eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

I'd read a draft of the script, and to me it was the best thing that Kaufman's written to date. Packs an emotional punch that was somewhat lacking in Malkovich and Adaptation.

er xpost

Did you ever see In Living Colour jel? I think he was at his most funny on that show.

I keep thinking, should I rent the Majestic??

ah fuck it, i was high

uh

couldn't think of a good one

(Except everyone does that. So maybe not.)

(and a time to die)

(was my valley)

"Kaufman, as he showed with “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation,” is not so much a conjurer with a trick up his sleeve as a guy madly sewing extra sleeves onto his jacket."

(Anthony Lane)

i guess i'll miss it though, damn

I think 'Cable Guy' had it's pay off on Sep-11. All that afternoon, watching pundits guess at who committed the atrocities, I amused my sister by saying 'I think they were Aaaayshun...'

possible flaw is the direction. too busy, distracting. (but then maybe that's the point? eroding memories, etc. forgetting things as they happen.)

It's great. Probably not La Jetee great. Definitely Blade Runner great.

I thought it was just wonderful. Just... great. Really great. Gushworthy. I cried for 20 minutes after it was over, and didn't mind doing so.

does this link work? http://216.168.37.61/posteritati/FMPro?-db=PosterBASE&-lay=web&-format=detail.html&-RecID=46806&-find

I thought it was very, very sweet. It made me happy.

It didn't help that i was in tears for almost the entire second half. I figured maybe Kaufman knows his demographic too well (the sweater, the Eskimo boots, the Tom Waits and Beck) but most of the similarities between this movie and my life circa a month ago were scarily similar. If you go to this movie with a heavy heart, it's going to shatter you!

That said, I can't really focus in on specifics from the movie now. I really liked it and there were some brilliant scenes (ie. when Carey is racing back and forth on the street, with his car and his girl comically reappearing just out of reach every where he turns). Kristin was great but i felt like her whole subplot was more or less in there for the strangeness factor, it didn't really add anything to it for me.

But Jim and Kate are radical, and its a great film, a true modern love story. If the Magnetic Fields had been in this, I would have had to be carried out by paramedics.

-- ryan (augustuscaesar2...), March 21st, 2004

Yes, that's what it was like for me. It was so much fun being in the metaphyisical/emotional rollercoaster inside of Carrey's head that I wanted the entire movie to be about that. And it just about was.

Haha but the best part is the LAST bit when he tries to confront the bully!

I wanna see! I wanna see! I wanna see! I wanna see!

But I can't see until Friday at the very earliest. Hmm.

I'm thrilled to hear all the good things about my girl Kate Winslet. I think she is one of the coolest actresses out there. And I've always wanted to like Kirsten Dunst, so it'll be good to see a good performance from her. :)

"You're so impulsive. I really love that about you."

"Remember when you looked at my crotch and you wanted to have sex?"

This movie is an embarassing stinker, but Jim Carrey is kind of a cutie.

If Kaufman thinks that he has one finger's worth of Resnais, he is seriously tripping.

dud: finding out that the greatest film ever stars Jim Carrey

Okay, long-stretch here, but maybe Dunst had the best performance of all? I think of the main two as Carrey and Winslet, and the little Hobbit freak, and the guy I confused with Paul Rudd - but Dunst just slid right into Mary Beth, crushing receptionist.

Donna, I rented My Life Without Me last night just because Mark Ruffalo was in it! The film was terrible, but Ruffalo played a mysterious stranger who got to look all soulful!

I thought Kate Winslet in this movie had as much charisma as a sack of stale pototoes. God, and her hair could only be surpassed in its unfecthingness by Katie Holmes' locks in 'Pieces of April.' Did the two movies retain the same hair stylist perhaps?

I will say that Mark Rufallo's return to the stoner role suits him well—so well that I suggest that he never undertake to play a non-stoner.

Elihjah Wood? Please.

Can someone please acknowledge how utterly stupid this film was? Oh, OK, let's have an office where we erase peoples memories, but let's do the actual work of the memory erasing in peoples homes, and cart around our supplies in what looks like a stolen van.

i liked your conjuring up a 'kirsten dunst dancing in underwear' genre; no doubt almodovar is contemplating his genre-bending contribution as i write.

some of the hysterical praise here embarrasses me, as it would with any film whatsoever.

