Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

This is a damn good dive into the human brain.

Director: Michel Gondry
Writers: Charlie Kaufman (story and screenplay)
                Michel Gondry (story)
                Pierre Bismuth (story)

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about this one, not because I don't know how to talk about it but because I don't want to spoil it for anyone. So yeah, this is gonna be fairly short.

What's this about then, it's about a couple who after a slightly messy breakup, erase each other from their memories. Well, actually it's more she erases him, he finds out and the whole film is him going through the erasing process. It's really a beautiful story about someone who is traveling through his own mind while regretting the choice he made to fully erase a person from his life.

I can't believe that I've never even seen this film, the lengths that Joel (Jim Carrey) goes to, to protect his good memories of Clementine (Kate Winslet). You see an entire relationship in reverse, from the end to the beginning, bad to good. It really makes you think about past relationships that you feel negatively about, you may think that there were no good times and if you really think about it, by diving right into untainted memories and remembering the good.

This sort of reminds me of Annie Hall, a dive into the mind of someone who is remembering a relationship, the difference between these films would be that in Annie Hall, these memories are presented how Alvy (Woody Allen) remembers them. These are tainted memories in the sense that he remembers how he wants to remember. Such as the scene where Annie (Diane Keaton) says wife rather than life. Alvy says "you were there, she said wife". He's presenting this as he heard it not how it happened exactly. In this film, however, you see them how they happened because of the machine targeting these memories. You're of course seeing how these memories are changing when he's realizing how he's made a mistake and obviously these are still being presented as his perspective and you never see Clementine's side of this but this feels closer to what really happened in this relationship rather than being shown a perspective on the relationship.

I'm sorry I couldn't talk more in detail about this but honestly, that should make you want to see this more. It's hard to make a film diving into the human brain because we don't know what goes on in there. As far as I know, filmmakers aren't experts in the brain. Please go watch this film if you haven't already. It's really beautiful and Kate Winslet looks absolutely beautiful with blue hair, she really does, then again who doesn't. Blue is a gorgeous colour and it's also a bit strange (for me at least) seeing Jim Carrey in a fairly serious role, he's great in this but it's just weird you know? I'm rambling anyway so go watch this, regardless whether you have or haven't seen it.

This is just my opinion and if you disagree then that's great, I'm open to discussion and I'm always interested to hear how you feel about this film. This is also a critique which is considered "Fair Use" under the Copyright Act 1976. If you like this film then please go and support its creators by buying the DVD or Bluray.