Yo, I'm Jason Serrano. And I'm Jinx, hosting a new podcast called No Skips. In it, we discuss the most iconic and unskippable albums in hip-hop history. New episodes drop on Thursdays, only on Spotify.
This episode is brought to you by Volkswagen. Let's talk about the ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road. The Volkswagen Tiguan. Its sleek exterior makes a first impression you can't ignore.
Step inside to find available leather seats and wood accents, the kind of interior that makes even grocery runs feel cinematic. Under the hood, the available 268-horsepower engine gives it a fun-to-drive edge. The refined Tiguan. You deserve more style.
Visit VW.com to learn more. SUVW, German engineered for all. We're also brought to you by TheRinger.com, as well as the Ringer Podcast Network. Coming up.
Richard Roper of Ebert and Roper in the movies calls Memento easily the best film so far this year. See it once, you've got to see it again. Ingenious. You'll want to stay in the theater and see it again.
The one entertaining experience this year worth repeating. Memento, rated R. All right, Chris Ryan is here. We are doing a movie that caused us both to go get a bunch of tattoos and cover ourselves.
Mine says, fact number one, watch Luca. Memento came out, the release date, it's hard to say, it was 2000, 2001, I don't know. We probably celebrated our 20th anniversary at some point over the last couple months. But this movie has lost a little bit of cultural influence that I think it really had in the first half of the 2000s.
I remember just even in my column making Memento jokes constantly. I felt like it was in there with Fight Club and Boogie Nights and a couple of those other iconic young director movies. And then it lost its luster, ironically, because it's not that rewatchable. But yet the reason we wanted to have this on the rewatchables is it is rewatchable because I still don't understand what the fuck happens in this movie.
If you ask me to explain the plot, I'm not sure I could. Do you understand what happens in this movie completely? I think that the actual plot of the movie, if you lay it out, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, regardless of the chronology of the way in which it's told, is not that complicated. But it does have some ambiguous stuff, like whether or not Leonard is the Sammy Jenkins, whether he did what Sammy Jenkins did.
But the actual Leonard is this guy. He's being manipulated by a bunch of people. He gets involved in a drug deal and then a dirty cop gets him to kill somebody while also this femme fatale gets him involved with her boyfriend dying. That's pretty much like the bare bones way that all great detective stories go.
It's like a guy gets sucked into a plan that goes over his head. It's the big sleep. It's the Maltese Falcon. It's Chinatown.
This is just told backwards. You're right. And the structure works. And I think one of the reasons this movie is special is it's impossible to rip off.
It's a one of one. It will never happen again. If somebody tried to do it again, it would just be like, come on, fuck you. You're just ripping off Nolan.
On Wikipedia on the Memento page, they actually have a graph of how the two plots intertwine. That's really helpful. I do feel like the Internet's helped this movie in some way, but even as I'm looking at the graph now, I'm still confused. And I guess I know what happened.
I think I know what happened, but you might have some revelation that I've never considered. And this movie's been around for 20 years. Well, so this is also one of those things where this was my preferred version of the Internet, was the version of the Internet that was breaking down Memento where you have to go to these weird message boards, which you would also get spammed by Russian bots while you were there. It was actually just like nerds trying to figure this movie out.
Yeah, I think that if you ask 10 different people to give them, give a description of what happens in this movie and what this movie means or is about, you'll probably get 10 different answers. From a pop culture significance standpoint, it really was important. I think, you know, Chuck, our friend Chuck Klosterman, he wrote Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which I think was, what, 2003. And there's a Memento chapter about the diner scene.
Like that was the kind of relevance it had. I think, you know, it's not that, it's not that fun of a rewatch, but I've actually come around the other way. I think it really is a fun rewatch because you pick up new stuff every time you see it. And I think I get what happened now, but I kind of think it's a borderline masterpiece and Nolan's career since then, which is the real story of this movie and the real reason why we want to do this podcast.
Nolan's had such a fascinating career. And this is technically his second movie, but it's really his first real movie with a budget. We're talking about Paul Thomas Anderson with Heart 8, Nolan with this movie. There's this, there's this energy around that 95 to 2000 scene.