Lacuna Inc.

haha

I liked his little speech near the end where he explains how if you're drunk, you can just smoke a little pot, and then you're okay to drive again. It's scientific.

How? They'd only been erased once.

See, this movie made me cry, but it didn't make me sad, if that makes any sense. It threw my girlfriend into an awful mood, but it made me feel like sucking some marrow out of something. I'm very thankful to have the memories I do, and I may as well be since, as the movie argues, that's all I am anyway. Hating my memories would be directly analogous to hating myself.

The final bit is of Clem and Joel playing in the snow. They start playing, and then it cuts back to them starting playing again, and then to them starting a third time, and then a fourth . . . . given the fact that we've just seen them talking in the hall and Clem gives Joel basically the same I'm-just-a-screwed-up-girl speech that she gave him in the bookstore (albeit tempered by the added info that they both know *exactly* how their relationship is going to end up), the clear implication is that they keep starting the relationship over and over, having had their memories erased each time. The whole movie essentially becomes a big reiteration of "those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it."

I kinda wish I hadn't just read that.

Aren't we meant to identify with Clem and Joel? And given that they seem doomed to repeat this over and over (including the memory wipe), isn't the point despite what we may pretend we actually *do* hate ourselves?

My blog entry about this.

"Remembering is good if you don't let it be the fear in you."
-- Erykah Badu

I argued this "eternal loopage of the otherwise spotless movie" line with my wife after the movie, and spoiled it for her. "so they got a SECOND wipe and STILL got together? now I'm PISSED OFF!" after a period of reflection, we realized that the chrono sequence must have gone like this: 1. he left the abandoned house after they both broke in 2. he went to the bookstore later to talk to her, the scene where she gives the little speech in the first place ("you're married or whatever...I'm just a fucked-up chick") 3. they got together 4. they broke up 5. they get the wipes 6. they get back together, as she makes the same speech she made before, even though she doesn't remember saying it to him before, because that's her basic belief about herself and not something that can be "erased" 7. gondry decides to fuck with us by looping that sequence but it doesn't mean anything

The eternal loop sounds very Kaufman-esque (and what I didn't like about Malkovich), so maybe Gondry's more upbeat influence is what kept Kaufman from writing himself into a corner.

That can't be right. After she gives him the speech in the bookstore the second time, they both acknowledge that they remember it from the first time she said it. "Ah, I remember when you said that to me..." That was Kaufman fucking with us a little, making us think, "Where am I in this chronology?" for just a second and then revealing that we're right on track. Both of those speeches were from their first relationship. There may be small hints that *maybe* they're in some kind of a loop, but the logic of the movie is pretty linear (considering).

And besides, wouldn't the Dunst character have ended the loop? I got the distinct impression that when she steals all the doctor's files and sends all those tapes out, she pretty much ruins his little business.

Then she gives him the same speech after erasure.

the key to it all was "okay, so how did they get together in the first place? after all, he left the beach house because he was afraid of getting in trouble, and then what?" once we retraced it, it became clear that the scene in the bookstore had to have been their first "date" moment

yup.

I don't think they're necessarily doomed as a couple. You can extrapolate all sorts of things from the ending. (I also didn't think it was a "bummer of a movie" as someone said above.) My take on the final exchange was her saying, 'yeah, this is true, I'll get bored with you, I always do,' and him saying, 'yeah, well, I'm kind of boring, I know,' and then they both say 'OK,' meaning, 'Well, we know this about ourselves and each other, and maybe we'll just end up breaking up again, but maybe knowing that going in gives us a little more mature perspective on the whole thing and we'll at least have a shot at keeping it together.' The 'OK' to me meant, OK, let's maybe give it another go. Which certainly doesn't guarantee a happy ending, but doesn't automatically mean a bad one either. And their willingness to try was at least hopeful.

I didn't think there was anything particularly bleak or grim about the movie's view of relationships.

I feel like I need to see it again to sort out the subtleties of the chronology and where certain pieces fall on the loop (and whether or not the film explicitly or implicitly leads us to believe that the erasing has happened before and/or will happen again).

