Memento

It has enough cool aspects to earn a solid 3, but it's sad.

 I had to watch something solo today. I couldn't find any of the movies I actually wanted. I checked Xfinity free stuff (there is nothing there I will ever want to watch), Hulu, and Netflix to no avail. I was puttering around my last resort, Hulu, when I saw they had Memento. I had seen it earlier in my search, on my "to watch" list, but I'd long passed the point when I actually wanted to watch it, so I hadn't bothered to see if I could find it anywhere. But, seeing it there on Hulu, I remembered what it was actually about, and I decided it was time to see it, if only to finally be able to say I had.

Guy Pearce is awesome. One of my favorite actors, for sure. I don't think I liked Memento, though. There were a lot of twists, and parts of it were interesting. I liked some of the themes, and the dialogue was stellar in parts. But parts of it also lagged, and it was a bit of a downer. It's slightly reminiscent of The Salton Sea, in ways, but I liked that movie a lot more.

In Memento, this poor guy just keeps on killing people, and doesn't even remember it. I think he'll remember this time, though. I mean, not that he'll remember, remember, but he's got a picture, he can write it down; he'll believe that he did it this time, at least. I'm not sure how he keeps getting away with killing people. I guess they just hadn't found Jimmy's body yet.

I do love that Natalie was talking to Jimmy's killer, and she had no idea about it. She tricked him into hurting Dodd, but killing the cop wasn't a trick, so she didn't really hurt him, either. I wonder how he got those cuts on his face? Maybe I just missed when it happened. I thought that suit didn't fit him quite right. Kind of weird that he took Jimmy's clothes, though. You would think Natalie would've noticed he was wearing Jimmy's clothes. Maybe she thought Teddy gave them to him. I wonder if he'll ever find the money in his car?

It was a great twist that Sammy didn't have a wife. I was really interested in Sammy's story. The movie as a whole was definitely a little slow. It lost my interest in places. I didn't like getting jerked around so much, having the reveals being drawn out so much. I lost patience with it. I liked the opening scene going backwards, though, and then everything else being revealed backwards, too. I had heard the movie played out "backwards," and I thought, how does that work, exactly? That part they did pull off, no qualifiers needed.

I don't think they made it clear enough that he killed his wife. I guess he did. The whole time, I was thinking it didn't seem like the intruder/s killed her, since he stopped them. So it's plausible that she survived. We see an image of her with him, and a tattoo on his chest that says something like, "I did it." But there's a blank spot there "later," in the chronology of actual events, not of the film. So she would've been alive still, after he killed the real John G. And then couldn't handle the "new" him. But he more or less had a handle on things. He wasn't like Sammy, and he could've easily proved his memory problems weren't imaginary, so they wouldn't have had the same monetary problems as Sammy and his imaginary wife.

So it doesn't make sense for him to kill her. Or for her to want him to. And he couldn't have done it out of his own inspiration, she would've stopped him.

I like a lot of the early themes of the movie, like the one about how memory can be changed. It's true. It was profound when he said, "How am I supposed to heal if I can't feel time?" Something interesting to wrap your brain around. It must be torture to relive her death every day, no matter who caused it.
I like that he played a trick on his own mind, tricking himself into believing Teddy was the man who killed his husband. That was brilliant. It's not often you see a character conning themselves like that.

There were enough cool aspects of it that I can give it a solid 3. But it seems like he's never going to have any kind of a life, always getting tricked by people, even himself, so it's just a sad movie.