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PaperclipPerfector
21d ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Last year I reviewed Barbie and Oppenheimer. I was very harsh in my critique of Oppenheimer, and my review included this sentence: "[Oppenheimer is m]iles and miles below the still-wonderful Memento, which I'm increasingly confident will, years down the line, come to be seen as [writer-director Christopher Nolan's] only film really worth discussing."
I rewatched Memento last night, and... wow. It's nowhere near as good as I remember it being. It's a puzzle to be enjoyed once and then discarded, gaining nothing on subsequent viewings - there's as much point in watching it again as completing a crossword a second time. It's interesting that, long before he was a big-budget Hollywood player, most of the elements of the Nolan "house style" were already on full display here (with the thankful exception of the omnipresent shaky cam, frenetic cutting and bombastic sound mixing). Excluding two secondary characters who receive barely any screentime and whose briefly sketched sub-plot is more affecting than anything in the A-plot, none of the characters feel like real people, but rather robotic ciphers completing their subroutines. On two occasions in the film, Lenny is confronting a man he believes raped and murdered his wife, with the intent to kill him - and he sounds no more angry than if the man in question had scratched the door of his car. And believe you me, there is no conflict between a film having a contrived plot and having characters you like or care about: Psycho, Vertigo, Secret Window, Seven, Fight Club are all psychological thrillers with no supernatural elements whose plots are at least as silly as Memento's (if not more so) but whose protagonists I felt invested in, one way or the other. The narrative structure of the film may be "innovative", but its very artificiality (specifically the overlapping between the end of one scene and the beginning of the next) calls attention to itself, disrupting the immersion every time it cuts to black. Nolan sets up rules for how Lenny's condition works and then constantly cheats them when convenient: Lenny can become distracted and forget where he is and what he's doing by the sound of a door slamming or the act of scaling a fence, but he can fall asleep for an hour with the explicit goal of exploiting his condition to trick himself into believing he is somewhere other than he really is (geographically and temporally) - but he still knows who the prostitute is and why she's there when he opens the bathroom door? The passage of time within the film makes no sense: Lenny murders Jimmy Grants in an isolated location, and seemingly the entire criminal underworld in the city (but not the police) knows about it in a matter of hours. Natalie talks about losing Jimmy in a manner suggesting he disappeared at least a few weeks or months ago, but at the end of the film you realise she was talking about:
"Yeah, but Lenny showed up at the bar wearing Jimmy's clothes and driving his car, she knows Lenny must have killed him." Right, so her talking sadly about Jimmy disappearing is entirely for the audience's benefit. She's not manipulating Lenny in the long-term - that would be oxymoronic. He only can be manipulated in the short-term, which she does so successfully, in one of the only scenes in the movie that really works as intended.
At the time Memento came out, certain critics said that fans of The Usual Suspects were likely to enjoy it, which is accurate, but perhaps not the compliment the critics intended: both films are gimmicky schlock with contrived plots, and twist endings which come off as incredibly arbitrary and unearned, even anticlimactic.
As a pre-teen/teen, I said that my two favourite movies were Memento and Donnie Darko. Donnie Darko holds up. I suspect that a major reason I referred to Memento as one of my favourites was shoring up an inferiority complex: I was trying to conspicuously advertise how intelligent I was that I was able to follow this movie with an infamously convoluted narrative structure. Now, of course, I'm emotionally mature enough that I no longer think one's taste in films (or music, or books) has even the slightest bearing on one's worth or merit as a human being; and the way to show off how smart you are is to do things that only smart people can do, a category which does not include "follow the plot of a Hollywood thriller film". I suspect that a lot of Nolan fanboys are people who never actually progressed to this emotional stage and remain stuck at the mental age of precocious teenagers desperate to be taken seriously by the people at the grown-ups' table; it's notable how, whenever one of Nolan's movies comes out, the fanboys make such a conspicuous song and dance of how you have to be really smart to understand it, and that most of the people who didn't like it were probably just too dumb to get it. Such people bear a strong familial resemblance with those people who go out of their way to mention their IQ or MENSA membership, to compensate for their visible paucity of actual intellectual achievements. (There's a big difference between "dudes who like listening to Tool" and "dudes who think that the fact that they like Tool means they're smart".) Nolan seems to be aware of this aspect of how his films are received and seems determined to lean into it by topping himself at every turn, insisting that a perfectly conventional Hollywood biopic or WWII movie be told in anachronic order for no adequately explained or narratively satisfying reason; or adding an extra layer of impenetrability to his films by the rather crude device of simply drowning out all the expository dialogue under layers of music and sound effects.
Am I now at the point where The Prestige is the only Nolan movie I can honestly say I like, without any qualifications? Christ. Maybe I should watch Following, Insomnia and The Dark Knight Rises just so I can honestly say I've watched all of his films and thought that almost all of them were mid at best and embarrassing at worst - but I really don't want to.
The music was okay though, and Joe Pantoliano gave a good performance.
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