Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

What a strange and interesting and beautiful and frightening movie. I saw it last night and it's still hard to put words around it. I liked it a lot.

This review helped me decide to go see it. The screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, also wrote Being John Malkovitch and Adaptation -- so if you know those two movies, you know this movie will play with your mind. (Rent both of those if you haven't seen them.)

Ever had a relationship that leaves so many poignant memories -- sweet AND bittersweet -- so many powerful memories, that it's just too hard to go on. And what if you had the option, imagine if there were a service that could erase all the memories you have of a certain lover from your mind forever. Would you do it?

Well, shy guy Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) finds out his ex-lover, a sexy extrovert with ever-changing hair color from blue to orange, Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) has done just that. All his friends have received a confidential card from the Lacuna Service, the company performing memory erasure, explaining that she has erased him from her mind, and please do not mention her to him anymore. A friend lets him see the confidential card, when sends him reeling. And that's where the movie starts and only gets more and more strange from there.

Visually, there are shockingly beautiful and haunting scenes of the specific geographic locations they made their early memories -- beach, frozen Charles River, train to Montauk. These places start to merge, resulting in strange juxtapositions like their lovemaking bed existing in their apartment and then instantly on a beach next to the surf, the wind blowing sand on their sheets and a small picket fence slowly covered with drifting dunes. The scene with Jim Carrey playing a 3-year-old hiding under the kitchen table and his full size reduced to the height of a small boy, (but he retains a man's proportions)while his mother and other women in the kitchen are large, him begging for ice cream, barely about to reach the freezer door and incredible and incredibly surreal.