| I saw Memento yesterday at Loews Broadway/19th. It's about ten minutes too long but quite good. As you may have read, it's about a man who's lost his short-term memory, but keeps himself up-to-date on his own investigation of his wife's murder by tattooing messages on his body and carrying polaroids in his pockets. The story is told in reverse chronological order, so each time he "wakes up" to a new, memory-wiped reality, the audience knows about as much as he does. Reviews have been smartass, comparing it to Groundhog Day and Harold Pinter's Betrayal, but I'd say it's closer to Tarantino (minus the pop-culture irony) and Dark City (minus the aliens). Stephen Tobolowsky, who played the accountant who kept recognizing Bill Murray on the street in Groundhog Day is heartbreaking in a parallel tale of another short-term-memory-losser named Sammy Jankis, who remembers how to give his wife her insulin shot but can't retain the plot of the TV show he's watching. One of the ironies of Memento is that the audience has to hold a lot of info in RAM (i.e., short term memory) in order to make sense of the plot.
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