Memento

Rating:
Summary: Best Film of the Year!
Review: In a season of overhyped tripe like "Pearl Harbor" and "A.I." it's heartening that a low budget but brilliantly written and acted film like "Memento" has found a niche in the marketplace ("Memento's 5 million dollar budget is probably less than "Pearl Harbor's" catering bill).

Like a poisonous snake, "Memento" slowly creeps up on you, wraps itself neatly around you for a few hours and then delivers its bite.

The Australian born Guy Pearce gives one of the best performances in recent memory.

One viewing of "Memento" is not enough for many of us to figure out all of its complexities and twists, but in an era of overbudgeted, special effects-laden mediocrity, that's a blessing!

Rating:
Summary: More interesting than you think
Review: If I could control the Acadamey Awards like everybody else wishes, I would definetly put Memento in the Best Picture nominations and possibly as the winner. Why? Because this move gives the audience a big 1-2 punch by filming the movie scenes backwards. At first you'd think it looks normal but the scene before it makes it intense. Guy Pearce does his best role since L.A. Confidential. Carrie-Anne Moss is thrilling since the Matrix. If you want the most suspenseful movie of our time, don' even give a second thought to buying Memento.

Rating:
Summary: Modern Rarity: A Good Film in its Purest Form
Review: Memento serves as proof that excessive marketing does not make a film successful (the same goes for Pearl Harbor). Its rhythmic storytelling captures you within the first few minutes; its expert performances and meticulous attention to details lock you up and throw away the key. Memento exemplifies what few films today can boast: a good film--minus the monotonous advertising, minus the trillion-dollar budget, minus the self-crusading actors interested in only the Benjamins. The only areas in which Memento is not lacking are truth and innovation, for Memento is pure film personified.

Rating:
Summary: No
Review: This middlebrow imitation "art-film" cant hide one thing from true movie appreciators: the gee-willacker twist ending is a cheap betrayal of the integrity of Leonard's character.

Great movies dont all-of-a-sudden turn the character you knew throughout the whole film.

Rating:
Summary: a clever concept, but ultimately disappointing
Review: The screenwriter came up with a clever idea, but couldn't figure out what to do with it. The movie raises questions and builds tension and then ends suddenly without resolving them. The ending was a huge letdown. Lots of writers can dream up challenging puzzles; only the really good ones know how to resolve them.

Rating:
Summary: Memento! Thriller for the Millenium
Review: Saw Memento and found it to be a great story. Told in time reverse order, I thought that to be a great twist in the mix, forcing the viewer to be stronger attention to the story as it rolled on, for fear of missing an important detail. The performances of Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano were rock solid in telling this very twisted tale of murder and deception.

Rating:
Summary: Very exciting, but also very confusing
Review: I had a tough time gauging my reaction to this movie. Originally, I was all wound up with hype from friends and I admit, the story does swing and twist with alarming excitement. Also, the acting is superb, particularly by the main character and his "friend" Teddy.

However, at the end I was pretty utterly confused, and I imagine most of the theater was as well. Don't get me wrong: it's a great flick that deserves to be watched more than once, if for no other reason than to figure out the twists and turns. However, I was firmly entrenched with the idea that I knew what was going on until the end, and then I was desperately searching back in my mind as to where I made the mistake. As an aside, my friend said she understood "partically all of it", so I guess it just depends on your particular viewing sense.

See it, but be prepared to study it as well.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best movies I've ever seen!
Review: Memento is a chilling, thrilling and dramatic ride through two days in the life of Leonard Shelby, a man who watched a man rape his wife, and then suffered a blow to his head, which made him lose his ability to "create new memories". This quick paced thriller threads the begining and the end together, which makes it unlike anything I've ever seen.

Christopher Nolan's direction is so precise and intrecet, he leaves no detail out, everything connects, everything makes sense. Guy Pierce is stunning as Leonard (although he looks startlingly like Brad Pitt) who turns in an Oscar worthy performance. He plays Leonard with just the right amount of humor, sadness and naiveness and it is wonderful. Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano shine as his only two friends, and they compliment each other quite nicely.

Overall, this movie is one of the best of the year, and quite possibly one of the best, most original that I've ever seen. Highly recomened, and it really makes you think....

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant handling of time!
Review: I went to see this movie with no previous idea about what it dealt with, only having been highly recommended to go see it.

I was gladly surprised by a movie who had a very original idea treated in its script, as well as a very original handling of the time axis. There have been so many Pulp Fiction-like movies in the last times, which break down several apparently unrelated plots, which end up being related in the end, that there was a need for something like this to happen. At least, it is the first movie I see that deals with the plot stating with the most recent events, and going backwards. Although this may sound a little odd, they did it in such a way that after a couple of blocks of time, you get used to the scheme.

As for the script,... it is pivotal to the script, to have the story told backwards, as you get to understand how some of the things that happened later on in the star's life (in the movie, those things that happened in the beginning) got to be the way they were. I know this sounds vague, but I want to keep it that way, so as not to ruin your movie-going experience.

Finally, there's an ethical element (not necessarily saying the best things about some of the stars of the movie), which is -I consider- VERY interesting. How people make the choices they make? How they condone themselves? How you sometimes actually would rather forget than remember something?

In short: go see it (or if you're late, rent it as it comes out on video format). I had seen several authentically typical Hollywood movies earlier this summer, such as Pearl Harbor and AI. This one broke the mold and has saved the movie-going season so far for me.

Rating:
Summary: Forget it, if you can
Review: Memento, for the length of it, employs two major gimmicks: the protagonist, Leonard, cannot form short-term memories, and the events of the film reveal themselves in chronologically reverse order. Now you think that these two gimmicks would have something to do with each other, but the things is, THEY DON'T, except for on the most transient level. Hence, about halfway through this pile of celluloid confusion, I stopped at all caring about what happened to anyone. I couldn't sympathize with the characters, since they are either cheats or malcontents, and Leonard's arcane disorder is not something you're ever going to witness afflicting anyone you know, or even strangers appearing in telethons. The plot does contains more twists than a bag of melted Twizzlers, but this does not always make for a great film; here they seem like a substitute for more resourceful screenwriting. I wish I could get hit near that part of the brain that would make me forget ever spending money to see this film. I give it two stars only because the acting was decent. No performance will ever be as bad as Jennifer Lopez' in "The Cell".