Christopher Nolan: Ranking His Films From Worst To Best
2. Memento
Remember Sammy Jankis? Leonard does, or thinks he does at least; Mementos protagonist is the dual sufferer of anterograde amnesia, which prohibits him from forming new memories, and the pain and anguish of his wifes murder. We follow his frantic attempts to solve the crime and achieve vengeance. Backwards. Back in 1997, Nolan had just finished shooting Following and found himself in Los Angeles, where his wife Emma Thomas had recently accepted a job at Working Title. The man she replaced, Aaron Ryder, had been recruited by Newmarket Films and tasked with finding new projects; after a screening of Following and talking to its director about a screenplay he had written based on a short story idea dreamed up by Jonathan Nolan, Ryder found just what he was looking for. Handed a $4.5 million budget slight by Hollywood standards but astronomical for the fledgling director and a 25-day shooting schedule, Nolan cracked the whip (gently, of course) and canned all of the footage required to edit together the kind of non-linear structure that would soon become almost a trademark. The finished product, which entails two different sequences interspersed a chronological black-and-white series of phone conversations, and colour sequence shown in reverse order is one of the most innovative and thought-provoking motion pictures of recent decades. Memento is now nearing its 15th anniversary but hasnt aged a day. The viewer is forced to inhabit Leonards perpetual confusion as both you and he try to solve a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma edited by a sadist, and many theories abound as to what really happened. Nolan, of course, will never tell.
I watch movies and I watch sport. I also watch movies about sport, and if there were a sport about movies I'd watch that too. The internet was the closest thing I could find.
