Código 46

There may have been something in the air or the water or the ether or the Zeitgeist just around 2003 and 2004. Whatever the case may have been, a cluster of movies came out in that time bubble and all seem to overlap in this way: they are pensive, offbeat and a little eerie and they all contain elements of beauty. Here are four for the ages:

Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003)

Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 (2003)

Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Wong Kar-Wai's 2046 (2004)

Each of these films has a science fiction feel -- but they are also in the here and now, the near past and the near future. They have an international, cosmopolitan edge. And they collectively remind me of something Luis Buñuel's wrote via My Last Sigh (translated by Abigail Israel; University of Minnesota Press, 2003): "You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing. . ."   Indeed, that's a motivation for maintaining "Erik's Choice" and "Speak, Memory: Time Regained," tending to memories individual and collective -- dreams, history, imagination.

Today's Rune: Flow.