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Christopher Nolan's next-level noir movie Memento celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. Wish it an amnesiac birthday by winning Wired.com's giveaway. Unless, of course, you forget to do so.
Building on the success of his impressive indie debut Following – which, like the Oscar-nominated Inception, also featured a serial burglar named Cobb – the cerebral director crafted a nonlinear crime thriller anchored in anterograde amnesia. Memento, released Tuesday on Blu-ray, quickly illustrated Nolan's uncanny ability to create challenging narratives.
Nolan's sophomore cinematic triumph also helped move forward film noir's tropes and traps for a new millennium. Grasping for prefixes like tech- and neo-, noir nerds have had a hell of a time admitting that classifying variations on film noir's classic theme – as seen in Memento (and The Dark Knight, and Inception, and ...) – has become an exercise in geeky futility.
Noir even has a subdivision dedicated to films that are drenched in sunlight, like Roman Polanski's epochal Chinatown and Nolan's remake of director Erik Skjoldbjærg's Arctic thriller, Insomnia.
Nolan discusses Memento's legacy in a featurette created for the anniversary Blu-ray release, but we're interested on where you stand on film noir's evolution into neo-noir, tech-noir or whatever academics and other geeks are calling it these days.
So nerd out on your favorite next-gen noir – Blade Runner? Twin Peaks? Inception? – in the comments section below. We'll hand off five Memento: 10th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray packages to the five geekiest entries. And we promise to remember to mail them.
Contest ends 12:01 a.m. Pacific on March 1, 2011. Winners restricted to the United States Note: If you do not have an e-mail address or Twitter handle associated with your Disqus login, you must include contact information in your comment to be eligible. Any winner who does not respond to Wired.com’s notification within 72 hours will forfeit the prize.
Image courtesy Lions Gate
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