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[bryant]

You either like Charlie Kaufman movies or you don’t, and if you do, you’re already going to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, so no big review here. It’s in the top half of Kaufman films for me.

OK, OK. Better than Human Nature and Adaptation, and on a par with Being John Malkovich. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind I sort of put off on the side because it’s a different beast.

I thought it was completely comprehensible. The narrative wasn’t particularly chronological on one level, but on another level it was mostly linear, albeit with one big giant flashback in the middle. It’s all well and good to talk about how messed up a narrative is, but you’d think some people had never read any time travel stories…

Oh, right.

Also I liked the hard core of truth at the middle. There were moments when I worried about a saccharine ending, but not at all. One icicle in particular is perfectly chilling and painful. Kaufman and Gondry have a pretty good understanding of all the ways love can result in people hurting other people.

This happens to be that movie Jim Carrey’s been trying to make where you can forget that he’s Jim Carrey for a little while, by the by. That’s nice too. And Elijah Wood is good, and Kirsten Dunst is good, and so on. But you either like movies written by Kaufman or you don’t.

Comments

[ratmmjess.livejournal.com]

I like Charlie Kaufman films, and so I was looking forward to this one. I think it's actually the best of his, because there was more emotional content and more emotional...veracity? verisimilitude? recognizability? All of these things, in Eternal Sunshine, and I thought Kaufman's previous films lacked those, or at least didn't have them nearly as much as this one did.

I wasn't worried about a saccharine ending so much as a crushing one--I really feared that Carrey & Winslet wouldn't be together at the end. I was relieved, more than a little, that they were, even if the second time around is for no longer than the first.

I thought Carrey erased a lot of debts with this one.

[mgrasso.livejournal.com]

Sounds like this differs a lot from the script that's been circulating on the internet.

[ratmmjess.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the script online, but I think Carrey and Winslet do lend the script a certain emotional, what, resonance, that it might not otherwise have.

[bryant]

Mmm, yeah. I think Gondry's music video background was actually a big part of that in this case. A lot of the scenes struck me as very music video influenced in that they packed a lot of oblique punch and meaning into a few short minutes. Gondry's used to depicting emotionally affective material in brief videos, and that helped here.

Spike Jonze has the same music video background, but he's not known for his emotional pieces -- he does quirky. Gondry has a much more emotional touch with his videos.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

L&I saw this last night. Liked it a lot. Very nice meditation on memory and how different a relationship looks from one end or the other. (Plus the collapsing memories visuals were basically what I wanted to do in my oft-talked about warring alternate histories game.)
I think it's probably going to be my favorite of the Kaufman movies, but then I have hangups about Being John Malkovich as it almost tanked Lisa & my relationship before it had barely begun.

[that-cad.livejournal.com]

...I have hangups about Being John Malkovich as it almost tanked Lisa & my relationship before it had barely begun.

So, I take it one of you didn't like it? I mean, really didn't like it?

Anywho, on that note:

I have to say it's not my favorite of his films (I think I liked Eternal Sunshine the most), but only because it really messed with my head in a disturbing fashion. I mean, throughout the last half-hour of the movie all I could keep recalling the scene when John Malkovich was in the bar, and he suddenly came to and said "I'm back...I'm really back!" And then — yoink! — his mind was taken over again. That fucked with me.

Ugh! What a nightmare! To spend your entire life buried in your own subconscious? That's horrific! Like those stories you hear of people being conscious during surgery, but unable to move 'cause of all the muscle relaxants and stuff. Shudder.