It's hard not to think about this movie in that energy, but on top of it, like you look at Nolan's IMDb, which we're gonna get to, and this movie makes so much sense as his first big budget movie. This is all he's tried to do for 20 years. Elaborate movies that fuck with you. Yeah, he seems to arrive fully formed.
Like he arrives as the finished product. Like when, you know, a couple of other directors, like you mentioned Paul Thomas Anderson, I would even say like Scorsese, he makes like a documentary and he does, who's that knocking at my door? But then he does Mean Streets, right? Like then he does the movie that announces him to the world.
And Paul Thomas Anderson is the same way. He does Heart 8, but then he does Boogie Nights. Even though people love Heart 8 and I love Heart 8, Boogie Nights is the thing that announces it into the world. And Nolan had done this like 70 minute black and white movie called The Following in 1998.
And it was just obvious that he had skills. Like if you, if you go back and watch it, you can just see all the stuff there. You can see all the pure raw talent there. And then Memento, he makes for $4.5 million, I think.
He makes it in 25 days, but it's as tight as usual suspects or Fight Club or any thriller, pop thriller from that era. Yeah, it's impeccably crafted and really unusually good for somebody who, you know, the whole story of this movie where he's driving his brother from Georgetown to LA and his brother has this idea for a movie and they just fuck around. Like, yeah, we've seen versions of that, but it's usually an indie movie that's good, but it's a little flawed and you wish you had done this or that. It's usually like, what if we did Reservoir Dogs, but it was Hollywood agents who did Coke and it's backwards.
Yeah. He does Memento. He does Insomnia two years later. And that has Pacino, Robin Williams.
It's a huge, big budget movie. It's in Alaska. It's almost like he skipped a step. And you mentioned The Following.
I didn't see The Following. I saw every movie in the late nineties. I didn't even know that movie existed. Memento comes in.
It really does hit. And it also hits this fun time that you mentioned earlier where, you know, Blair Witch, Memento, where you could go to the movies and not know what was going to happen and not have it spoiled too much. I saw this in the movies. I knew there was a gimmick.
I intentionally tried not to find out about it. And I also didn't have to worry about finding out about it because you could avoid those things back then. You know, and this is the tail end of that era. Yeah.
And this, you know, you mentioned not knowing exactly like what anniversary to celebrate. So this movie debuted at Venice, at Venice Film Festival in 2000. And it kept getting passed on by distributors, even though it had like this amazing buzz. And the festivals, but also the word of mouth back then really meant a lot.
I don't remember when Ain't It Cool News started or when some of those early movie sites started. But if you got somebody like Soderbergh to go around and in every interview he did was like, you got to see Memento, you got to see Memento. It built up this word of mouth that really, I think the internet has kind of superseded any kind of buzz a movie can get coming out. I mean, sometimes something happens, like, oh, people saw Minari at Sundance and they were like, holy shit, I can't wait for you to see this movie.
But it was almost like this weird, like waiting nine months to finally be able to get to see it. Memento seemed to just like, it was like a runaway train. Like they decided to go, not independently, but Newmarket distributed it. And it went to like 500 theaters or something.
And it just became one of those movies, which was a real late nineties, early 2000s thing where you would maybe go see it randomly. And then you would tell every single person you knew that they had to go see it and that they should know as little as possible going into It's hard to imagine that that wasn't the best five directing things. Want to talk about Guy Pearce quickly? Yeah, please.
We'll go into the casting what ifs with this. There's a really interesting monkey wrench one. But I left this movie with Guy Pearce because he's got L.A. Confidential, what, two, three years before and then this one and you just think like, oh, Guy Pearce is going to be around.
Now, 20 years later, he's, you know, the fourth most important character in Mare of Easttown. I don't know why it didn't totally work out for him in an A-list way. What's your theory? I think Guy Pearce has the kind of career that when we talk about other actors on this pod and we're like, something must have happened to this guy.
