Memento Review - Max (Yu SUN)

After I saw the movie again during last week's class, I watched it again for the fifth time because I still got some questions I couldn't explain. Every time I saw it, I got more information, or say clues. Some of them helped me understanding what the movie was trying to say, others would give out more question marks. But I have to admit that I love the movie somehow, because it was cut in a very unique way. The two different time lines (the colored reverse order and the B&W normal order) really provide the audiences an opportunity to play a time-line puzzle with the director. We were forced to pay full attention the the movie in order not to miss a single detail. And I realized suddenly after the fifth time watching that I trusted the protagonist (or the direct) so much that I was losing the ability of distinguishing the true from the false. There is a man named Sammy, but he is not the person who killed his wife by injecting over-dozed medicine, it was the protagonist- Lenny, at least I thought about it this way. What made me feel this was that the direct put a few alternative shots about the same scene, this could explain why different audiences gave different clues. It is because that is the canny director's ultimate purpose.
My version of the storyline should be like this: Lenny was some kind of detective, he had a client named Sammy who was suffering the fake Anterograde Amnesia in order to get something. After Lenny's wife was attacked by two criminals, he shot one of them to die but was beaten by the other. His was survived but he had this Anterograde Amnesia. His wife sacrificed her life to test whether Lenny's disorder is true. And Lenny killed his wife by accident. He was so remorseful about what he had done, so he CHOSE to pick some of the fake things (including tell himself Sammy is the guy over-dozed Sammy's wife, his own wife was killed by the two criminals) to remember in order to reduce his pain. So he kept telling himself that he must find the escaped criminal named John G. to revenge. The rest part of the story I think most of us had an agreement on what was happening, and like I said above, it is the part which the director force us to believe the facts that Lenny had written down on his snap-shot pictures. But still, some of the notes Lenny took were true, some of them were Lenny's PICK "Truth".
I love movies that are full of "surprises" like Memento. For example last year, there was a movie named The Time Traveler's wife. I was a little bit confused with the movie's time sequence because the time jumped forward or backward with the protagonist Henry some times and also with his wife's. What makes this movie a good movie is that even though I feel confused some time, I could still get the main story line without losing a single detail, because the director told me the thing that I had to know at what time I had to know. And this is the difference between Memento and The Time Traveler's wife, because the director of Time Traveler's wife does't play time puzzle with the audience, which I prefer.