While the "those who don't know their history..." moral is clear in the original draft (upthread), I didn't think that was foregrounded in the finished product. The ending seems to make it clear that even those who *do* know their history are doomed to repeat it, because that's "who they are". The message, as I saw it, was more "better to have loved and lost..." and the Annie Hall "because we need the eggs" bit (as several critics have noted). In the film, love is sisyphean--difficult, inevitable, unproductive, irrational, but not, I think, ignorant or masochistic.

I like David Edelstein's comparison in his review on Slate:

The philosopher Stanley Cavell has called the classic screwball movies like The Awful Truth (1937) and The Lady Eve (1941) "comedies of remarriage," in which couples are rudely bounced from their Edenic connubial gardens and reunited (after a series of farcical/magical contrivances) in a spirit of wry realism: This time they know they'll live bumpily ever after. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Focus Features), the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman teleports the screwball genre into the 21st century.

There's something marvelously contradictorily human about this notion that we knowingly choose the bumpy ride and that we are suspicious of any enterprise that would deprive us of the bumps.

eternal sunshine offers a love story wrapped up inside an imaginative and beautifully designed pacakge. adaptation could easily have become a complete disaster, it's intricacy and complexity were deftly handled by kaufman. a genius screenplay and an amazing film all the way around. eternal sunshine is touching but if I were Joel, i would simply rate the film, "nice".

I still think I'm right about the end, though!

Adaptation on the other hand, is a brilliant concept and is a story told unlike any other that I've seen on film. It's very nature requires it to force you to think about what's happened(happening) and how it relates to the timeline etc. This was very appealing to me, again, I thought it was absolute genius.

Huh? The memory-erasing angle was the reason the movie got made. Without it, you've got nothing.

I mentioned this upthread already, but the scene at the end in Joel's apartment, where he's playing the tape with his voice on it, is a stroke of genius. The juxtaposition of the innocent idealism of their relationship's beginning with the bitter contempt of its end (on the tape) has an extraordinary emotional effect that couldn't have been created otherwise. In one moment, you have the whole of their relationship -- and you see how it's both worthwhile and fruitless, how they love and hate each other, at once. It's a wonderful crystallization of love.

That part works well as a metaphor for the way people who have just started dating each other tend to create a fictional future to try and predict whether they'll be happy with their partner several years down the line. Rather than enjoy the blissful "ignorance" (as it were) of the honeymoon phase, they anticipate disaster from day one, and they can either say say "Well, let's see how it goes" or chuck the whole thing right then. Usually these forged futures are all imagined internally, and you don't really get to hear what the other person has to say unless it's something you're picking up psychically. I liked how Eternal Sunshine forced the issue and made Joel and Clem wrestle with their doubts as a couple.

it's metafiction transplanted to film; it's an okay movie, but the device is so far from original it's kind of stale. See every single John Barth novel ever written.

There is definitely no "trick" at the end of Eternal Sunshine, I think people are just expecting this kind of thing at the end of movies now after years of Usual Suspects/Sixth Sense "surprises".

re: the ending, from one of the horses' mouths (Gondry's):

Gondry: That loop was supposed to play all across the credit, but we had a disagreement, so I let it go.

Q: You let it fade out.

Gondry: Yeah, because they said it would affect the credits. People would not read them. But the loop was supposed to play again and again. It’s funny, because I think Charlie didn’t like this idea; although, I agreed not to do it because I saw his version and I thought it was good, too. But the funny thing is by doing that, we gave a more optimistic ending. I’m not sure – I’ll have to talk about it with Charlie, if he realizes this – but since we changed the end like that, people seem to consider the film as having a happy ending. Whereas before it was more ambiguous. It really is sad how it works, because before, by watching a loop for three minutes, you have a real sense that they would do the same mistake again and again. And now it’s just like a nice, nostalgic feeling that fades away. It’s not so pointed. Maybe it’s better.

Q: That’s interesting, because the longer you look at that loop, the more despairing it gets.

Gondry: Now, it’s just a nice little conclusion, while the other one, it was like, “They’re going to go forever and ever.” But I remember, I think I had the idea of this shot because the studio was saying the (scene in the) corridor was not strong enough to finish the film; it’s too claustrophobic. I’m not sure I really agree with that. But we tried that, and I think the idea was that you see the image, that they’re sharing time together, but you don’t know if it’s a flashback or if it’s the future. I think this ambiguity corresponds exactly to the uncertainty of what’s going to happen to them. Obviously, it’s not real. We don’t know what will become of them, if they will agree, or disagree and do the right thing again.

