Movie Reviews for Memento

Memento

	List Price: $14.94 Our Price: $5.57 You Save: $9.37 (63%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $1.98 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases

Movie Reviews of Memento

Movie Review: Best thriller of 2001.....2000.....1999.....1998....1997....
Summary: 5 Stars

Though 2001 is far from over, it's not to early to say that Memento is one of the Top Ten movies of the year. This outstanding suspense thriller gets just about everything right. It's stylish, tricky, clever and intriguing. It's the kind of movie that makes you think, leaves you guessing and causes you to debate it with the people you watched it with. If it has a fault, it's that it pays no mind to the modern phenomenon of limited attention spans. Pay attention or be lost.

The movie opens with a shot of a hand waving a Polaroid snapshot. But, wait a minute! This photo isn't coming into focus, it's fading away. We are going backwards. Each scene shows what happened before the preceding scene. Because of the marvelous way it is edited, it isn't that hard to follow. The result is not so much one of confusion as it is one that demonstrates how tricky memory can be.

The protagonist, Leonard [Guy Pearce], has anterograde memory loss, which is a condition that makes it impossible to make new memories. This condition is the result an injury he received on the night his wife was brutally murdered. He attempted to save her, or that's the way he remembers it. Now he is on a quest to find her killer. This is an almost impossible task for him. If he meets someone, he won't remember doing so ten minutes later. If someone talks to him too long, he won't remember the first of the conversation. It makes him easy to victimize, and, along the way, he meets several characters who do just that. At the same time, we slowly begin to wonder if Leonard is, in fact, a victim. There is something not quite right with his story.

Leonard's long term memory is perfectly intact. He remember everything from before the injury. He has a methodical personality and uses all sorts of tricks to help him remember things now. He constantly writes notes. He uses Polaroids to remind him of who he has met and where he has been. He even goes so far as to have pertinent facts tattooed on this body, so that when he wakes up every morning, he will remember his mission. It is important to note that Leonard isn't looking for justice. He's seeking revenge.

Guy Pearce is stunning as Leonard. His role is much more difficult than he makes it appear to be because he must create in us empathy and understanding for a character who, because of his condition, basically has no personality we can relate to. How do you relate to someone who never remembers he's ever met you? A bond could never exist. Yet Pearce does make us care about Leonard.

This is director Christopher Nolan's second film. His first, which was shot on video and is in black and white, is so obscure you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who's seen it. After Memento, be promises to be a very recognizable creative talent.

There is something reassuring to me about this movie's success. [People] have voted Memento number eleven on [a] site's list of best movies ever made. While I might not rank it that high on my own list, the important point is that, of the 12,000 plus votes cast, about half came from people under twenty-five years old. This group rated it even higher than older voters. The fact that all those kids can be so impressed by a literate, intelligent movie that has no special effects and no pop music soundtrack is something that others in Hollywood should pay attention to. Perhaps the business would be well served by more movies that challenge their audiences.

Movie Review: "How can I heal if I can't feel time?"
Summary: 5 Stars

Guy Pierce is excellent in the role of Lenny, a man who has suffered a severe head injury while trying to defend his wife against an attack by burglars. This injury has left him incapable of making new memories; he retains nothing for more than 5 or 10 mins. He can't watch a half hour TV show because by the end, he's forgotten how it started. His condition is not amnesia; he knows who he is and recalls everything about his life before the injury. His brain simply won't retain any new experiences.

Lenny's wife was raped and murdered by her attackers, leaving him devastated and filled with rage. A police investigation turned up a suspect known only as "John G." Of course, Lenny's injury would quickly cause him to forget all of this, so he has his chest tattooed with "John G. raped and murdered my wife". His quest to find and kill the man who ruined his life is what gives him purpose. In order to function, he is constantly taking Polaroids and making notes to refer back to after he's forgotten. The most important clues that he uncovers he has tattooed all over his body. Lenny's mission is complicated by two people with ulterior motives who take advantage of his dysfunction. One is Teddy (Pantoliano), a cop helping him find the killer; the other is Natalie (Moss), a woman he meets along the way who he thinks may be able to help him.

