50 First Dates

Or maybe Eternal Memento of the Spotless Groundhog.

Wasn't especially optimistic as V has a known antipathy to both Adam Sandler and Walruses.

Not so bad in the end - there are a few genuinely hilarious moments, and the supporting cast (especially Sean Astin) are on good form.

How did Drew Barrymore manage to stay so serene during Sandler's ukelele singing scene? This is the second time I've seen him doing 'sensitive' and I remain unconvinced.

This movie appears to kick off as a comedy of modern dating mores, goes goofball, situational and then finally doesn't seem so sure it's even still a comedy at all.

I suspect that none of these memory-loss plotlines would stand up to cross-examination by Oliver Sacks. Amnesia is rarely an isolated condition as 'normal' human consciousness includes working memories of your current plan from both past and future perspectives.

Antonio Damasio's research has revealed that the brains of people apparently unable to lay down new memories know a lot more than they let on to their conscious selves. (A notion that Charlie Kaufman explores in Eternal Sunshine, but not the Nolans in Memento.)

As in Memento the scriptwriter's cheat in 50 First dates is to have a fixed moment where recently accumulated short-term memories are wiped like a CCTV VHS tape. But aphasias resulting from selective brain injury tend to degrade our general awareness down to generics, so in practice Drew Barrymore's character would have some deeper issues to cope with every day.

It's not just a matter of not clicking on the SAVE icon at regular intervals, patients like these have trouble learning anything new. In Memento Leonard forgets many things from cycle to cycle, but not that he has an overall gameplan, which is where that story veers away from the clinical evidence.

It has also been noted that time-warped aphasiacs imaginatively compensate themselves when reality doesn't match the world inside their heads. So Lucy wouldn't have needed her father and brother to create a phoney world around her (like Alex in Goodbye Lenin!), because most likely she would have been generating and re-generating the fable herself.