Right. Like, what's up with it? Like, what's not in the Wikipedia page? Like the Steven, Steven Dorff situation.
But it's like Guy Pearce has that career, but then every seven years is awesome in something awesome. Or in every like five years is awesome in something awesome. Michael Biehn? Yeah, he just works a lot and I don't know if he always chooses the best material and I don't know why that is, but like, he's definitely like very prolific.
Like, he's in Australian television shows, he's in HBO miniseries, he's in action movies, he's in indie dramas. But like, this starting gun with L.A. Confidential, which pretty much like announces him as like the next big leading man. Him and Crowe.
And then for him to go do Memento, you're basically like, Oh, okay, this guy is gonna be like, a movie star for the next 15, 20 years, right? Do you think he got market corrected by Christian Bale? Well, he got market corrected within like, the Christopher Nolan universe. Like, you know, I mean, like, if you put Christian Bale, Guy Pearce, Leonardo DiCaprio, all in, like, and if you take Pattinson from Tennant, you just put them in a lineup, it's like, Oh, no one definitely has a tight.
He does. Well, Guy Pearce is good in this movie. He's awesome in this movie. Carrie Ann Moss is incredible in this movie.
And she has this little run here in 99 to 2000 that is almost like looking at a... Who's the guy in Arizona? Luis Gonzalez, where you look at his IMDb and you're like, oh my God, he had 110 homers in two years? What happened?
She's in 99, 2000, The Matrix. Are you saying Carrie Ann Moss was juicing? I think she might've been juicing here. She starts out in like, Models Inc.
Like, she's a TV actress. And then all of a sudden, she's in The Matrix. Matrix. She's in New Blood Memento, Red Planet, Chocolat in the span of like 18 months.
And this is like a Famke Jansen rounders, kind of those hardened, hot women with baggage parts, and she crushes it. And she's so good in this movie. She also did not get nominated. Terrifying in this movie.
Like that scene where she turns on Leonard is like, Oh my God, this is just like, this is so tough to watch. It gets harsh. Best Supporting Actress that year was Jennifer Connelly won for Beautiful Mind. Helen Mirren, Gosford Park, Maggie Smith, Gosford Park, Marisa Tomei in The Bedroom, Kate Winslet in Iris.
That's a rough group. I feel like she could have cracked that. She could have got one of the Gosfords, I think. When was the last Gosford Park conversation?
Actually, we talked about it on The Big Picture. I actually liked Gosford Park a lot. But that's like a classic, like, there's just too many famous British people in this movie, so they're all going to get nominated. Became a Godfather 2 thing.
I really liked her. I don't, you know, sometimes this happens with Hollywood where these actresses have these three-year runs and then they just kind of get replaced by the next person. Maybe she, I don't know, maybe she had a kid, maybe she decided to phase back. But I thought she was really, really good in this and important.
This won Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay, Best Editing. Yeah, didn't win, but it got Oscar nominations. $4.5 million budget made $40 million. Our guy, Raj, three out of four stars.
Of course. This isn't a Raj kind of movie. He loves, he loves character, strength of character, and plot. And I think that probably broke his brain.
But I think he probably appreciated it, like, the Hitchcockian level of, like, formal inventiveness here. He did. He said after watching Memento twice, he concluded that greater understanding helped on the plot level, but didn't enrich the viewing experience. Confusion is the state we are intended to be in.
He doesn't want to be confused. Yeah. But in my opinion, that's probably the best part of this movie, is that you're just so disoriented, uncomfortable, and confused the whole time. That's what Nolan wants.
He's got you in a yo-yo. So let me ask you, like, did you do any kind of different viewing experiments with watching it this time? Because I think on YouTube before, like, I don't know if they still have it, but YouTube had, like, a chronological cut of Memento. And then you can do it by hand.
You basically go to the end, which is, I think the end is when he pulls up to the tattoo shop. And then you just basically go to the beginning of each previous scene, and that is the quote-unquote next scene in the movie. So did you, did you try doing that at all? I didn't do it.
