Memento

A great film needs to be able to hold its viewers captive. Everything else, though damn impressive, is extraneous. Not to say that Memento was lacking in other fields. The plot, needless to say, is at or near unique. The soundtrack did not stick out in my head, which usually means it was good because it did not draw attention to itself, much unlike certain Belorussians in our class. The acting was certainly on par and beyond. The ending is nothing short of beautiful (excluding morally).

A Memento is an object that serves as a reminder of something. What does the director have in mind when he chose this title? Was it "remember Sam Jenkins"? Was it one of Leonard's photographs? (Teddy would be the most likely match if it was). Perhaps it was his "John G." tattoo. I also wonder, if Lenny is such a diabolical villain, then why did he take that picture of dead Teddy at the chronological end? This would only stand in the way of his sick purpose in life. Is his conscious battling him, or is the burned picture of Jimmy getting lonely? If you dig deeper, you can say that this is a representation of his forgotten conscious, the sins he'll never regret. Was Christopher Nolan making a statement about the sociopath? The one in a million warped human mind that cares for no one and might as well forget everything he/she does because they hold no weight on their soul. Leonard is not a sociopath, at least not entirely, because of his deep love for his wife and the remorse he appears to feel for killing Jimmy. From the beginning of the movie, I had a feeling that Teddy had been wrongly framed. The guilty man would have been more suspicious than he was. He would not have slept in his car waiting for him. In the final scene, before we learn of Leonard's more deplorable mental illness, we see Teddy have his keys taken away and thrown in a bush like he's a schoolyard nerd. His futile search for them with the crowbar only makes him look only more pathetic, maybe it was just me, but he exuded this sort of "pathetic-ness" throughout the film. Of course, this could have been used to try to convince the viewer that he is a dirty little worm with no boundaries to his disgusting manipulations.