Jim Carrey - I hate him when he's doing "the Jim Carrey thing" but he's wonderful in this, just subdued enough.

Kate Winslet - adorable and fucked up. Not just cutely fucked up, but some serious problems - for some reason I liked that.

The horrible, gasping shock of a certain moment with Kristin...

I was unexpectedly delighted with Elijah Wood as a total dick.

I basically like everything Kaufman's done so far, even the not-exactly-popular "Human Nature". I'm a sucker for this kind of thing.

Uh, how am I missing the point, exactly?

the opening credits, so perfectly timed, of joel crying his eyes out in the car, that's everything. the entire centre of the movie is rooted in joel's anguish. there's a quote near the beginning where he's remembering their last major fight and is chasing her down the street and she disappears and he says something like (major paraphrase): "great - the perfect end to the perfect piece of shit story!" things have gotten so bad between them that on some level its clear that he BELIEVES what he's saying. he's that frustrated, that lost. and of course it rings true because most of us have been in that situation, where we've ended relationships and felt so separated from the love that was there in the beginning that our only logical recourse is to assume that we dreamt it.

what's so perfect about the second last scene is that the film's conceit allows kaufman to construct a direct bridge between that terrible frustration (in the form of their lacuna tapes) and the couple's excitement in meeting each other for the 'first' time. that's where you get your answers i think, in the way they happily relent to each other even in spite of knowing what's probably in store. it's hamfisted but its also stupidly powerful, the way their hopefulness and curiosity is enough to wash away their better judgement.

my interpretation of this scene was similar to jody's. i heard the voices in the background as analogous to the baggage that we carry with us into new relationships. they represent all the hurts and fears that you're left with whenever you part ways with someone, things you can ultimately get over but never totally leave behind. and even though they're with you when you meet the next person (and the next, and the next), they're never enough to keep you from trying again.

if joel and clementine end up in a loop, it's probably because they have that luxury! i don't infer anything overtly misanthropic from that, just the obvious: love is a difficult thing to say no to.

I was very glad that Kaufman finally learned how to write an ending.

milo otm - what we are supposed to make of the beach cuts is that the director has made and will make music videos on anybody's dime/time.
-- cinniblount (littlejohnnyjewe...), March 25th, 2004 10:08 PM. (James Blount) (later) (link)

Anthony, you're starting to make me upset.

"Time-lapse" =/ "loop"! And dismissing Kenan's first sentence is positively Rumsfeldian! Are you on dope?

I think I like that ending better than the cuts/loop. (And I'm not differing in interpretation - I'm saying that even if they meant to make it a 'loop' in the first place, that's not how it came out in the final cut. Or it just wasn't done very well, since you couldn't see any difference in Clem's hair or anything to indicate it was a loop)

I agree. I like the ambiguity. And I like mark p's point about the power of that scene in his long post way upthread.

do i need to bother mentioning that i enjoyed this film? i guess not.

the balance between Gondry & Kaufman's apparent 'let's build the story around the ideas/gimmicks/effects' approach and the 'but let's tell an interesting primordial story that raises numerous questions and provides few answers because that's the kind of thing people like us get off on' seemed fairly well struck too. it wasn't too Gondry music-video - it took a while for his trademarks to creep in (Carrey walking from the bookstore back into the room in his friends' house - as visual representation of the seamless nature our memories replay and intertwine with other often incongruous matter - was the first big trick i noticed).

very clever, sweet, scary and funny in places. didn't actually like the two main characters that much (not that relevant in a way). thought Tom Wilkinson was great, Dunst fine, Elijah OK tho he had little to do.

pretentious? mais naturellement!

would be surprised at anyone who loved BJM (i did) and Adaptation (still not seen) but hated this. other haters, not sure what you wanted (you so rarely explain...).

but yeah, it's a masterpiece. i think i need a little time away from it before i comment any further, though.

the sordid end of relationship business was terribly accurate and moving.

i am staying with this dude who misses the point of absolutely everything, and he managed to miss the point of this movie as well, rambling on about gender roles and girls scoring higher on standardized exams or something. i think he's insane.

i have a crush on him

http://freespace.virgin.net/daz.bert/mirror/rudefood/food/dick.jpg

i didn't love the music, but then, i found jon brion's contributions to the films of pt anderson pretty bleh as well.

i thought the dunst/wilkonson thing was really effective and a necessary counterpoint, although its narration was kind of awkward at times. mark ruffalo (sp?) is great though.

