| Rating: | ★★★ |
| Category: | Movies |
| Genre: | Mystery & Suspense |
This movie was released in 2000 but I didn't know about it until recently.
Guy Pearce (the main actor in LA Confidential, The Time Machine) plays Leonard, an insurance investigator whose wife was killed by two brutal killers who also smashed his head while he was trying to help her. As a result, his brain losts its ability to retain long term memory. He can only remember past events before and at the time of the incident and those that are happening within 5-10 minutes duration (short term memory). He was put in an mental institution but manages to escape in order to find out who killed his wife. When he realizes his brain can only retain short term memory, he keeps notes to himself by both writing them on his skins all over his body and taking photographs of people with notes about them on the back of their photos. He uses these methods to track down the killer who surprisingly knows his handicapped memory and takes advantage out of it. This is the interesting plot of the movie.
This movie might give you a bit of headache - well at least for me initially, until I found the trick to watch it :-). You might need to watch it more than once to understand the flow. The appearance of Carrie-Ann Moss (played "Trinity" in The Matrix) and the "joyful" character of Joe Pantoliano (played a deputy marshal in The Fugitive and US Marshall) should reduce some of your headache... :-)
The story starts with the closing scene (the end of the movie) and rewinds (flashback) to its beginning. Well, not really actually... say if the story starts from chapter 1 to 10, the movie starts with chapter 10, then 1, then 9, then 2, then 8, then 3, and so on... You can differentiate between chapters by their color settings (black-and-white scenes move forward, colored scenes move backward). If you watch this on DVD, you can browse different chapters by selecting scenes and go with their flow sequence. But if you want to watch as it was designed by its director, well... bring some aspirin with you... :-)
Lesson learned:
"Some memories are best forgotten"
