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Review: Memento
Guy Pearce (the uptight ass-kisser in L.A. Confidential ) plays Leonard, a young, guilt-ridden insurance investigator. He's pursuing his the man who raped and murdered his wife, but he has a bizarre inability to form new memories; if he happens upon an important clue, then orders a sandwich or walks around the block, he won't remember what he learned. He calls it a short-term memory disorder. So he frantically tattoos himself with clues, reminders and warnings and scribbles notes on hurriedly-shot Polaroids so he can identify people he already knew, and remember details he's already discovered.
Lenny's life is further complicated by a couple of people who appear to be friends (Joe Pantoliano, now playing the evil Ralphie on The Sopranos, and Carrie-Anne Moss) but who it gradually becomes clear might (or might not) be manipulating Leonard for their own murky reasons.
Leonard, anxious, even desperate, lives in a continuous fight with the outside world, constantly trying to orient himself and make snap judgements about his evolving reality. He is particularly haunted by his callous handling of an insurance claimant who suffered from the same memory disorder. Through Leonard's guile, his company refused the man's genuine claim for compensation. His tattoos and pictures remind of him of what he has done, and help him keep track -- he thinks -- of his wife's killer. He is continually forgetting his interactions with other people, remembering and re-remembering.
Nolan makes things considerably more challenging by running most of the story backwards, so the audience is essentially faced with the same problem Leonard has -- struggling to stay oriented, keep up, check his pictures and notes, and figure out what information is real. His mind replays people,words, memories and clues over and over again, a kind of thinking reflected in the fractured structure of the movie itself. This is an amazing editing and writing feat, weakened only by a mildly cheesy, anti-climactic ending. And the film noir feeling is enhanced by the seedy L.A. neighborhoods and motels the story runs through.
This movie demands a lot of its viewers. Leonard lives in a dizzy, whirling present tense, even as he is constantly in need of repetition, reinforcement and reference.
Memento is like a nightmare from which Leonard and the audience can't awaken. Soon enough, we realize that nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Leonard is like a fly stuck in flypaper. As much as he struggles, he can't break free. The effect is riveting, Leonard's predicament genuinely frightening. You leave the theater trying hurriedly, along with everyone else, to patch together clues, portents and explanations before you forget them -- just like Leonard. Plan to see this movie at least twice to grasp what you missed the first time.
What a great idea: harrass the audience by not telling them the story in a straightforward manner.
So... if we don't understand it all, can we pay half-price?
Similarly, I'm glad I read your content for free, Katz!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yea, you're right. I was, of course, writing a reply to a slashdot review of a movie by Katz, instead of going to see the movie in question.
However, no movie theaters in my area seem to be showing the movie in question, so it seems that it would be unlikely for me to have seen it. I could similarly harangue you to "check the listings in my area before you post a useless reply", but that would be equally pointless.
However, if you think it was a good mystery, then maybe I'll rent it sometime, or even see it in the theater if it catches on the way CTHD did...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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I think it depends.
:)
Are you referring to the ending that happened at the end of the movie, or the ending that happened at the begining?
Not a single one of the nearby multiplexes is running it. WTF? A more extensive search revealed that it is in fact playing the art house downtown, as well as one in one of the smaller theatres in an adjacent suburb.
<rampant over-zealous conspiracy theory>
Could this be yet another attempt by the corporate power elite to keep the really good stuff away from the American masses? Every other review I looked at said it was great, yet they seem to be intent on hiding it away. Oh well. I guess I should have expected such.
</rampant over-zealous conspiracy theory>
Personally, I think I'll make the drive out to watch it.
The main inspiration the writer used was the fact that he was mugged. That instant feeling of hate, anger, and fear he felt those first 15 minutes. He said he wondered what if... what if that feeling never went away. What if that was your motivation to find the perp...
Ive also heard that at film festivals (this movie has been finished and played overseas for almost a year) that many major studios went up to the actors and told them what a brilliant film it was. When asked if they would pick it up for American distribution, the comments always went along the line of "This movie is too complex for the American audience". Guess these are the same guys who told Soderberg that noone would go see Traffic.
And for a shameless plug to the trailer I did, find it here. You'll need QuickTime, and yes, I am a company man.
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
interestingly try http://otnemem.com/
here
Here's the original short story that inspired the movie, by Jonathan Nolan. It's very different from the movie and in some ways it's better. Read it if you get the chance - it gives away nothing about the movie that you couldn't deduce from the Memento trailer.
The second time I saw Memento, I brought a pad of paper and took copious notes. Here are the results: a chronological list of Memento scenes. Warning: SPOILERS there.
-Josh
The ending is non-hollywood. There's no happy end, in fact it is quite open ended. That's what makes it a nice movie. You leave the cinema not sure what to think. What was true what was illusion. Who's manipulating who. What bothers me in Hollywood movies is that there's always a happy/closed ending. Bad guy dies, hero walks away. In this movie (::::spoiler warning::::) it is just the other way around (but you can't be sure really).
The memory loss the guy seems to suffer from really exists, by the way. I saw a tv interview once with a guy who had suffered a stroke and was no longer able to store new memories. He sounded pretty normal until he started to ask what year it was (he was vaguely aware that something was wrong with his memory). Also he was surprised to hear that the cold war was over (he had his stroke somewhere in the eighties). After a few minutes the purpose of the interview had to be explained to him again (all in one shot) and the interviewer had to reintroduce himself. Very scary desease.
