Critique The Critic: Memento

My First Art of Film Blog entry will be about Owen Gleiberman's Review in the popular magazine Entertainment Weekly about a film I just recently watched, Memento. Owen gives it overall a very positive review, giving it a final score of "A" using the standard letter grade system. I generally agree with his review of the film as it reflects a lot of my thoughts about it. I enjoyed the film very much. Gleiberman gives a brief synopsis of the film intertwined into his analysis of what happens in it. He describes the film as a " obsessive and hypnotic thriller", which i think fits the movie perfectly. As it is shown chronologically backwards, it pays very fine attention to detail about how things happened in the previous scene.

Although I agree with his review on the film, i find the way he critiques it to be very odd and ineffective. He ruins key parts in the film, not even marked by the usual *Spoiler Alert* tag frequently found across the net, and takes away some of the enjoyment in having the viewers experience the movie for themselves. Now I realize that reading a review will always have the risk of spoilers, but Owen takes it to the extreme, citing examples of the work for pretty much all of the review and not taking in his own analysis.

"Leonard tracks his investigation -- and, indeed, his very existence -- through a series of Polaroid photographs adorned with hastily scribbled captions that attain a nearly totemic significance (''Don't believe his lies''), and by adorning his body with elaborate black ink tattoos of ''facts'' and clues that add up to an enigmatic map of the killer's profile."

This ruins some of the magic of the movie as it is a major part in it and instead of having people figure it out for themselves, he makes it so that they are expecting certain elements of it to occur which makes it not as special of a movie. He grammar and word choice is also not what I'd expect from a well paid reviewer of a magazine such as EW. Now I'm not expecting some pretentious review with long, drawn out metaphors trying to relate this movie to others, but there is a clear example of this hum-drum language in the following passage lifted directly from the review.

''Memento'' has scenes that command you with their cleverness, like the one in which we learn how Natalie got her bashed lip, or the moment when Leonard finds himself in the middle of a chase and can't remember whether he's the pursuer or the pursued."

This level of writing is about on par with a 13 year old, rambling off random examples of scenes that the viewer will probably find unique and entertaining instead of really delving into what makes the movie stand out so much from the rest. Overall the film really is a wonderful work of art, and overall i generally think that Owen's review was favorable enough to draw major crowds to the movie theater. However, I do not believe that his lackluster review style of putting such a unique movie into drab, layman's terms really does it justice.