Christopher Nolan adapted the screenplay (which was nominated for an Oscar) from a short story by his brother, Jonathan Nolan. The genius of the script is that it mimics Lenny's handicap in that the viewer doesn't know what preceded the current scene, just as Lenny doesn't know because he's forgotten! It raises intriguing questions about the role of memory in our perception of reality. At one point, Lenny is thinking out loud about his predicament. He wonders how many times he's been reminded and forgotten that his wife is gone. Imagine learning that a loved one has died, over and over, each time as if it were the first. "How can I heal if I can't feel time?" How can he trust others that he only knows through scribbled notes on photographs? In a surprise revelation near the end of the film, we find that Lenny can't really "know" anything because he can't even trust himself. Because this film is so unconventional and tough to fully absorb in one viewing, some impatient folks will consider it a waste of time. But MEMENTO is extremely well made (Oscar nominated for Best Film Editing) and well worth the effort for anyone who appreciates film as art and is not intimidated by complexity.

Movie Review: Unforgetable
Summary: 5 Stars

Its hard to think of a more intelligent movie, and one that requires quite so much concentration, this isnt a popcorn and sunday afternoon movie, this one needs you awake and alert and concentrating on every sly move the narrative pulls or you could quite easily miss the beauty of this movie.

Shot in an unusual style in that the movie "develops" much like the photographs the main character takes to help with his memory, slowly and partially. You see it tells everything backwards, from end to beginning then end again, except the end isnt quite the end, confused? sorry, but its hard to explain.

Essentially we see one scene, say five minutes worth of plot, then the next five mins shows events leading up to the part we just saw. For instance if for instance we just saw a five minute scene starting with the character walking into a house, when thats done we see another five minute scene climaxing in him pulling up to the house. I've explained it remarkably bad but it really is ingenious, and a crucial subplot intersects these scenes giving a nice background and an unusual twist to the overall story, as well as providing a slight relief from all the head-swirling of the main story.

The story itself concerns Lenny, an ex insurance investigator whose wife was murdered, fairly straight forward except lenny suffers from a memory disorder which means he has no short term memory, thus he uses polaroids and tattoos and hand written notes to help him along his way to finding the killer, but at the same time is never sure of who people are and if he can trust them.

The cast headed by Guy Pearce is generally very very good and Guy himself shows why he won rave reviews after L.A Confidential with another excellent performance. The direction is pretty slick and extremely sly and all credit must go to the makers not just for thinking up such an intelligent story but for comitting it to film and making it work.

If any downfalls of the film exist its in that it may be a little too clever for its own good, a lot of people wont have the patience to concentrate for the whole movie and may find it boring or hard work, not generally what people want from entertainment and thats a fair expectation, I know I have to be in a certain frame of mind to watch this myself and know many people to have switched off halfway in.

That aside if your prepared to work with the film to its conclusion and to keep your eyes open and your mind on the plot then its an extremely rewarding experience, one that will have you gasping, full of admiration for all the players involved and with a head full of questions to which there is no answer other than possibly watching again. The sort of film you watch and immediatly want to talk about to anyone else who has seen it, and restores faith that sometimes you can get an intricate story from somewhere other than a book.

Sorry for the clumsy review, this is one movie that just seems to have that effect on me :)

Movie Review: What? No Oscar?!
Summary: 5 Stars

Memento is one of the most original and intelligent (not to mention funny and profound) films of the last decade. Possibly ever.

The story revolves around the character of Leonard Shelby, (played wonderfully by Guy Pearce), a man who has no short-term memory. Since an attack in which his wife was brutally raped and murdered (Leonard's last memory is of this in fact), and in which he recieved a damaging blow to the back of his head, he has been totally unable to make new memories. Something of a problem when Leonard is utterly consumed by the desire for revenge.

In order to place the viewer in a similar state to the protagonist, the film has a unique structure, beginning at the end of the movie chronologically, and working its way backwards through time in small (10 - 20 min) segments. Viewing the film, you find yourself in the same position as Leonard, desperately seeking the truth about what has happened to him, and willing him on in his strange investigation.

