Following Reviews

(MU) Buen debut de Nolan, ya está su ruptura fina, planificada, de la linealidad, asociada a la memoria de los personajes. El engaño de todos contra todos en una atmósfera blanco y negro muy noir...

Since i'm crazy about Christopher Nolan, watching this movie was only a matter of time for me, and indie movies interests me the most, so this is a double pleasure for me.

Shot with a budget of 6000$ in a duration of a year, with non actors, and it was written, directed, and co-produced by Nolan, this is as creative as it can be, it's like a lower budget memento, which made it a blast for me, because creative director is creative, he doesn't need gimmicks or a blockbuster to show up his skills, he just needs talent and devotion, although Christopher Nolan have a very successful career now and have created masterpieces (The Prestige, Inception, The Dark Knight), but i also thinks that this movie should be to him as Clerks to Kevin smith, because taking in consideration how the movie was made, it's a masterpiece.

And the movie is very Christopher Nolany, with a confusing atmosphere, multi-layered timeline and a twist at the end, it's just can't get better than this, a non linear story with very interesting characters, that are so well written, it looked so real, even though they weren't really conventional people, a story about a thief who breaks into houses just to mess with people, steal personal items and play with their emotions, and he meets this "writer" who follow people to study them from a far just to have something to write about, it's was noir gold, and had so many twist, that i as a Christopher Nolan fan, didn't think that this movie could surprise me, but i was wrong.

Like i said before, the people in this movie aren't actors, they were normal people with actual jobs, but you can't get that until you read about it, although their performances weren't something special, but still very believable and much better than what mainstream actors can do, the only problem that i had with this movie were the violent scenes because it looked very fake, and i can understand that because these things cost money which the director didn't had.

Overall, a fantastic thriller movie that defiantly deserve more recognition, and even though Nolan late movies are way better, this movie still deserve a look.

Since I'm a huge fan of Christopher Nolan's work, I was definitely eager to check his directing debut. Nolan has become one of the most successful and popular mainstream directors but the reactions towards his movies are quite extreme nowadays. Indeed, on one hand, you have his die-hard fans (I'm a fan but not so devoted) who push all his movies on the top of such lists like the Imdb top 250 or 'Listal's 100 Films To See Before You Die' but, on the other hand, more and more people are getting rather annoyed with this fanatism and think he is actually rather overrated. Anyway, 15 years ago, he made this very impressive directing debut which was barely seen when it was released but he sure got noticed. Apparently, like some other notable directors before him like David Lynch or Kevin Smith, he made this flick on a micro-budget with non-professional actors. The shooting of this film took over a year and because all the cast and crew members had other full-time jobs, they were only able to film on Saturdays about 15 minutes of footage until photography had been completed. Personally, I thought it was a rather fascinating plot, about a regular guy obsessively following some strangers. The directing was also pretty solid and the only real weakness would be the acting which was not really impressive but, back then, Nolan didn't have at his disposal such actors like Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Al Pacino or Morgan Freeman. To conclude, I think it is a very good directing debut and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in Christopher Nolan's work.

Year 2000 saw the suspense thriller MEMENTO starring Guy Pearce, wherein the uniqueness of the script resides in the fact that the plot unfolds from the end and proceeds backwards. FOLLOWING has somewhat of that same flavor, though not so engagingly or cleverly done.
In this film, Jeremy Theobald plays Bill, a young Londoner addicted to following people - not with any malicious intent, but just out of curiosity. After a period of initial confusion for which the viewer might be excused, it becomes apparent that scenes from three timelines are being depicted. There's the present, in which Bill is telling an interviewer (lawyer, psychologist, police official ?) the genesis of his current situation, beginning with his practice of following strangers. There's the relatively distant past, in which Bill is confronted by one of his quarry, Cobb (Alex Haw), a sartorially elegant house burglar, who befriends Bill and includes him on his capers. Finally, the relatively recent past, in which Bill is dating The Blond (Lucy Russell), one of the pair's victims that isn't what she appears to be. The first clue I had that three timelines were running intermixed was Bill's facial appearance: scruffily bearded and unkemptly dressed, well dressed and clean shaven, and the latter plus a bruised face.

The plot twist, when it finally comes, is sufficiently unexpected to raise an eyebrow. However, unlike Pearce's Leonard in MEMENTO, the characters are all so universally unattractive that it was hard to care when the patsy among them took the fall. Also, the director's decision to photograph in black and white added nothing as far as I was concerned; color would have sufficed. Blessedly, the run time is only 70 minutes. Perhaps they were on a shoestring budget.

My advice - rent MEMENTO instead.