{"id":73,"date":"2005-09-26T14:24:08","date_gmt":"2005-09-26T18:24:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/2005\/09\/26\/73\/"},"modified":"2005-09-26T14:59:39","modified_gmt":"2005-09-26T18:59:39","slug":"73","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/2005\/09\/26\/73\/","title":{"rendered":"Postmodernism and Guy Pearce’s hotness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mr. Pearce may be hot, but he’s a bad actor.  I’ve seen the movie about six or seven times, and his acting gradually gets worse with each viewing.  Nonetheless, I love the movie and I think Chris Nolan is an amazing director.  He splices a few split-second shots that are extremely hard to notice – especially during the first viewing – but which are very important in foreshadowing the plot.  For example, there’s a scene where Sammy Jankis is sitting in a chair at the mental institution.  At 1:29:55, the film cuts to a split-second black-and-white shot of Leonard sitting in the same chair at the mental institution and he’s in Sammy’s clothes.  This minor but meticulous detail is one of the things that makes Nolan such an awesome director…and this leads me to a book Dr. Sample talked briefly about in class.  In Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You <\/em>(or, rather, the article excerpt I read in the NYT Magazine), he argues that movies have become more and more complex as a result of VHS and now DVDs.  Movies now have to stand up over multiple viewings, and this has induced movie-makers to create more complicated films.  I think Memento<\/em> is a wonderful example, because as anyone who watches the movie more than once realizes, there are so many things one misses during the first viewing.  So, I guess this is one of the ways in which evolving media have substantially changed film as an art form.<\/font><\/p>\n

Anyway, one of the little details in the film that I think is postmodern takes place when Leonard’s wife is reading her favorite book and he says, “I always thought the pleasure of the book was in wanting to know what happens next.”  This is a self-referential joke, obviously:  the pleasure in this particular film is in wanting to know what happened before<\/em>.  This is not only a self-referential joke about the chronology used in Memento<\/em>, but also to the way in which Nolan’s film challenges traditional story-telling (where "the novel" is perhaps analogous to the traditional structure of a film).  This reminds me of a scene in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five<\/em> in which Billy Pilgrim listens to a radio program where they discuss the purpose of the novel (or whether or not it’s dead; I can’t remember exactly).  Both texts – Vonnegut’s and Nolan’s – depart radically from the story-telling structure used by those texts that have preceded them, and they both joke about that departure within the text itself.<\/font><\/p>\n

Also, not to get nitpicky, but Chris Nolan wrote and directed this movie, and he’s British.  (Guy Pearce is British\/Australian, and Carrie-Anne Moss in Canadian.)  Is the text still American?  I guess it took place and was shot in America, but I’m not so sure that makes it American.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mr. Pearce may be hot, but he’s a bad actor.  I’ve seen the movie about six or seven times, and his acting gradually gets worse with each viewing.  Nonetheless, I love the movie and I think Chris Nolan is an amazing director.  He splices a few split-second shots that are extremely hard to notice – especially … Continue reading Postmodernism and Guy Pearce’s hotness<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}