There is also a wonderful kind of twist at the (actual) end of the film, which completely changes your views on what has transpired and no matter how good you are at guessing the ending of films, this one is going to catch you out. How Christopher Nolan managed to cultivate such an intriguing and intricate story as this is astonishing.

The performances of the three main leads are superb. Guy Pearce plays Shelby with the perfect amount of bewilderment, ironic humour, and pathos. It is essential to the way the story works that we feel empathy for his character and his situation, and Pearce manages this brilliantly.

Carrie-Ann Moss puts in a great performance as Natalie, one of the two main characters whom Leonard comes into contact with. She manages to remain ambivalent all the way through the film, and one is never sure whether to trust her or not.

Joe Pantoliano puts in a scene-stealing performance as 'Teddy', the friend that Shelby can never quite trust. Pantoliano's performance, (like The Matrix co-star Carrie-Ann Moss'), is ambivalent throughout, but he manages to remain wonderfully charismatic. He keeps us guessing about what it is that he knows about Leonard and his past all the way through the movie.

The movie in itself would be worth the purchase of the DVD, but the inclusion of an original story by Jonathan Nolan (the directors brother), an interview with Christopher Nolan, the entire shooting script (complete with notes and scrawls written over by various parties involved in the film), as well as a hidden feature by which you can watch the film re-edited in chronological order, it really is an essential purchase.

I can't recommend this film highly enough, particularly to those who enjoy thrillers, or giving their brain a good work out during a film.

How this film missed out in the Oscars is beyond me. Brilliant stuff.

Movie Review: "Memento": Kant...or Hume...how do WE perceive it?
Summary: 5 Stars

"There can be in us no modes of knowledge,
no conection or unity of one mode of knowledge
with another, without that unity of
consciousness which precedes all data of
intuitions, and by relation to which,
representations of objects is alone possible.
This pure original unchangeable consciousness
I shall name _transcendental apperception_.
* * *
This transcendental unity of apperception
forms out of all possible appearances, which
can stand alongside one another in one
experience, a connection of all these
representations according to laws. For
this unity of consciousness would be
impossible -- if the mind, in knowledge
of the manifold, could not become conscious
of the identity of function whereby it
synthetically combines it into one
knowledge.
The original and necessary consciousness
of the identity of the self is thus at
the same time a consciousness of an
equally necessary unity of the synthesis
of all appearances according to concepts,
that is, according to rules, which not
only make them necessarily reproducible --
but also, in so doing, determine an
object for their intuition, that is, the
concept of something wherein they are
necessarily interconnected....
[Immanuel Kant: quoted in W.T. Jones;
_A History of Western Philosophy_.]
* * * * * * * * *
"Where am I, or what? From what causes
do I derive my existence, and to what
condition shall I return? Whose favor
shall I court, and whose anger must I
dread? What beings surround me? and on
whom have I any influence, or who have
any influnece on me? I am confounded
with all these questions, and begin to
fancy myself in the most deplorable
condition imaginable, inviron'd with the
deepest darkness, and utterly depriv'd
of the use of every member and faculty."
* * *
"But setting aside some metaphysicians of
this kind, I may venture to affirm to the
rest of mankind, that they are nothing but
a bundle or collection of different
perceptions, which succeed each other
with an inconceivable rapidity, and are
in a perpetual flux and movement. ...
The mind is a kind of theatre, where several
perceptions successiveley make their appearance;
pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an
infinite variety of postures and situations.
There is properly no _simplicity_ in it
at one time, nor _identity_ in different;
whatever natural propension, we may have
to imagine that simplicity and identity.
The comparison of the theatre must not
mislead us. They are the successive
perceptions only, that constitute the
mind; nor have we the most distant notion
of the place, where these scenes are
represented, or of the materials, of which
it is compos'd."
[David Hume; quoted in W.T. Jones;
_A History of Western Philosophy_.]
* * * * * * * * *
Good luck!!