Tag: Carrie-anne Moss

Dramas

Memento

LizLockeLeave a comment
Image credit: Memento, 2000

I don’t often think about how memory impacts my movie consumption, but this week’s pick Memento (Disc/Download) has brought it to the forefront of my mind. A film I saw twice in the theater during its initial release, but never again in all the years after, I thought I remembered its twists and turns. I thought I remembered the ending. I thought I knew who the good and bad guys were, but I was totally wrong. Turns out, when it comes to this movie, I have amnesia.

Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough film about a vengeful man who has lost his short-term memory asks a lot of its audience. It assumes we’re able to follow as the story is told out of sequence: backward in the color scenes, forward in the black & white scenes, with tattoos and injuries appearing in reverse, their causes unknown. If you make it through with even a vague understanding of the plot, then you might feel pretty smart. Maybe that’s why I liked it so much as a teen and still do now: Memento issues a challenge, and I enjoy being challenged. Technically a neo-noir, the film follows Guy Pearce’s Leonard as he searches for the man he thinks raped and murdered his wife. Characters come into his life (Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano), and you’re never sure if they’re heroes or villains. Ultimately, the whole world seems to be taking advantage of Leonard’s condition, even Leonard himself. There are things he doesn’t want to remember, and it’s easier to move forward if everything beyond the previous five minutes is a black hole.

The story takes place where most of the great noirs have thrived, in the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles. Lenny’s world is one of cheap motels, dive bars, and abandoned buildings, with keys to rooms and cars he doesn’t remember. Maybe you’ve had a night of heavy drinking where things got fuzzy after a certain point, or maybe you’re looking for one today. While watching Memento, I recommend drinking this Memory Loss cocktail.

Memory Loss

2 oz Rye

½ oz Fernet Branca

½ oz Bénédictine

1 barspoon Maraschino Liqueur

Orange Bitters

Dried Orange Slice

Combine rye, Fernet Branca, Bénédictine, Maraschino Liqueur, and bitters in a shaker with ice. Stir to chill, then strain into a glass filled with one large ice cube. Garnish with a dried orange slice.

Nolan would go on to have the kind of career most filmmakers dream of, delivering hit after hit both critically and commercially. He’s often played with our perception of reality and time, in films like The Prestige, Interstellar, Inception, etc., and in some ways, Memento seems like the forgotten film of his oeuvre . It’s gotten overshadowed, fading from our memories like one of Leonard’s Polaroids shot in reverse. Personally, I may have forgotten the plot, but I’ve never forgotten the unsettled way it makes me feel. Cheers!

Action/Adventure/Heist · Sci Fi

The Matrix

LizLockeLeave a comment
Image credit: The Matrix, 1999

I’ll be the first to admit—I am decades late to The Matrix party. When this movie (Disc/Download) came out in 1999, to me it was only a poster on a wall, hanging in the video store where I worked after school. I must have glanced at that picture of Keanu Reeves in a trench coat a thousand times, restocked the tape boxes triple that amount, but never felt tempted to see what all the fuss was about. Well, let’s just say my indifference ended this year thanks to pandemic boredom, a reboot, and one exceptionally good trailer.

The trailer I’m referring to is that of The Matrix: Resurrections, the most recent installment of this franchise which enjoyed a buzzy streaming release last winter. One whiff of a Jefferson Airplane song and the gracefully aging face of Keanu Reeves, and I was hooked. I wanted to see what these red and blue pills were all about. But to do that, I had to watch the original Matrix, a movie I’d successfully avoided for the past twenty-three years. So… I watched it. And I got lost. And then more lost. And then I gave up around the time Joe Pantoliano was gulping his wine. “What the hell is happening in this movie?” I shouted. “What is even real???”

My husband urged me to watch it again, this time with no distractions and my smart phone out of reach. And you know what? He was right. With nothing dividing my focus, I finally understood it. In the world of The Matrix, robots have taken over, sucking energy from humans, placing them in a weird dream state while they power the grid. A few humans have broken out of the Matrix, but then they go back in, but must escape again before either their real version or their Matrix version gets killed. There are also some giant robotic squids attacking a ship at one point??? Oh, hell, maybe I still don’t get it. But the pleather costumes are glorious.

There are a lot of references to Alice in Wonderland in The Matrix, so if you’re having a watch party, it might be fun to make White Rabbits with red and blue rimming sugar. Let your guests decide which one they want!

White Rabbit

1 ½ oz Gin

¾ oz Amaretto

¾ oz Vanilla non-dairy creamer

¼ oz Lemon cream liqueur

Red and blue rimming sugar

Run a lemon around the edge of a glass, then dip in rimming sugar. Add gin, Amaretto, creamer, and lemon cream liqueur to a shaker with ice. Shake until chilled then strain into prepared glass.

This might feel like a slightly heavy cocktail (in truth it tastes like a lemon meringue pie!), but this is a heavy movie in my opinion. It plays on our fears that we are doomed to be cogs in the machine, urging us to rise up and make a change; to be “The One” in our own lives. To believe we have the power to stop bullets and stand up to those who see us as nothing more than an expendable vessel.

I think.