I can't remember to forget it (POSSIBLE SPOILERS)

Rating: 10/10 (23 June 2002)

I have been wanting to see this ever since I absorbed the hype from the Internet, primarily because it's that "backwards" movie everybody was talking about.
It takes a few minutes for your mind to wrap around the progression of the movie, but once you do, you are hooked. Put it this way, my kids had to wait until 9 o'clock at night to eat dinner because I refused to get up from this flick :^) By the time the last half hour of the movie was wrapping up I was literally glued to my seat. Bathroom breaks be damned, I cannot remember the last time my jaw dropped at the end of a movie due to the fact that I had absolutely no idea what the end was going to be. I loved it!! I sat in stunned silence for a few minutes gleefully replaying the events of the movie in my mind.
This definitely pushed past "Pulp Fiction" as my top "I wanna see this over and over again" movie. "Pulp Fiction" is the only movie that I can even think of to "compare" to this movie and that's not even fair because "Pulp Fiction" was cool because it was a normally sequenced movie that was basically rearranged out of sequence just to f*ck with your head, and we loved it. We know what's going on in "PF", it's just all scrambled up. Well "Memento" is out of sequence, totally backwards, because of Leonard Shelby's lack of short term memory. We (and Leonard) have to relive each step of his life through the use of Polaroid pictures and the ever present Teddy (the wonderful Joe Pantoliano). Guy Pearce (Leonard Shelby), who was superb in "L.A. Confidential," could have just traipsed, befuddled, through his trek and made this a drag, but instead I was as anxious as he was to bring himself some closure. This could have just been a run of the mill whodunit that relied on flashbacks. Instead we are guessing, guessing, guessing and then boom! we are hit with the end and blown away.
If you like a great psychological thriller, this takes it light-years past what you would normally expect. Set aside two hours, unplug the phone, make sure all pets/kids/spouses are fed, extinguish all smoking materials, and prepare to be riveted.....and perhaps Christopher Nolan did this on purpose (and did it so well), the irony is, Leonard Shelby has to go over and over the same things, repeating himself, having information repeated to him, but I want to see this movie again, so does that mean that we are stuck in Leonard's endless loop of a life once we see this movie? An emphatic YES and that's what makes this movie absolutely *awesome.*
Definitely 10 out of 10 stars for this one.