Reviews
Memento (2000)
Surprisingly original noir, but with a disappointing end
Christopher Nolan make a memorable movie. Unfortunately it's ruined by a too easy ending; the most important thing (and, certainly, the most difficult), I think, for a thriller story, is choosing a "good" guilty: solve a story like this one, it means not-choose at all, perhaps for fear of failing. In this way it really disappoints us, because it was a very well realized low cost story, with a great screenplay (taken from a book), some hilarious situation, and a surprising mechanism: it starts at the end and proceed on the contrary, jumping some time back to show us how it went at the initial situation, then it jumps more time back to explain how it went at the second situation, and so on, flashback after flashback. It's all in the same linear (but reverse) chronology so it's always easy to follow and understand. It's a story of a brilliant detective who works for an insurance company that one night find his wife raped and murdered, and it's hit himself by the mysterious John G. whom he swear revenge searching him, because the police don't believe at his version of the facts. Little detail: after the barrel he lost his brief memory, which means that he can remember all his life before the night of the murder, but after can remember everything only for fifteen minutes. So he forces himself to a methodical research of the murderer with lots of tattoos, notes and photos of his Polaroid, to remember himself all that he's discovering after that night, because every fifteen minutes his mind cleans every facts. But of course he must be careful, and ready, of that he writes on his notes. Besides, the others who know his problem, and tell that are helping him, could swindle him
Guy Pearce plays well in a role half-way between Goofy (of Mickey Mouse) and Ed Exley (of LA Confidential)
Chain of Fools (2000)
Unknown and underrated, but very amazing movie
I found this movie 4 years ago on Italian pay-TV, it was very less advertised and I've seen it only because that night there wasn't nothing apart it, and it was with famous actors like Steve Zahn and Salma Hayek. And when it started, I read the others actors of the cast! One name better than the previous: Jeff Goldblum, Elijah Wood, Orlando Jones, Tom Wilkinson, David Cross. This is a good point to start watching a unknown movie: discover a beautiful cast. Then, the movie, obviously. I love black comedy and generally all the movie with a lot of different characters which want the same thing(s), like Snatch, Big Trouble
And this one is absolutely the best. It's very funny, which is a very hard thing to find nowadays, few times banal, and it has a tremendous pace (in 1 hour and 35 minutes happens everything you can imagine). Moreover the plot begin almost at the end of the history, and then it's a flashback followed by another flashback, and so for all the actors, but, that is the best thing about this movie, it's never really hard to figure out and, although it is complex, it's easy to rebuild the history, which is globally believable. It's quite clean (not like the majority of black comedies), unfortunately it has a large number of dirty words (in the Italian version I've counted more of 70 of them), but they are proportionate at the characters. So, isn't a deep movie to think about something, it's the better way to relax yourself sometimes. Discover it, because isn't famous at all!