The Memento Bum

After watching Inception (still the best movie of the summer), I had the urge to go back and see Christopher Nolan’s breakout feature film Memento, and boy am I glad I did. Memento came out 10 years ago, and I haven’t really sat down to enjoy it since then. I remembered I really liked its originality then, but now I know it is still in a class all its own.


Memento follows Leonard, played by Guy Pearce, as he hunts for the man that murdered his wife. However, the biggest problem he faces is himself. Leonard has a condition called Anterograde Amnesia which completely erases his short term memory. He wouldn’t remember things within minutes of it happening so he would have to keep his investigative notes in a most peculiar way.

Leonard would tattoo all of his most important findings all over his body, and add notes to Polaroid’s he takes of people, places and things to always keep himself as organized as possible. Leonard believed that it’s his experience as a former insurance investigator, & organizational skills that will continue to keep him on the track of the elusive man that took his wife from him.

Helping out Leonard in his quest is his questionable friend Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), and Natalie (Carrie Ann Moss) a waitress with problems all her own.
The thing about this movie that sets it apart from anything we’ve seen before it, and since, is that writer/director Nolan tries to put the film’s viewer into Leonard’s head by telling the story backwards, and a bit sideways, but never in chronological order. You might think that it is hard to keep a story suspenseful once you know the ending, but believe me the ending of the movie itself will still blow you away. It might even surprise you to know that the whole movie was shot in only 25 days.
There is a special edition DVD that has an easter egg that will allow you to watch the movie in chronological order, but unless you watch Memento a few times as Nolan originally intended it will ruin the genius and innovation that the whole film encompasses.
Everyone that saw Memento in 2000 had to know that Christopher Nolan’s opus was the beginning of new visionary’s world that would eventually bring us movies like The Dark Knight, The Prestige, and of coarse Inception.
If you have seen Memento before, well then watch it again, but if you’ve never seen it, you know what I’m going to say, especially if you are a fan of Nolan’s latest inception of original story telling in Hollywood.