I'm not a fan of doing that with movies. Because they have, remember they did that with The Godfather 2 where it's a saga, and it just starts in the 20s. I'm just anti. I feel like that's a betrayal of the director, and I like movies, and I care about movies, and I don't want to do it.
But I'm not judging. I'm just saying I don't personally like that. Do you think that, like, after seeing it however many times you've seen it, do you know, like, when Dodd chases him? Or, like, do you know the order in which, like, he meets Natalie at the bar versus when he goes to her house versus when they go to the diner?
Like, because that took me, I actually did have to go backwards to sort of figure that out again. Well, when he, when they have the diner scene, that's sort of at the tail end of his relationship with her, right? Yeah, that's after she's set him up. Right.
And at some point, all those people pretending to interact with him for the first time, it's just not in, he has no idea. Yeah, I get that part. The Dodd part, it's one of my favorite things about this movie where it just comes in and he's in a chase and he doesn't know if he's being chased or if he's chasing the guy. Okay, so what am I doing?
I'm chasing this guy. Nope, he's chasing me. That's like, that's like a metaphor for the entire feeling of watching this movie. I'm chasing this guy.
Wait, no, he's chasing me. And they do, no one's talked about this. They did a lot of stuff to keep the audience kind of confused on edge, where it's like every time they show Guy Pearce's character, the camera's closer to him. They're always trying to, when they shift scenes, it's always in the middle of something happening versus the setup of something happening.
And the whole goal is just to keep you disoriented. You're going here, you're going there, you're going, and it just never kind of ends. It's relentless. The only other thing I wanted to ask you about is that, I mean, I know that we probably, like a lot of this stuff kind of bleeds together now because of streaming and having so much prestige TV and everything.
But one of the things I thought we could chat about is that feeling that would happen, really like the sweet spot of when we do rewatchables a lot, which is like sort of the early 90s through kind of like up through 08, 09, and then maybe a little bit later. But this feeling that you would get sometimes when you would get to go see a movie and you could tell that the filmmaker was going to be a big deal. Like maybe not the movie you were seeing was going to be the one, but you were like, oh my God, this guy's going to have like a 20 movie career. This is going to be so awesome.
And I think that that's gotten a little bit lost because guys and women get drafted into the superhero world so fast. So you make one movie and then you make a Jurassic Park. But Nolan actually had one of those last really cool progressions where he made like increasingly bigger movies and even sometimes missteps. But and then he gets to Batman Begins and then that goes up in Dark Knight and then it goes even higher up in Inception.
And it's like he's always sort of pushing the envelope. I think the only person, the most recent person to kind of have that trajectory for me is probably Kugler, you know, because he starts with Fruitvale and then he does Creed and then he does Black Panther. It feels like a little bit more natural, although it's still sped up. Kugler is a really good example of that.
Yeah, I was thinking, you know, mid-90s, even pre-internet Your Sour Patch Kids, whatever you have, and you sit there and then that wow moment, the last 10 minutes, where you're like, oh! So this guy's a fucking lunatic who's just, there is no second killer. He just wants to, this is just who he is. He is the guy in the Polaroid who's happy that he killed somebody, yeah.
It was so good. And I don't think that any, any subsequent experience can match it. There's movies where like, you know, the fourth time you watch it, you're like, oh yeah. And then it falls into place.
Yeah, when you go back and watch Fight Club with the eye towards Durden's never there, that's one way. When you go back and watch Sixth Sense knowing what happens, that's a way to watch it. Like you can just be like, oh, they don't look at him. Yeah.
But with this, I think that there's still like, look, I think I, maybe I, I didn't read the right articles online, but do you think definitively that what Joey Pants says to him at the end is the real story? I, I personally think it is, but you could also make the case that, you know, there's a, I was gonna do it later, but there's a, there's a fun theory that, uh, he's in, he's the guy in the mental institution at the end. Right, right. That scene of Kobolowski.
Yeah. That, you know, that's an invention in his mind. And that's really him. And that's a parallel of him.
