Memento is one of the best movies of all-time

Cafe Society
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In a recent thread I nominated Memento as a strange film. My own post inspired me to rewatch Memento and to check its IMDB rating. While rewatching I was reminded that this was one of my very favorite movies of all time. Its IMDB rating — 8.4 — is quite high. IIUC there are only 66 movies altogether ranked 8.4 or better; these include *Casablanca *(8.5), Life Is Beautiful (8.6), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (8.7), Good, Bad and Ugly (8.8), Lord of the Rings: Return King (8.9), Godfather I and II (9.2 and 9.0). … And about Twenty movies on my personal All-time Best Movies list.

The following is not a movie spoiler; you’ll figure it out before the story gets far. (In fact the first half-minute of the starting episode, 40, has time reversed.)
What qualifies Memento as strange is the storyline ordering. Ignoring flashbacks (memories), the story is presented as 40 story units (‘episodes’) which all take place over a fairly short period of time. Let’s number them chronologically as 1 to 40, But the brief episodes are presented in the film, in an outside-in or backwards order: 40, 1, 39, 2, 38, 3, 37, 4, 36, 5, 35, 6, 34, 7, 33, 8, 32, 9, 31, 10, 30, 11, 29, 12, 28, 13, 27, 14, 26, 15, 25, 16, 24, 17, 23, 18, 22, 19, 21, 20. (For clarity, to make the back-and-forth jumps stand out , scenes 1-19 are presented in black/white; scenes 21-40 in color. Scene 20 starts b/w and switches.)

This may sound like some cheap gimmick, but it turns out it is the perfect way to tell this particular story. Certainly one admires the immense imagination of the story designer. The ordering is justified in that the protagonist suffers from anterograde amnesia (a true medical condition experts say is presented faithfully in the movie).

I like Sixth Sense because of its special denouement . In Memento the grand denouement arrives in scene 20. But isn’t just a single denouement, at least THREE (3) separate puzzles are suddenly resolved in a grand denouement

Yes, Memento is definitely on my All-Time Best list. (I’ve not actually prepared that list, but it does have more than 20 members. For starters, Taxi Driver, Lawrence of Arabia, Chinatown, Snatch, Amadeus are candidates even though they got “only” 8.2 or 8.3 IMDB points.)

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Memento, Chinatown, Pulp Fiction are on my list. I agree with your discussion of Memento.

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Agree. Memento is an excellent movie, if not very easy to follow.

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I agree that Memento is a spectacular film, a daring attempt at an unusual narrative style and it worked perfectly, enhancing the story and giving us a viewing experience that is totally unique.

But:

In fact, there are about 18,464 titles rated 8.4, including television shows. There are at least 200 comedy movies rated 8.4, as well as 73 action movies rated 8.4. Presumably there are many more rated higher than 8.4.

I see that the IMDb “Top 1000” (Sorted by IMDb Rating Descending) gets down to #83 (2018’s Green Book) before ratings are 8.3 or lower, but I’m not sure how that list is put together; pure ranking would seem to be right out based on the numbers I gave previously.

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I randomly met Ethan Hawke at a friend’s house a few years ago (they are neighbors in Nova Scotia) and, in fact, I wasn’t sure who he actually was when he walked up, until my friend introduced him. For a split second I swear to God I almost said “you were great in Memento”, then I remembered that it wasn’t him in that movie but Guy Pearce. For some reason I had them confused. That would have been awkward, to say the least.

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I really, really enjoyed Memento, which I first saw when it was originally released. I should take another look at it. Clever plot, great cast, and an undertone of loss and futility that really gives it some emotional weight. My favorite moment: Leonard finds himself outdoors running and doesn’t know if he’s chasing someone or being chased. The other guy shoots at him, and he realizes he’s the one being chased.

The Wiki article has an interesting chart: Memento (film) - Wikipedia

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To be included in an IMDb Top Rated list a movie or show must have at least 25,000 votes from “regular voters”. The criteria for being considered a regular voter aren’t published in order to make it harder for people to game the system.