The part where Mark Ruffalo scratches his left nipple when he's on the phone with Howard is PURE Ruffalo.

I have now seen this movie THREE times in the theater, which I'm pretty sure is a record for me. (First time was supposed to be with Kenan, NA, and Sarah McL, but was effectively by myself, since we never found each other; second time was with my best friend; third time was with my girlfriend.) (Two was probably enough, but after I raved about it so much, the gf wanted to see it for herself. So.)

And you don't know about it because it's only been a month. I'm still in that phase where I like to work in gratuitous references to her in casual conversation, to brag about the fact that I have a girlfriend.

(Just like Patrick does in Eternal Sunshine! Hey, I'm on-topic!)

Seems like that's the recurring theme in Charlie Kaufman's scripts - they try to appear much deeper than they really are.

Sometimes when I'm watching boring movies, especially relationship comedy-dramas, I try coming up with sci-fi or other bizarre scenarios, or just random exploding-head stuff, that might or might not take the movie into a strange new place but would at least engage my interest. To the extent that I like Charlie Kaufman movies it's because he seems to have the same kind of impatience.

That's pretty Nietzsche-y, ennit. I'm not sure if that means anything, but hey, it mentioned him a fair bit.

It's actually almost hard to recognise Carrey when he's a bearded, socially inept loser and not an hilarious rubber faced goon. The 'well that's working like GANGBUSTERS' goofy voiced bit was the only hint of it, it was oddly welcome. E Wood as a creepy pitiable weirdo was quite odd as well.

see this i don't really see as so awesome or particularly profound, and it was just so spelled out! i thought the ending felt really self-important and tragically romantic in a very uninteresting way.

i disagree very much--i thought the film sketched in their relationship in an unusually convincing way

s1ocki i would respond to your posts but i'm too busy contemplating cassandra's thought that we are suckers for paying to see the endings of movies.

I also have a Crush Of Shame on Jim Carrey now. I feel like the bottom has dropped out of my value system.

i went through the same thing. we need group therapy.

there's too many tear-goggles on this thread.

http://www.designsodistinction.com/images/Robots.JPG

there were certainly elements of this... seeing a relationship in reverse order makes you think of your own rubbish relationships in reverse order (ie remembering the things that made them worthwhile in the first place).

jim carrey has nice facial stubble and is charming, i don't think there should be any shame in crushing on him

It's odd how it seems to have had such an effect on so many people that I generally agree with. There were some lovely bits for sure (the childhood sections, for instance), and I do look forward to Gondry's next film, but the whole thing felt flawed to me.

In retrospect, it seemed to be all working up to the scenes when they were hearing themselves be hateful towards each other, which felt like a great conceit wasted. It just didn't feel like the emotional payoff it should have been. Sure, I cried, but I cry in most films.

I think the problem for me, as others have also said way upthread, was that I didn't care about them. I like the two leads as actors generally (though I did have a bit of a problem with believing in Kate Winslet as kooky American). Shades of Helena Bonham-Carter, yes. Maybe Dunst would have been better in the role. But yeah, I couldn't believe in their relationship, certainly not as one that was worth a dime. Maybe it was a lack of chemistry, but I think the bigger problem was that the film left out anything but their initial getting together (the repeat version of which, on the train, just left me really irritated with Kate Winslet's character) and the breaking up.

