Memento
reviewed by The Self-Made Critic

Starring: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano, Polaroid, Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss...what was I saying?
Directed By: Christopher Nolan
Rated: R
Memento

Editor's Note:

How can you exist another day without seeing this movie!!?! Oh, yeah. I forgot. I already told you.

For all that and more, you really, really need to see Memento. I grant this film a rousing 4 1/2 Babylons. See it as soon as humanly possible. Go now! What are you waiting for?

All it needs for perfection is a Jedi Knight or a cute pig.

But you are wrong, it is a masterpiece.

Nothing I say can adequately describe this experience for you, so your only treatment for your undeniable curiosity is to see the movie. Some may find it overly confusing. Others may think it contrived.

But as wonderful as everyone is in the film, the real star is director and writer Christopher Nolan, who paints a masterful portrait on the screen that confounds and abuses. You will see this movie, and then you will want to see it again.

Or maybe not. You just never know.

Joe Pantoliano, who was so slimy as Cypher in The Matrix, is reunited with his Matrix obsession (Moss) and plays Teddy, who may be a friend.

Carrie-Anne Moss is also quite good as Natalie, an impossibly mysterious woman who may be having a relationship with Guy Pearce.

If that doesn't make you a Guy Pearce fan, I don't know what will.

The movie wouldn't work if it weren't for Guy Pearce. He's a stud. He's a star. He displays the kind of subtle desperation that paints a perfectly solid portrait of a character who is, by necessity, continually recreating himself.

So Lenny - yes I'm going to call him Lenny, and he can just pout if he doesn't like it - exists in his own world. Doomed to continually relive his wife's horrible rape and murder, he struggles for the one thing that holds meaning in his life. The one thing that means anything anymore. Vengeance.

Or maybe I'm giving up a little too much personal info.

Think about it, why else do we always look back fondly to our youth? "Ah, the innocence of youth!" we say. But who are we kidding? We were miserable in our youth! People picked on us, girls ignored us, we were covered in layers of acne- our youth sucked!

We create our own memories to serve our own interests.

The movie says a hell of a lot about memory. Our memory. Your memory. The Pope's memory. Its everlasting message is thus:

You learn by unlearning. Awesome, just awesome.

As cool as the story is, the movie is immensely cooler. Because of one thing: the story is told backwards. The first scene in the movie is the end of the story. And each scene thereafter pretty much ends where the previous scene began.

Nothing is as it seems. How can it be when your memory is the least reliable thing in your possession?

Along the way, Lenny - oops, I mean Leonard - meets, or has already met- who can ever know- bartender Carrie-Anne Moss and friend Joe Pantoliano. He has Poloroids of them, and he has written important notes to himself on those photos. And yet...

To compensate, he takes Polaroid pictures of important things and writes himself little notes- who people are, what they mean to him, important things like that. It's the only way he can cope. If something is extra important, he'll have it tattooed onto his body.

If you talk to him too long, he'll forget how the conversation started. He'll forget who you are. He'll forget if he wiped his ass this morning.

After that, nothing.

Here's the gist. Leonard 'Don't Call Me Lenny' Shelby (Guy Pearce) is trying to find the man who raped and murdered his wife. The problem is that at the same time his wife was being raped and murdered, he received a blow to the head that now prevents him from creating new memories. He can remember everything up to the moment of his accident.

OK, maybe I'm kidding, but it is a phenomenal flick.

The film is Memento. A thriller of dazzling proportions that amazes, confounds, bemuses, and whips you into a blood-curdling frenzy of passion desperate to riot and pillage to your heart's content.

The greatest film of 2001 has just been released. And unless you live in LA or New York, you can't see it for another two weeks. But soon you will, and you must, and let me tell you why.