A Favorite Of Mine

Rating: 9/10 (30 November 2009)

For the first time in nearly nine years since its release, "I had the opportunity to watch Christopher Nolan's authentic masterpiece, "Memento", which to this date holds a special place in my heart. Guy Pearce throws himself into his part as Leonard Shelby, a man who has suffered from a short-term memory loss. Shelby can reminisce the past, but his amnesia forces him to not recall any recent memories.
Shelby depends on tattoos to keep him on track of things and may lead up to finding his wife's killer and the person who's responsible for his memory loss. Shelby also sports photographs of people, his motel and his car as a way to potentially retrace his memory.
As I mentioned before, this movie was excellent and the man behind it all is the British born director Christopher Nolan who should have bagged in some awards along the way. What's original about this movie is that the film's events are reversed. Nolan's intentions are to trace a scene from the past, which are featured in black and white. After the scene closes, the present scenes return in colour. The following scene will conclude the way the previous scene concludes. It's hard to explain, you just have to see it for yourselves to get the idea.
Other strong notables in this movie are Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano who turn in equally compelling performances. The twists delivered by Nolan are out to make you go bonkers, but as the film progresses, the journey into the past will lead you to incredible discoveries revealed. Shelby's memory loss is so bad he would be the type of person to befriend a man who may have pick-pocketed him. Then after a while, he'll forget that he was pick-pocketed only if he writes it down to remember what just happened.
The black and white sequences are placed to turn back the clocks to past events that lead up to the story.
It's not all entirely serious though, there are some funny moments like when Shelby meets Teddy (Pantoliano) frequently and he ventures out to find people who may know him and his mental condition even though he knows what his state of mind is already. When watching the movie, we gradually grow on Shelby and realize that this man lives on repeated events that continually linger on in his mind. Everyday he thinks his wife's death was just recent. I know it's sad to see a person live a life like that, but the character study is very involving and we all hope for a miracle and that we hope he can get his full memory back. It's a bit odd that the events are told backwards, but it was still executed to perfection and succeeds to keep the audience motivated.
Overall it was a crowd-pleasing success and the twists are handled subliminally. The reversed scenes were brilliant and original and the characters are a pleasure to watch. The direction by Christopher Nolan was both crisp and immaculate with an unorthodox method to his madness.