Others have told me that that's the point, that it was just a regular relationship between two people, not something built up to be the romance of the century. Maybe so, but then how do people end up so moved by it? Anna says it's like the Every Relationship. But my own long-term relationships have never ended like that, with such a stark contrast between our views of each other at the start and finish of it. Ending up so annoyed by each other like that. Sure, we might have got on each other's nerves at times, but it has always ended in something approaching tenderness, amidst all the frustration. And any irritation has been about what we do to each other rather than what we are. Leaving someone I've loved for two years, thinking they're boring or stupid? No. So I guess I couldn't relate to what they said on those tapes (well, they were kind of respectively boring and stupid, yes, but why did it take them two years to realise that?). I know Joel's outburst was tempered by his subsequent inability to let her go, but maybe I can only believe in that sort of equivocal feeling when it's directed at someone I can vaguely see the attraction in myself.

That hair!

This does seem to happen to LOTS of people though

This is what happened to me too. And when we left she was still totally stonefaced like it may as well have been "Independence Day" or whatever while i was fighting back tears. Then she said in a really understated smart-ass tone "Well, what a movie for a recently broken up couple to see, huh?" I felt like commiting hari-kari.

?

One of my favourite films ever. It had me in tears the first time, and moreso the second.

I thought David Cross was well cast as an extremely irritating man.

I liked them stealing the "patrick is all back of head" gag from The Simpsons.

I didn't quite understand why Clementine's name erased itself from the card David Cross gave to Joel.

The second last scene is incredible, particluarly "WHAT IS WITH HER HAIR COLOUR i really like your hair IT'S JUST SUCH FUCKING BULLSHIT"

The utter unprofessionality of the guys in the startup was nice, and not unrealistic.

I thought some of the "replaceable" scenes (where he's with her, and happy, and then she disappears) are absolutely essential (and gorgeous) in filling out their relationship.

On the other hand, a subpar result for her clearance would explain why she keeps feeling funny when hanging around with Patrick. Is it clear why she reacts so strongly to him calling her 'nice'? The conversation at the start of the film hasn't happened yet, does it belong in one of the other memories?

The decision he makes in the end is exactly the one he makes during the film - that this love is worth this pain. Or possibly, cynically, that they have enough in common for a few months at least vs finding someone new.

The scene with them walking through the trees where he wakes up/his memory of Clementine starts to collude with him is one of my favourite, just because it's where the plot starts to turn.

Of course the movie has its excesses, but no more than I've just come to expect from any American movie these days, even the better ones. Things are over-explained and over tied-up. Everyone needs to be completely clear on the whole "memory erasure" think before we can move on.

I just read Pete's point on DYS that there's an implied film from inside Clementine's head, where she goes through the same process with the same results. I'm not entirely convinced, because she was done some time before (I forget how long - Patrick says it just before he talks about stealing her panties), and I dunno, maybe she's been going to Montauk every day since for reasons she can't fathom.

It's made pretty clear that she has had her memory erased only a couple of days earlier.

I thought, if I was the child of divorced parents with an axe to grind, I would totally recommend this movie and only obliquely explain it to them, claiming "oh I don't want to spoil it."

The pacing was decent and I actually started to give a shit about C+J while they were running away through his memories together trying to preserve her in his mind, which was really refreshing considering my track record with Kaufman protagonists.

Because we're seeing him undergo the experience, these are his memories being erased.

Clementine: Was it something I said?
Joel: You said "so, go" with such disdain, y'know?
Clementine: I'm sorry.

sorry haters

(i look forward to going back and reading the rest of this thread when i have more time.)

And it breaks your damn heart, too.

I love it dearly.

It is on cable a lot now, though, so maybe it's time to gush again.(?)

I've got what Kenan does. He always speaks for "us", right? He always speaks in the general/plural. It's kind of funny!

Do I win a prize?

Can't remember the DP's name but s/he (it's a woman, no?) did an excellent job and the editing is simply awesome.

I like to think of this as my "prose style."

It's the Jerry Springer "Final Thought" style.

Don't ever stop.

It's too late, adam. I must change my ways.

the dp was ellen kuras who is also helming the "Untitled Dave Chappelle/Michel Gondry Project (2005)" (!!!!). she started out in experimental films and has worked a bunch for spike lee (whose recent films, at least the ones shot on 35mm, have been pretty gorgeous as well).

Has Gondry directed any other feature films?

But I NEED to watch it again. Argh.

I assumed a few days; they had the massive fight, he went out to buy her a make-up gift while she had her mind erased, she had already met the new guy and started dating him by the time he met up with her again, he went to friends to complain and David Cross told him the dealio, he went to the office, went away, then ran back and insisted they erase her from his mind that night. At most it seems like a 48 hour turnaround.

