So where are you? You’re in some motel room. You just - you just wake up and you’re in - in a motel room. There’s the key. It feels like maybe it’s just the first time you’ve been there, but perhaps you’ve been there for a week, three months. It’s - it’s kind of hard to say. I don’t - I don’t know. It’s just an anonymous room.
Memento is a movie directed by Christopher Nolan (Dark Knight, Inception; If you haven’t seen, let alone heard of those two movies get out from under that rock) in 2000. It stars Guy Pearce, who plays a Leonard (Lenny) Shelley who got anterograde amnesia after witnessing the rape and murder of his wife. So he self-efficaces his body to remind himself of this and decides to seek revenge on the man who did all this. That’s not sad or anything.
This guy loves his tattooed memorabilia.
The movie plays both backwards and forwards, with the backwards scenes in color and the other scenes in black and white. The result is that there seem to be two separate threads, one that begins at chronologically the end of the story and the other that begins at, well, the beginning and they eventually come together at the end of the film. It’s a really interesting and well thought out device that captures much of Lenny’s psyche and the confusion that he feels as he gets taken advantage of by just about everyone he meets because of his condition, as well as adds a certain layer of ambiguity since there is no reliable narrator (the movie is viewed from an amnesiac’s point of view). The movie is thought provoking, bringing up deep thematic ideas that honestly are rarely seen in other movies.
I highly recommend this film, partially because I like Christopher Nolan’s style, and partially because objectively it is one of the better movies I’ve seen.
In other news, The Big Lebowski is overrated. I don’t care if Lauren Faust has a massive crush on it and snuck references into Foster and My Little Pony, the plot is crappy. And that’s saddening, because disregarding the plot it’s funny as hell.
Also 50/50 is good, definitely recommend on Seth Rogen’s performance alone, although Joseph Gordon-Levitt was real good. Anna Kendrick was ok, but it’s hard to evaluate her performance on 20 minutes of screentime based on the role she played. The movie was a little sappy at the end, and I’m not sure if I liked Levitt’s character development but whatever the movie was enjoyable nonetheless.
I figure that every week or two I’m going to churn out thoughts on movies that I’ve watched that I feel like typing random stuff about.