And then they kind of hint at it because they show him a quick shot in the chair for a second. And then he's in a mental institution just dreaming this whole thing. They don't really sell that theory, but this is one of the great things about this movie. You can really kind of come up with whatever your own reality is.
I personally think Pants tells him what's going on at the end. Right, right. I mean, I guess, I mean, and there's no incentive, but most characters in this movie, Bert, Natalie, Teddy, all at various points, tell Leonard the truth because they know that there's no consequences to lying. You know, there's no consequences to scamming this guy.
Yeah. Um, the, the only other ones I age the worst I had is just the guy, Guy Pearce, just like, I, if he had his rookie cards after Memento, you, you took a hit. How are you feeling about Guy on there? It's a great question.
Um, I'm just not sure why that guy's in nowhere, Pennsylvania, uh, a former college basketball star or high school basketball star. I know it doesn't totally add up. He needs, he either needs to be 30 pounds heavier or he needs, you know, some giant scar across his forehead or something. He needs to have lost more hair, probably.
Yeah, there's got to be something a little more wrong with this guy. This is going up on Monday. So I guess the mayor finale will have aired. We don't know like what happens with that character.
So maybe we'll be proven and like be, be surprised or whatever. Mayor. Mayor. Any other, I would say the worst for you?
No, I actually, I thought that this movie remains pretty, pretty timeless. Like I, I think that there's, I have some possibly unanswerable questions that go towards like, it's, it's a, it's era, but I don't find anything that's really aged the worst. I think your main thing of being like, it's, it's hard to replicate the feeling that you got the first time you watch it and maybe the second time once you knew how it went. Yeah.
But watching it, like, like Craig was saying before we got on the pod, it's like picking this movie up in the middle is kind of like, uh, it's kind of dizzying. It's sort of, it's like having vertigo. You're like, wait, what the fuck is happening? Recasting couch.
So the drug dealer that he hits over the head and the guy is the strip. I wish there was a more famous 2000, 2001 actor. Bill, Bill, Bill. How is this guy not Nicky cat?
Oh, that would have been good. It's it is, he looks like Nicky cat. He acts like Nicky cat. Nicky cat was available.
He was on the draft board. And I just don't understand. It's just like, can you imagine how good that would have been if Nicky cat shows up at the end of memento? That would have been great.
I had Michael Imperioli. Oh, awesome. Awesome. Because this is like, you still could have gotten them at this point.
He's still just spider from Goodfellas and he's on the Sopranos, but he's not like super, you know, it's not super hard to get him yet. The only other two guys I have and they may have already been in the wilderness by this point were either uh Madsen or Sizemore. Uh, next category. Could this be remade as a 10 episode Netflix show?
Well, yeah. I'm kind of excited about that idea, to be honest. So could they do it backwards without people losing their mind? I think that the episodes would have to be a half an hour.
I think if it was like a 52 minute or an hour long episode, I think people would kind of just get so frustrated by like feeling jerked around. But I think if you did it in these really kinetic half hour episodes, it would work. I don't think it could have a chronology fucked up and go back and forth. It can go backwards.
I think if you did it as a 10 episode, the reason I got excited about it was, I think you could just ride the short term memory. This guy is basically a killer for hire for all these different people trying to piece together what's going on. And those are the episodes, but I don't think you can skip around. I think that'd be too confusing for TV.
What if it was all turned, told from the perspective of Bert, the guy working at the discount end? Maybe that's the spinoff. It's just all about, it's all about uh Bert. Uh, best that guy, AKA the Joey Pants Award.
Do we have to give it to Joey Pants if Joey Pants is in the movie? Craig, producer Craig. You want a ruling? Yeah.
So if Joey Pants is in the movie, does he automatically get the award? I guess we've never really decided this. Well, did you give the award from when you rewatched the movie that featured Joey Pants? Is that the award?
We haven't always. So I, I feel like he should just automatically get it, but we should have a runner up who's almost like the college team that if, if the title gets vacated, that team wins the title. Oh yeah. It's like 10 years later, like they give the sugar bowl to Auburn because the other team.
