This movie reminded me how utterly unique the familiar can be made to be… I was initially really looking forward to seeing Eternal Sunshine when I first heard about it but almost instantly put off after I saw the trailer and someone pointed out it looked an awful lot like one of my all-time favourites, Vanilla Sky... there is much to compare between the two, however, Eternal Sunshine has plenty of tricks of its own and left me with a completely different feeling.

I came out of this movie feeling like I had been completely altered, both spiritually, mentally, and even physically… it’s that rare work of art that makes absolutely everything new again… you look at stuff on the walk back home and it means something else – you look at yourself and feel better, or worse, or both, just… different. This movie really transported me somewhere else, and though it offered nothing new in the way of philosophies, it presented things I was always aware I should be thinking of in a way that actually made me think about them.

Perhaps it’s down to the hyper-realism of the whole thing. The dialogue reminded me of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies, the disjointedness, like in Punch-Drunk Love, “That would be very food,” or Boogie Nights, “What that means is that it’s the highest quality fidelity,” – in Eternal Sunshine I loved in the hallway outside Joel’s apartment towards the end as he tells Clementine to “Wait,” and that’s all, he doesn’t know why, he just knows that at the moment, he doesn’t want her to go because something might happen… even if he might just end up looking ridiculous. This movie is full of such real moments, totally unlike the usual all-knowing, together movie heros or heroines.

For me, this is everything I could’ve expected from a movie starring Jim Carrey in serious mode, Kate Winslet in American mode, written by Charlie Kaufman, scored by Jon Brion (who scored Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies and produced Fiona Apple among many others), and directed by a guy I’d never heard of but had heard has bizarre visual flair. It’s an awesome movie… simultaneous in so many respects, simultaneous beginnings and endings, simultaneous joy and despair, simultaneous comedy and tragedy… an all-out mind-f**k presentation of our f**ked up universal experience today that will win at least one Oscar next February.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2004 at 3:31 pm in unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.