Jilles
I disagree. I actually enjoyed the movie a lot on an intellectual level, but in the end, there's a big difference between keeping something deliberately vague to make the audience come to their own conclusions, and not communicating the storyline clearly. I recently got the new Criterion release of Do The Right Thing, and with all the yelling and panic that surrounded that film on it's release, it was a clear example of the former. What was "the Right Thing"? Smashing the window? Racial tolerance? Fight the Power? That was something that Lee let *you* decide, but absolutely no-one can say they came out of the theatre wondering exactly happened in the movie. Lee crafted a great film, and got the audience to think. :)
In Memento, I swear that over half the (packed) audience was non-stop asking each other questions for blocks after we left, and those questions weren't "what is reality?" or "how do we perceive time?", it was "I don't get it - did xxxx really happen and did yyyy know zzzz?" That's supposed to be the director's job - communicate the story. While I very much enjoyed trying to untangle it, I feel that in 10 years people will look back on it as a film school experiment. A very well done experiment, make no mistake, but an experiment.
I'd still watch it over a Segal movie, though.
DT
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RumorsDaily
I asked myself: "I wonder how many sentences it will take before he uses the word interactive?" Congrats, Jon: it's a new record!
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Did you even watch this movie?? The ending is carefully designed to tie together nothing at all. Instead it asks, "how do you know what you know? Can you completely trust anything?"
There are a number of possible "truths" to explain this story. You probably just chose to believe in the most plesant one.
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilm/skeletons/film_detail/
The official site of the movie is at www.otnemem.com (nice touch). It has some details which are probably better learned after watching the movie rather than before.
The IMDb message boards for Memento have a lot of discussion (SPOILER alert!!) about the possible plotlines. Reading the posts here after watching the movie the first time was quite enlightening ...
I thought the ending was brilliant. Just when I thought the movie couldn't get better, the ending neatly tied the whole thing together.
I can't bring myself to say what the ending was, even with a spoiler alert, because I don't want to ruin it for anyone. Let's just say I'll definitely be seeing this movie again soon.
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Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Well actually the first time he mentioned the insulin thing (the insurance claimee injecting his wife) I was immedately asking and how exactly do you know that? The woman is dead and her husband cant remember a thing. For all you know, she did it to herself. Later when we see him doing it, I'm like uh huh! I knew it, the only way he could know is because he did it, and then immediately made up a way to incorporate this warning into his 'habits' so that he wouldn't do it again. Very well done.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I love the movie. Fantastic, but you dont have to play a movie backward to get this effect (although it is definitely an excellent way of doing it). I am reminded of spy movies in particular. You watch a spy flick and you are constantly wondering why someone did something. You have to put aside the things you know and think about the things the characters know. Then as more information is revealed to you, you have to go backwards in your mind and think about what you thought a character's motives were and reassess them.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Ask soon as he saw what happened to his wife he wrote it down. Every time he read it he got depressed and hated himself, so one day he figured he'd write it into sammy's story and he made himself read it every day.. but habit != memory so I think you're right. Oh well.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The husband used to give his wife her shots on a regular basis. The fingerprints would have been on the syringes anyway. After all, who uses desposible syringes to give themselves insulin?
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's not cheesy and it's anti-clmactic. So much happens in the end that I'm wondering if you missed something.
As a previous replier indicated, your keen powers of prediction have failed you. Maybe you shouldn't trust your pre-judgements so much.
It was out in England AGES ago (pre-Christmas, I think) and got quite a bit of hype and a reasonably wide release.
And, make sure you're looking for "Memento" as in "Something to help you remember" instead of "Momento" which is something like a little bit of Momentum.
(BTW, I'm still calling it "Momento", though, since that's what I thought I saw when I read it the first time.)
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
Well, my opinion about the CTHD movie craze is this:
It's a martial arts movie, obviously, but the plot is a bit deeper than "My name is somethingorother, you killed my master/father/family/dog, prepare to die". There's love, friendship, honor, stuff like that, and none of the "you big-muscled man, me helpless bimbo, me want you" that passes as love on mostly every other action flick.
Another reason I loved the movie was the natural scenery they used as background. Very impressive. I never knew China had such beautiful forests, deserts and mountains.
And I'd have to disagree about the action scenes being standard. They had a semi-mythological aura (or whatever you could call it) that's not present in movies other than old Ninja movies and the like. Or "The Matrix", of course.
Maybe that's the reason people like both movies. They both have heroes doing impossible stuff (instead of nearly impossible, such as the stunts in movies like "Mission Impossible" or "The replacements"). And deep down we all want to do things no one else can.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
With all the talk about planted web-sites and other guerilla-advertising tactics, it is refreshing to do a google search for Momento. I couldn't find any relevent results. Same even with the imdb.
The question is, is this really better for the movie? Do planted sites hurt the legitamacy of a film or does not having them just make it harder to compete?
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
As far as this not playing in the local multiplex, if this movie (with a confusing plot, no stars, an unknown director) had opened wide, it would have died fast since it's hard to market. When American Beauty opened a couple years ago, it started in small theaters, built up word of mouth from people, kept selling out like crazy, then expanded where it was showing once they knew that people had heard about the movie and it would succeed. If Memento keeps getting tons of people to showings (and since you really need to see it twice, I'm sure it will), it might eventually expand to larger theaters after more people have heard of it. Crouching Tiger even followed this same path. It's used by studios all the time to open movies that might not open well if they start wide, but by starting small, they can build momemtum and then become a success. If it's not playing where you live yet, it will get there, but I know the feeling of waiting. I drove 4 hours to see Crouching Tiger early last year.