Right. Yeah. So, all right. Thanks, Greg.
Joey Pants wins, but I think, Hey, look, Stephen Tobolsky. Yeah. I don't. He's already won this award.
He won it for Groundhog Day. You think he's Stephen Tobolsky. Yeah. I would go with either.
I feel like he's Groundhog Day. Nobody knows his name other than me, you, Sean, and five other people. I would go with Mark Boone Jr. who plays Bert, the hotel guy or Calvin James Rennie, who's died, who's also, he was in Battlestar Galactica and a couple other things.
Well, the hotel guy, was he in anything else or is he just the hotel guy? Yeah, he's in, let me look. He's in a bunch of stuff because I feel like he's just the hotel guy. Every time I see that, that Stephen Tobolsky guy, I just go, Phil.
Phil. Yeah, let's see. I don't think he's Stephen Tobolsky. I think he's Groundhog Day.
Phil, Phil. Oh, I got, Mark Boone Jr. has been in a bunch of stuff. He was in, he's been around forever.
And then he's in Memento. He's in Too Fast, Too Furious. He's in Carnival, Batman Begins. Uh, he's in 30 Days of Night.
You know, he's in Sons of Anarchy for a long time. That's pretty good. All right. That's fair.
I'll allow it. Um, Apex Mountain. Guy Pearce, yes. Yeah.
Carrie Ann Moss, I, probably coming out of The Matrix. But maybe at this moment you could say, but it didn't really lead to a ton for her. Yeah, so this, I would say this is Carrie Ann Moss Apex Mountain. Okay.
Uh, Georgia Fox. So Rip, ripping off ER seasons, uh, is playing the Memento. When does she go, she goes into CSI after this, right? Goes into CSI after.
Okay. But I think CSI is starting right around now. I feel like this is very Apex Mountain because she basically leaves ER to go to CSI. And she's on the first.
CSI started already. So I think, to me, this is, I don't think it's ever been better for Georgia Fox. Okay. Um, I always enjoyed her, by the way.
Very unconventional. Everything about her. And they're bringing her back, right? Because they're gonna start, they're doing CSI again.
Yeah, Peterson needed a, he needed a roof. He lives like two blocks from me. Doesn't he need a new roof? He hasn't really worked out the house in a while.
Have you seen, do you see him around? I've seen him a couple times. It's great. You never go up to him, though?
You can't, I like, you And he's replaced by Leonard in the chair, which makes people think he's in this mental institution all the time. I just want to mention this is an unanswerable question because we don't actually know if he's in a mental institution or not. Here's a good one. Did this movie steal from Mr.
Short-Term Memory on SNL? This was one of Tom Hanks's Tom Hanks would guest host SNL during the late 90s. Yeah. And he multiple times would play Mr.
Short-Term Memory, which would be like, he's Mr. Short-Term Memory. And he would be on a date and he'd be like, I'll have the chicken parmesan. And then his wife would order, or his date would order, and then go back and he'd be like, and I'll have the chicken parmesan.
And he's just like, couldn't. And that was the whole gimmick. And I wonder if like Nolan's brother saw that. I'm sure that was the extent of their conversation on their cross-country road trip.
It's just like, have you ever seen Mr. Short-Term Memory? Yeah, great movie. Let's do it.
Great movie. Let's, let's rip that off. Who knows? My last unanswerable question.
Why didn't this movie have 10 sequels? Okay. Why wasn't this Saw? It just could have been short-term memory over and over again.
It didn't even know what that. Would you want it to be the Guy Pearce sequel, or would you want this to be happening to other people? I don't know, but I just feel like Memento 4, um, Super Bowl. A guy's hired to, to blow up the Super Bowl, but has no, has, has no short-term memory and just like repeatedly doesn't know why he's there.
I don't know. It just feels like Memento 2 at least should have happened. Yeah. No, Memento, but set it inside the Patriots organization.
Yes. The Vincent Hannah, give me all you got award for best overacting. I think it's the drug dealer who strips. That was one of the reasons I wanted to do the recast.
Yeah. Yeah. He's got to be him. He does it.
