The Grand Cinema’s First 10 film series screens movies first shown at the Grand. Here’s this week’s offerings. See Movie Clock for showtimes.

Memento

Leonard, the hero of the film, is played by Guy Pearce, in a performance that is curiously moving, considering that by definition it has no emotional arc. He has witnessed the violent death of his wife and is determined to avenge it. But he has had short-term memory loss ever since the death and has to make copious notes — he even has memos tattooed to his body as reminders.



If Leonard keeps forgetting what has already happened, we in the audience suffer from the opposite condition. We begin at the end, and work our way back toward the beginning, because the story is told backward.



The purpose of the movie is not for us to solve the murder of the wife (“I can’t remember to forget you,” he says of her). If we leave the theater not sure exactly what happened, that’s fair enough. The movie is more like a poignant exercise in which Leonard’s residual code of honor pushes him through a fog of amnesia toward what he feels is his moral duty. The movie doesn’t supply the usual payoff of a thriller (how can it?), but it’s uncanny in evoking a state of mind. Maybe telling it backward is the director’s way of forcing us to identify with the hero. Hey, we all just got here. Rated R for violence, language and some drug content. Reviewed April 13, 2001. Three stars

Napoleon Dynamite

There is a kind of studied stupidity that sometimes passes as humor, and Jared Hess’ Napoleon Dynamite pushes it as far as it can go.



Napoleon is tall, ungainly, depressed, and happy to be left alone. He has red hair that must take hours in front of the mirror to look so bad. He wants us to know he is lonely by choice. He lives outside of town with his brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), whose waking life is spent online in chat rooms, and with his grandmother, who is laid up fairly early in a dune buggy accident.



Life at high school is daily misery for Napoleon, who is picked on cruelly and routinely. He finally makes a single friend, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), the school’s only Latino, and manages his campaign for class president. He has a crush on a girl named Deb (Tina Majorino), but his strategy is so inept that it has the indirect result of Deb going to the prom with Pedro. His entire prom experience consists of cutting in. Rated PG for language. Reviewed Feb. 18, 2004. One-and-a-half stars