I must say that the most egregious omission from the Oscar line up for best flick is director Chris Nolan‘s highly unconventional Memento. Unlike the linked review I think it quite possibly does make it to “favorite-of-all-time status” rather than just pretty damn good.
Guy Pearce turns in his best performance yet, sympathetic without being sentimental and Carrie-Ann Moss proves there is more to her than just ‘Trinity’ from The Matrix with her alluring, pitiable and in the end utterly detestable character. Joe Pantoliano is of course as dependable as ever. The structure of this work is pretty much in a class of its own: we see a scene and we think we understand what is going on, but a few minutes later we see the exact same scene but the context has changed, and we realise what we thought had happened before was not the case at all. This happens several times throughout the film, which in effect starts at the end and works not so much backwards as backwards, forwards, backwards again, hop to the middle, jump back again…
This little non-linear gem is certainly in my top 5 movies of all time. Hey Oscar, we wuz robbed!
