Memento

Rating:
Summary: Don't you hate it when....
Review: you rent a DVD, and then wish you would have saved your money, bought the DVD, and were able to watch it more than once? To go back to it, savor it, catch all the nuances and the beauty of the performances (or in the case of Memento, the editing!) and truly experience the film.

Well, Memento is one of "those". 80% of the movie is being caught up in trying to figure out what is going on, so I won't give any more details about the sad fate of Leonard ("Please don't call me Lenny") Shelby, an insurance investigator, who needs to use all his investigative and intellectual skills to survive after a brutal tragedy claims the life of his wife.

Beautifully filmed and written, with a fine performance by Guy Pearce, and a great supporting actor role by a Polaroid camera...
(seriously, a terrific job by Joey "Pants" as a sleazy sidekick; you'll loathe him even more than in the Sopranos)! The movie is an intense experience in filmmaking and film watching! Special features on the DVD are also more than worth a review, and, as another reviewer advised, the film is best to watch with a group of people who will take it apart after the incredibly well-done ending.

See it over and over, if you wish. Buy the DVD!!!

Rating:
Summary: ...how did i end up watchin this?...
Review: ...i mean, did i rent this? did i buy it? was it a gift and if so, then from whom? hmmmm....i wish i had written it down....uh, what was i talkin about? who are you? have i already told you about this?
...
...and thus concludes my chessy synopsis of a pretty good movie!

Rating:
Summary: You must remember this...
Review: see this movie!!! It is so cool! You got a guy who's looking for his wife's rapist and murderer but he can't retain new memories for more than 10 minutes! This makes for some real strange and sometimes quite humorous situations as he goes about doing this. At first I was apprehensive about the movie because I had heard about how complicated it was, but then I just relaxed and realized it's not rocket science-it's just a movie! So what if you don't know everything that happened before and after to our hero Leonard Shelby-no movie gives you an entire biography of a person. I was caught up in the here and now of it as he races about frantically following up clues he's had tattooed on his body and taken snapshots of. I found myself really identifying with this poor guy. I really found many poignant moments in the movie, such as when he says about his wife-"I can't remember to forget you". The star of the movie-Guy Pearce does a really good job playing Leonard Shelby. When someone told me this is the same guy who played the geek cop in L.A. Confidential I couldn't believe it, I mean he really gets lost in his movie roles. That's the sign of a good actor. All in all this movie rocked!!!!

Rating:
Summary: Inventive and mesmerizing
Review: is how my cable company described this movie, so I saw it. I must say it was all that and more. This has to be one of the most original storytelling devices I've ever seen. I won't give too much away except to say that we follow a guy (Leonard Shelby) who has short term memory as he looks for his wife's rapist and murderer. We also see a murder at the beginning and as we follow Leonard on his hunt we find out why the murder happened because we see things that lead up to it. I was captivated during the whole movie trying to put all the pieces together like Leonard. It also had some pretty funny moments too. The guy who played Leonard Shelby, Guy Pearce, was good and very easy on the eyes! Definitely helped me to concentrate during the more complicated parts of the movie. Not sorry I rented this dvd, not at all. Highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Backwards..what an idea!!!
Review: Memento, granted, will take you at least two viewings before you really understand the true beauty of a movie that runs backwards. THis movie is about a man who is searching for the guy that murdered his wife. One problem: he was injured and has no short term memory (injury to the hippocampus). He can remembe reverything very well up to the injury but after that, forget about it. He has to take polorids of everything, write notes, tatoos, all in this grand search for the murderer of his wife.

Here's where the movie itself takes a brand new life. By running backwards, repeating scenes over and over, by the time its over you are left with a full story, a full movie, and a tremendous impact of what memory is and just how a story can be told.

I was highly impressed by Memento and undoubtedly will continue to watch, and re-watch it, each time gaining more from the story, the technique, and the movie itself.

Rating:
Summary: The Emperor is Naked
Review: Friends recommended this movie to me. Smart friends. Memento is a classic who-done-it murder mystery (...) We are deliberately fed conflicting misinformation at the end of the film (or should I say the beginning?). It is as if the director (...) structured the plot-line in reverse chronological order, with the hope that his audience would be sufficiently confused that they would either assume there had been logical explanations for everything or, better yet, they would had invent their own explanations. My friends have come up with differing explanations (...), however these explanations are not necessarily grounded in the "facts" presented in the film. (...)

The real kicker is that many people are watching the movie over and over, hoping to figure it out. Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man will sooner figure out "Who's on first." And that's because Memento, like Abbott and Costello's famous routine, is not a riddle - it merely thinks that it is.

Rating:
Summary: Unforgetable
Review: Three months after seeing this movie for the third time its still in my head and still playing games with it. Incredibly complicated yet devastatingly simple, i still didnt see any of it coming, i still dont really understand how it was all woven together, but boy am i impressed.

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 :)

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic, I really enjoyed this
Review: Simply the best movie I've seen all year! The ending was astonishing, it's really on a par with the best of Alfred Hitchcock movies. Like Hitchcock, the director of this movie didn't make it easy for us and if you like that kind of thing, where you have to involve yourself in the movie, you should really enjoy "Memento". We all pretty much have heard that it's about a man without the ability to make new memories caused by an attack in his home, who's out looking for the man "John G", who caused this, plus raped and murdered his wife. The first thing that really struck me was how he used tattoos, wow, they were weird! They're all over his body, and they remind him of important things about this "John G", and also things he needs to remember every day, like "Eat"! He takes Polaroids snap shots of people, cars, etc to remind himself where he lives, what
car he drives, and information about the people he has to deal with. His name is Leonard Shelby and he's played by an actor named Guy Pearce, who I remembered as being so good in L.A. Confidential. He doesn't dissappoint in this film either, his performance is Oscar-worthy to me. Then there's Joe Pantoliano and Carrie-Anne Moss, and they play people who are important to Leonard, but we're like Leonard, we don't know if we should trust them or not. In the beginning the story telling was confusing because you see a scene, then you have to wait for the next scene to know what happened before that, so it unfolds in reverse order. Don't be fooled, that doesn't hurt it, it helps. You see, we need to be just like Leonard Shelby to get the full impact of the events that are revealed when the movie ends. I'm glad I read the other reviews because they prepared me for this, so I went in with a positive, not negative attitude about this unusual plot structure. Original and refreshing movie, it's great!!

Rating:
Summary: Work That Brain...Think...
Review: This is a good movie, but it is complex and you may not know what happened after repeated viewings. It is basically up to your interpretation as to what happened. Several people in the theatre were overheard saying "that was the worst movie I ever saw." (If you like the typical summer blockbuster movies, you probably won't like this because it is more challenging entertainment) I say watch it anyways and exercise your brain. Too much of those silly summer movies is bad for your noggin. Think of it as a "brainercise." Watch it 3 times and you will like it. Watch it 1 time and you will have to watch it again. Your brain will get used to the extra work it has to do.

Rating:
Summary: Ground Hog Day Revisited
Review: I watched it this weekend and it was slow. I finished it because I don't like to see half a movie. But really, it was like watching Ground Hog Day without the Humor.