6/18/05

Before "Batman Begins"

Christopher Nolan's Memento is a pretty clever reworking of noir conventions that pretty much remains that: a clever reworking of noir conventions. Nice idea to tell the story in reverse order, giving us a sense of the kind of dislocation the protagonist might have, but it's basically the kind of gimmick Hitchcock might have used (and did, to some extent, in Spellbound). The difference between Hitchcock and noir filmmaker wannabes like Nolan and Bryan Singer is that Hitchcock creates or uses these gimmicks out of a deeper need, to express his obsessions with guilt and sexual dread; his films as a result are far more unsettling.

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