Memento

Very clever and bizzare told-backwards device. You're often hit with, "You don't know what you think you know." Matinee.

Rented this with my mom. My brother and his wife said they liked it.

You're told at the beginning of the movie that the main character has brain damage that disrupts his short term memory. There are many ramifications that you might not expect when you first hear about it. For example, he has to use Polaroids with notes on them to remember people and places. And he has to tell people that he might have met them and can't remember them.

The movie starts at the end, with an obvious murder scene. We don't know what happened, and neither does the main character. He looks at his Polaroids and tries to figure out who's laying in front of him. We spend a coupla minutes there, then we flash to him in a motel room, narrating about his condition. Then we cut to outside a building and the look at the Polaroid that led to the commission of the murder. Then a few minutes exposition back at the motel. And so on.

There are several instances where people start to mess with him in apparent good humor. But that sets up later in the movie when a couple of characters use his condition to do things for them by feeding him misinformation. But because the story is told backwards we're constantly trying to guess, "Why is the main character here? Who is this new person? What did that person do to deserve that note? How does he connect with the other Polaroids and their notes?"

The human brain is good at filling in details, so you jump to some conclusions, and a lot of them turn out to be wrong. It might be interesting to see this movie again, and try to see what post-event clues are planted that lead you to guess wrong.

On Mighty's Baby Brother's Total Movie Value Scale, Matinee. Very clever and bizzare told-backwards device. You're often hit with, "You don't know what you think you know."

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