Memento

This was a very complex film and hard to watch.  The film showed the ending of the film at the beginning.  The flashbacks always let you know the sequence of events leading up to the current event, but it got tiring and boring, and in the end, left some unanswered questions like:

1)  Did Teddy and Natalie know each other?
2)  Was Lenny Sammy or just like Sammy?
3)  Did Lenny kill his wife?
4)  Was Teddy a good guy? 

The transitions between scenes was short and quick and used a flip-flop frame approach (The Art of Watching Films, pp. 190-197).  Inside/out editing was used which made it hard to watch because you constantly had to reorient yourself to figure out what was going on (The Art of Watching Films, p. 198).

Some scenes were shot in black and white I guess to show his past life mostly, but it made you pay more attention to the dialogue than to the background.  I guess the black and white scenes were about his memories and the colored scenes were about his real life.  The director used an expressionistic use of color to show us this (The Art of Watching Films, pp. 236-237).  The colored scenes were very colorful, especially the violent scenes, showing the mess his life is.  A lot of cool colors of blue and being were used in the film such as his shirt, the motel doors, the walls in his motel room (The Art of Watching Films, p. 231).

The film was told in a subjective point-of-view.  It tried to get you to feel what the character was feeling (The Art of Watching Films, p. 264).   It did do this, but you really didn't feel any sympathy for him, especially when you realized he was a killer.

Eerie background music was played to help try and keep your interest in the suspense, which helped, but it made it hard for me to understand what Lenny was saying, so I had to have the subtitles on.

There was a lot of information in the chapters we had to read for this week, and it was hard to put into words.  I thought I was going to have pages to write about, but when it came time to put it on paper, I couldn't come up with much.