Short Review: Following.

Premise: A tri-split narrative tells the story of a young man who likes to follow people who meets another guy who likes to burgle homes just to see how people really are... and the blonde woman between them.

Starring: Jeremy Theobald, Alex Haw, and Lucy Russell.

My Reaction: This was Christopher Nolan's first feature-length film. It's really low budget and black-and-white. It's about the same budget as Kevin Smith's Clerks., though the black-and-white is much darker here. The acting and dialogue is excellent. The movie is very reminiscent of Memento, though to me, not as good. Though this is also the kind of movie one would have to watch more than once to grasp completely. Early on (like, the first 20-30 minutes), I was horribly confused as to what the heck was going on. I think it was mostly due to not realizing at first the split narrative was the same story at different points in time (which was mostly due to not recognizing the main actor's face once he's cleaned up a bit). The split narrative works much better in Memento, mostly because this use of it seems a bit forced. It's just the one story told parallel to each other from different points in time (though the DVD does have the option of watching it chronologically). The movie is barely over an hour long, so taking half the movie to get used to what's going on is too much. However, all that being said, the ending is freaking fantastic. That's pretty much the only reason I gave the movie as high of a score as I did (based solely on a single viewing). It was tough to score already, but the ending was so great, I'm not sure why it isn't talked about more (especially with Nolan's rising popularity). It's not exactly a heist film, but it's a conman film, which follows similar territories... kinda like Lucky Number Slevin. If you're a fan of Memento, I really recommend it, although it's much slower in pace.


A Keanu 'Whoa'