Showing posts with label memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memory. Show all posts
Apr 5, 2019
May 1, 2017
Feb 1, 2014
Upstream color (DVD)
Summary: Years after a thief slipped her a drug that gave him total control over her, Kris tries to put her life back together, but she discovers that her new boyfriend seems to have the same strange memory problems that she does.
Video Librarian Reviews
Shane Carruth's first film since his 2004 award-winning debut Primer is a somewhat freaky experimental feature. Kris (Amy Seimetz) is a young woman who is assaulted by a man identified only as Thief (Thiago Martins), who forces her to swallow a larva that somehow turns her into his brainwashed slave. Kris must do whatever Thief commands, culminating in the emptying of her bank account. After being abandoned by her captor, Kris realizes that the larva she ingested has grown into a living worm inside her. She is then picked up by someone identified as Sampler (Andrew Sensenig), who appears to be a combination of sound recording engineer, surgeon, and pig farmer. Sampler hypnotizes Kris via an electronic wave and surgically removes the worm for deposit into a pig. Carruth himself turns up as Jeff—a mysterious figure who may have survived a similar experience—seeking to bond with Kris in a series of weirdly elliptical conversations. Needless to say, Upstream Color will confuse and perhaps even irritate viewers with little or no patience for avant-garde work. But those eager to be challenged by provocative filmmaking will be amazed at Carruth's boldly idiosyncratic production design and his willingness to wrap multiple genres into a stylish and disturbing cinematic experience that looks and sounds like no other contemporary film. One of the year's most original works, this is highly recommended. (P. Hall)Copyright Video Librarian Reviews 2011.
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Oct 1, 2011
Remainder - Tom McCarthy
Summary: Traumatized by an accident that involves something falling from the sky and leaves him with an outrageous sum in legal compensation, a man spends his time and money obsessively reconstructing and re-enacting memories and situations from his past, but when this fails to quench his thirst for authenticity, he starts reconstructing more violent events. Original. 30,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)
Kirkus Reviews
An assured work of existential horror from debut novelist McCarthy.The unnamed narrator begins by explaining that there's a lot he can't explain. He cannot, for example, share many details about his accident. That information is subject to a non-disclosure agreement, but it's also-more vitally-unavailable to him: He can't remember much about the accident or his life before it. He's become, very nearly, a blank, and the voice McCarthy conjures for this nonentity is an eerily precise, dumbly eloquent complement to his mental and emotional condition. Contemplating the crumbling plaster spilling out of a jagged hole in a wall, he thinks, "It looked kind of disgusting, like something that's coming out of something." That imprecision seems sloppy, but it works brilliantly to magnify the narrator's sense of abjection. The accident, which also wrecked his body, has forced him to relearn rote tasks like walking and eating. He begins to feel disconnected from other people, and he suspects that his life is no longer quite real. He decides to create his own little universe, and the millions of pounds he won in a post-accident settlement make his wishes reality. This project begins fairly innocuously, and although it quickly becomes weirder and more dangerous, McCarthy infuses the story with an uncanny sense of foreboding long before his protagonist decides to recreate a murder scene for his own amusement. It's tempting to call this a postmodern parable or allegory for a virtual age, but to reduce this novel to the level of the didactic is to overlook its considerable, creepy power.Perfectly disturbing. Copyright Kirkus 2006 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
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Jan 4, 2011
The mysterious flame of Queen Loana: an illustrated novel - Umberto Eco
Summary: Having suffered a complete loss of memory regarding every aspect of his identity, Yambo withdraws to a family home outside of Milan, where he sorts through boxes of old records and experiences memories in the form of a graphic novel. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
/*Starred Review*/ Eco, best known for the popular medieval murder-mystery tale The Name of the Rose (1983), continually tests himself and his devoted readers by composing, one after another, deeply cerebral novels teeming with erudition and offering plotlines into which he weaves (almost pours) learned discussions of history, religion, and philosophy. What saves his fiction from aridity and pretension, however, is his compelling storytelling and greatly sympathetic characters. His new novel, demonstrating this combination of traits to the fullest, is about a middle-aged man, an Italian rare-book dealer, who falls into a state of amnesia and must attempt to recover his memory. In other words, he seeks to relearn who "I" is. Yambo--the man's nickname--spends several weeks in his old family home in a rural village, sorting through the accumulated artifacts of recent family history and his own childhood. Surely these comic books and illustrated children's weeklies will prove to be a successful therapy; he desperately hopes they will prompt his memory. The novel's literal level almost sports the pacing of a thriller as Yambo pieces his past together, and on a more metaphysical level, it addresses provocative and never outdated or irrelevant questions about the integrity of one's identity and the irresistible attempt to estimate, while still a part of the community of the living, one's lasting imprint on the global slate. ((Reviewed March 1, 2005)) Copyright 2005 Booklist Reviews.
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