What's the, what saves the best? Okay. One of the first movie websites, Jonathan Nolan designed it. They made it like the Blair Witch Project where they had clues and you would go and interact with it, but not really learn too much about the movie.
This was a really great era from 99 to 2001. When people were like, we'll use the website to market our movie. I know. And some of it was actually fun.
And then it just went sideways and everybody fucked it up and they stopped doing that. Yeah, because there was, because the lack of social media, like if you found yourself on that website, there was no way to see what other people thought. So you allowed yourself to like kind of give into the whole project. Right.
And yeah, I thought that was an awesome era too. Answer a grade amnesia, I think is days the best. Sure. Many, many.
How would you know the difference if it hadn't? Many medical experts said it was one of the most realistic and accurate depictions of it in movie or film. I don't know what the other candidates were, but they said it was very realistic. This is apparently a real condition.
And it happens. Other would say the best. Chuck and Coco Puffs, he writes a lot about, like, it's not amnesia, but like that sense of forgetting, like, you know, basically how scared he is to forget things because that, like, you know, shrinks his reality. Yeah.
I do think that it is, it is kind of like effective to watch this a little bit, like 20 years later and think about how sometimes, like, certain things are not as at like your fingertips the way they were 20 years ago or 10 years ago, even like you're like, oh man, like I used to be able to name the starting lineup of the 96 Sixers and now I can't, you know, and you do, you do kind of like start to feel the character in a different way once you've started forgetting stuff in middle age. Welcome to my world. Two weeks ago, we were talking some something about Grantland and you were talking about how we did about last night for four years. And I was like, I just didn't remember that.
Didn't remember that we had two writers for it. It's just not in my brain. It's your brain is a nightclub. It can only store so many people.
That's right. The fire marshal moves people out. The bouncer fucking kicks stuff out of your brain nightclub. Another would say the best.
The narrator device. Great framing device. As you know, I'm not a, I'm not a huge narrator guy, but, uh, worked really well. And also they let him improv a lot of that.
So they gave him like what he had to say, but he, he improvised a lot of that. In other words, say the best. I love when he comes into the discount in the one time and he pushes the door, but it's a pull door. So he slams into it because there's like these little subtle touches like, Hey, this guy has no memory.
He literally doesn't know what's going on. And that I love when, uh, when the, the hotel car tries to rent them. Basically he realizes the guy's rented him two rooms. Like they do a nice job of subtly reinforcing, Hey, this guy that people are taking advantage of him left and right.
Yeah. I like that. That door scene is great. I think, yeah, there's, there's a couple of moments of like when he panics because of the situation that I find really effective.
Like that they, they, they do a really well. Another would say the best for me. Um, Carrie Ann Moss working at the bar. Now, when I watch his movies where somebody has a bar, I always think of you in the good fellas pod, how excited you would be to own a bar someday and how fun it would be.
I think like you can own the Carrie Ann Moss bar. Like what drink? How, how low would you go for the bar that you would own? Like what, what kind of, what, what's the bar for you?
How low of a dive bar would you want in LA before you'd be like, nah, this actually isn't worth it. I think that like, if there was like, you know, if it was like next to the airport, if it was the kind of, I think that like the lowest bar I would go to is the bar that, uh, O'Shea Jackson Jr. works at in Den of Thieves. Where it's like, it's kind of shady.
There may be some heists planned in there, but we watch a lot of soccer. Yeah. That, that, so that's your lowest bar. Yeah.
Yeah. I would say worst case scenario for owning a bar would be an airport bar. Just like in the airport. Yeah.
You're actually in the airport. It's like, where's your bar? Oh, it's in the airport. It's in terminal four.
Right. It's like, then you don't really own a bar. You own a stall in the airport. Yeah.
That would suck. Um, last would say it's the best for me is just Nolan talking about how he shot the movie. Get super film nerdy. It's basically above my pay grade, but, um, he shot, he shot it, uh, in cinemascope with anamorphic lenses.
