i found a great
writeup
of
memento
, which is saw awhile ago. when i originally saw the movie i thought it was better than average, but it appears that i missed much of the complexity:
“Unlike “The Sixth Sense” and “The Usual Suspects” — indeed, unlike almost every other celebrated “puzzle film” in cinematic history — “Memento’s” puzzle can’t be undone with a simple declarative explanatory sentence. Its riddles are tangled up in a dizzying series of ways: by an elegant but brain-knotting structure; by an exceedingly unreliable narrator through part of the film; by a postmodern self-referentiality that, unlike most empty examples of the form, thoroughly underscores the film’s sobering thematic meditations on memory, knowledge and grief; and by a number of red herrings and misleading clues that seem designed either to distract the audience or to hint at a deeper, second layer of puzzle at work — or that may, on the other the other hand, simply suggest that, in some respects, the director bit off more than he could chew.”