"!SHIT THE IS MOVIE THIS" (reviewed by OG)

Remember Sammy Jankis.

Remember the past.

Remember why you're here.

Remember where the fuck you left your keys? That shit's hard enough to deal with, especially when they're in your pocket all along and you're rummaging through your freezer (yeah...cuz that's where they'd BE) after 2 hours of looking like a damn 'tard. Now imagine you've lost your short-term memory. Every couple of minutes you forget everything about your past up to a point: the last thing you remember is finding your wife raped and murdered. But memory is a funny thing...sometimes things change in your own mind, and you don't even notice it.

Thus MEMENTO, Christopher Nolan's fantastic debut, begins...in slow motion. Backwards. A photo of a dead man, brains splattered on the floor, fades away to nothingness. The photo inserts itself into the Polaroid camera. A gun jumps into a man's hand. Brain matter recedes and sprays back into the dead man's head as the bullet leaves the skull and makes its way into the gun's barrel. Then the story of Leonard (played with subtle perfection by Guy Pearce) kicks in...in reverse. We don't know what's happening, just as he has no clue where he is from moment to moment, when his memory resets itself and the last thing he remembers is the dead body of the woman he loved.

The Limited edition DVD of this masterpiece comes with commentary from Nolan (extremely helpful to the entire film) and a supplementary disc that includes a 23-minute "Anatomy of a scene" documentary, which breaks down a single scene from script to design to photography to its final screen version. Also included is the original short story (written by the director's brother), as well as a "director's script" that allows viewers to dissect the film's unique structure by switching between a scene and Nolan's annotated film script by using a DVD player's angle-change feature. The DVD itself is packaged in a faded blue "medical folder" style case, complete with psychological tests and profiles on Pearce's character.

As frustrated as the character of Leonard gets during the film's many memorable (heh heh) sequences, I was just as frustrated getting through the disc's material. The drawback (as well as the genius) of dealing with this special edition is that both discs' features are "encoded" into a series of psychological flashcard-style tests, so that you have to actually use your sense of logic to find what you need. I watched this at 2am, when my sense of logic is usually out taking a shit, so my initial impulse was throw the DVD player through a cathedral-style window. The second disc, however, offers an amazing treat: a chronologically correct version of the film.

My suggestion? Go online and find the quick cheats to get to what you want to see, then sit back and take in what is one of the most original efforts of the new decade. MEMENTO is filmmaking at its creative best.

NOTE: Along with Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano give knockout performances....

(6.20.02)