The answer to Mary's question about why they came to your house in a stolen van is twofold: 1) They weren't reputable and didn't have a gigantic amount of money; 2) They wanted you to wake up at home in familiar surroundings to recalibrate your erased brain properly; remember you aren't even supposed to remember that you had someone erased from your memory, so waking up in their office would be kind of odd.

Not, like, the Boogie Nights kind of 'sort of'', though.

(You didn't even like the alligator part in Adaptation?)

Favorite movie of the decade.

seriously this movie is extremely visually inventive. i don't think i realized this until i walked away from the tv, trying to follow the film by listening to it (which you can do quite easily w/most contemporary hollywood movies), and i found it absolutely impossible, not to say utterly confusing.
― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Wednesday, July 20, 2005 4:49 PM (4 years ago)

Precisely -- not just inventive, but visually narrative, even from the first moment. There is a full 15 minutes of movie before the titles roll, and all of it is in these over-saturated primaries, like a Polaroid. Then about 30 minutes in, the linear makes-sense-in-real-life stuff starts to break up and give way to dreams, everything gets fuzzier, bluer and then more red, sharper and then more indistinct, all of it in a rhythm that tells a story almost by itself.

The narrative device of "remembering" a relationship backwards isn't a gimmick -- it's maybe Kaufman's least gimmicky narrative device. And Kate Winslet couldn't be more perfect. So wrong, so "nutso" (as she insists that she is not), and so completely sympathetic.

I want this DVD to come in one of those old cardboard longboxes so I can give it a hug.

yeah this is good movie - winslet is so omg i know that girl - might rescreen

jim careys plastic face abilities in the service of portraying depression, impressive!

i like that carrey and winslet are basically playing each other's roles in this.

winslet is so omg i know that girl

I kind of am that girl.

dont see u as the yelling at people on trains type

Well, anyway I identify with her a bit more than Joel, who really is a bit of a sad sack. I dunno. I'm a little manic/depressive, so I got 'em both in spades.

I love this film, particularly Carrey's performance in it, so finding out very recently that he is an anti-vaccination idiot made me much sadder than I thought it would. I mean you expect it from the other chumps, but he always seemed pretty smart.

Well, I figure whatever, the list of known Scientologists on wiki includes Chaka Khan. What the hell you gonna do.

My neighbor borrowed my DVD of this and then got evicted. Fuck the wowd!

I swear I read that as "My neighbor borrowed my DVD of this and then got excited." My only advice there would have been, lock up at night.

Little to add besides that I found this almost perfectly acted -- in fact I think everyone in this movie turned in a better performance than I've seen them give in any other movie.

Receptionist named after Italo Svevo seemed appropriate.

Sort of assumed this had won best picture and then looked back at 2004 Oscars and what? not even nominated! million dollar baby, finding neverland, ray, sideways, the aviator -- i barely remember what these movies WERE. was million dollar baby the one where hillary swank was a boxer?

anyway, this was a charmer. had no idea there was any life left in either "sad sack redeemed by manic pixie" or "tell the story backwards"

I never made that Svevo connection before! lol awesome

had no idea there was any life left in... "sad sack redeemed by manic pixie"

Like her "goddammit, I'm three dimensional - I'm not going to save your life or make everything better" speech in the dream bookstore.

found the ending a total success -- the point, i thought, was to say that their situation was NOT THAT DIFFERENT from what it was the first time around. clementine already KNOWS she gets bored, whence angry with each boyfriend after a time. joel already KNOWS he gets bored, whence contemptuous. yet each time we try again in the hope that it will be different this time -- what else can we do? the only difference is that this time the second go-round is with the same physical being.

jim careys plastic face abilities in the service of portraying depression, impressive!

― ice cr?m, Sunday, January 3, 2010 11:08 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

hah i thought the same thing - he's seriously amazing in it, I can't believe he didn't even get nominated for an Oscar.

guys, c'mon re Oscars. It's a miracle that Kaufman and Gondry got one for the script.

opened 10 years ago today (?)

http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-eternal-sunshine-of-the-spotless-mind-10

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