Why doesn’t a title with the average user vote of 9.4 appear in your top 250 Movies or TV list?

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All nolan movies post me off for some reason or another. But memento the least.

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Rewatched it very recently. Even if they hadn’t done a good job on the movie as a whole, it would have been worth celebrating for the spectacular approach to showing chronology for a character with memory impairment.

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I honestly didn’t care for Memento. Mainly because of what I consider to be such a serious plot hole that I wasn’t able to believe the basic premise of the film. Namely, if the main character suffers from anterograde amnesia, that is to say he cannot form new memories, then how does he remember that he can’t form new memories?

The movie came out when I was in college, and as one of my electives in college I took Psychology 101. As part of the lesson on memory we watched a video of a real life patient who suffered from that condition, due to brain damage from a severe case of encephalitis. Seeing how it looks in real life was actually very sad. It was almost as if, from his perspective, he was waking up from a years long coma every few minutes, with no memory of anything prior to his illness, and without the knowledge that he couldn’t form new memories. He was a reasonably intelligent guy and could understand what brain damage is, but explaining what had happened to him would do no good, because he’d just forget it soon after. In this state it’s impossible to function in society and he required constant care in a nursing home. His family would visit him every day, and every day he’d act like he hadn’t seen them in years, because of course he couldn’t remember seeing them yesterday. So having seen this prior to seeing Memento, I just couldn’t reconcile what I’d seen about how this disorder looks in real life versus how it was portrayed in the movie.

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This is me, too. It’s the one movie of his where his cleverness doesn’t completely overwhelm it.

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But are all cases exactly the same? According to Wikipedia, there are varying expressions of it.

“One extensively studied anterograde amnesiac patient, codenamed H.M., demonstrated that despite his amnesia preventing him from learning new declarative information, procedural memory consolidation was still possible, albeit severely reduced in power. He, along with other patients with anterograde amnesia, were given the same maze to complete day after day. Despite having no memory of having completed the maze the day before, unconscious practice of completing the same maze over and over reduced the amount of time needed to complete it in subsequent trials.”

That sounds to me like how Leonard, having established his pattern of recording the information he needed to know by tattooing it on himself, and then reconstructing it every time he “woke up” might form the procedural memory of how to do that and be able to reconstruct his knowledge easier each time.

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It’s too late to edit, but I of course I meant “no memory of anything after his illness.”

Possibly. I mean this certainly isn’t my area of expertise and I may very well be experiencing the Dunning–Kruger effect after just one lesson on the subject. But… based on a single class I took nearly 20 years ago… “procedural memory” refers to remembering how to perform a task. The classic example being that once you learn how to ride a bicycle you never forget how. So in Leonard’s case, procedural memory would allow him to learn how to use a tattoo needle, and with practice over time learn how to make better tattoos. But I believe to be able to understand why he has those tattoos would require episodic memory (memory of events that happened to him).

This memory is kind of fuzzy, but I seem to remember the guy we saw in that video would actually write stuff in a diary, and then upon seeing it later would cross it all out, because he was certain he didn’t write it because he had no memory of it, and proceed to write a new entry, which upon seeing later he would cross out… So to me a more likely reaction to Leonard “waking up” and seeing a tattoo he’d given himself would be “Who the hell gave me this tattoo?”

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It’s certainly not my area of expertise either.

Possibly I am a bit more willing than you are to engage in the willing suspension of disbelief that is required for all forms of fictional entertainment. In any case, I enjoyed the movie a great deal, although I did find that it made more sense after 2 or 3 viewings than the first.

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Yeah, it’s my go to movie recommendation that most people haven’t seen or heard of.

I didn’t get the impression that the black and white scenes are necessarily in order though.

It was based on a story by Nolan’s brother. Despite being completely raised together, they have completely different accents (London and Chicago) to mindfuck you more.