always thinking two or three steps ahead of his situation, and the films do a good job of portraying that intelligence without dumbing down the movie. In other words, you have to pay attention and be pretty smart yourself to follow what's in Bourne's head with what the director shows you.
On Sunday afternoon we went to Giants Stadium to see The Police in concert on their reunion tour that I'm sure you've heard about. Our seats were way up in the nosebleed section, but aside from the distance it was a nice view of the entire scene, and the breezes were cool up there. After sitting through two opening acts, Sting, Stewart and Andy hit the stage about 8:30 pm and played about two hours with two encores. The Police have long been my favorite all-time band, and it was great to see a concert where I and most of the audience knew all the songs, and you had 50,000 people singing "Roxanne" in unison. It was probably the best rock concert I've ever seen in my life so far.