He said, I wanted as clear an image as possible to really put the audience in the lead character's head. Um, he said very few wide shots, very few long shots, no establishing shots. Yeah. You never know where you are.
And then I think that when they would do two person conversations, so if they're doing Guy Pearce and Joey Pants, or if they're doing Guy Pearce and Carrie Ann Moss, no one would get the camera closer to Guy Pearce. Yep. Then, and it's subtle, but you would feel like very much like this was like you were inside Leonard's head, which is great. My only what's age the best is, uh, Tajunga, which I have not spent a lot of time in, but that was like where they shot outside of LA in like the valley.
And they did a little bit of shooting on like victory Boulevard near Burbank. Yeah. I think. And a little bit of passing it, but that grimy kind of like down and out valley where it's like when you're driving through and you're just like, what is great?
What's the deal? And you're there. Yeah. This is like a glass store and a bar.
I don't know what's happening. Why is there a boxing equipment store? Yeah. I'm like driving past a windshield mark.
Yeah. I think Barry's done a really good job with that on the TV show. Barry. I'm just like hitting that side of the Valley where you're always like who lives here?
What's happening here? Why is this store here? How fast internet research. So we mentioned the story of the idea with the brothers, um, took a couple of years to develop new market, gave it a budget of 4.5 million and then screened it for a bunch of studio heads in March, 2000.
All of them liked the movie, thought Nolan was incredibly talented, but didn't think the film would make it cause it was too confusing. Soderbergh does his whole thing. New market says, fuck it. We'll distribute it ourselves.
They get to 500 theaters. They make 25 million domestic. And then they sell the international rights. And Harvey Weinstein, who's one of the people who passed on it, um, tried to buy it.
Couldn't get it. Probably threw a tantr The last 20 minutes of this movie are really, really, really rewatchable. Yeah, basically, like when Leonard goes off in his flannel and the transition from black and white to color is probably the most rewatchable scene, but the killing of Jimmy and then Teddy's reveal. Last category, picking nits.
I mean, I'm not smart enough to really pick nits, are you? I have one. You could argue Teddy should just kill Lenny way earlier than this because Lenny's so crazy that Lenny's talking himself into finding some sort of scapegoat. And if I'm Teddy and I'm just trying to survive, I'm like, all right, enough with this guy.
It's nice to have like a higher gun that I can, you know, sick on people. But at the same time, I'm like, I am now in danger. I'm just gonna kill this guy. The idea is that basically like Teddy wants to keep Leonard on the rope because he knows in 10 minutes, Leonard's gonna forget what just happened.
But the whole movie revolves around him trying to get to the cash in the trunk of the Jaguar for the most part. So I do think that Teddy could have taken the express lane to just, yeah, killing him and taking the car keys. Yeah. Well, then we wouldn't have had Memento.
I know. All right, I think that works. We completely fucked with our rewatchables format. We have to keep it fresh for ourselves, you know?
We have to challenge ourselves every once in a while. You know, it's like sometimes, we're both married. Sometimes you just have to put on women's clothes just to... No, I'm kidding.
Producer Craig, did we pull that off? Yeah. Tight hour. Well done.
Oh, good. Craig's happy. This podcast was produced by Craig Horlbeck. Oh, you got the last name.
Nice. Yeah. Chris Ryan, so... I'm not afraid to say what we have coming in a week.
Oh, good. I'm glad because people get, like, I think people get so excited to get prepared for the pods. Let's do it. It's the 40-year anniversary of a little movie called Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Oh, hell yeah. And we will be doing that next week, me, Chris, and Sean. So you have a week to watch. We've been doing action movies here basically all year.
It's the first great modern action movie in a lot of ways. It's not an action movie like Predator or Lethal Weapon and stuff like that, but it's the first modern action movie. It's a tiny bit slow, but slow in a great way. It belongs in a museum in the best possible way.
It is just an all-timer, and it's time to do it. The 40th anniversary is the perfect time to do it. So you have a week to watch it, and then you can hear us do Raiders of the Lost Ark in one week. Chris, Greg, thanks to you.
See you in a week.