Jandy's · Reviews · and · Such

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Directed by: Michel Gondry
Written by: Charlie Kaufman
Starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, etc.

"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!"
- Alexander Pope, "Eloisa to Abelard"

What if you could erase a person from your memory? All the pain they caused...all the fights, all the annoyances, everything. You could be free from them not only in the present, but in the past as well.

Joel (Jim Carrey) undergoes this erasure after his ex-girlfriend erases him. The majority of the movie takes place in Joel's memory, as all memories of Clementine are erased from it in reverse sequential order. We see the cutting remarks. We see the arguments. We see a man frustrated by his girlfriend's unconventionality, and a woman bored by her boyfriend's staidness. And then, those memories are gone.

But successively, as Joel moves backwards through his relationship with Clementine, we see them laughing. Playing. Enjoying each other. Joel remembers why he fell in love with Clementine in the first place, but it's too late to stop the erasing process.

I was originally worried about how the film would end. Would they meet again and fall in love, never finding out they had known each other before? That seemed...disturbing somehow. Frightening--that they would make all the same mistakes. Would they regain their memories over time? That seemed a deus ex machina, since there was no evidence given that the effects of the erasure could fade. Would they go on with their separate lives, never remembering or meeting each other again? That would be unsatisfying. This movie created for itself a virtual minefield for the writer to negotiate to reach a fulfilling ending. And Charlie Kaufman did it.

Kaufman is perhaps the most creative writer in film today. (You may interpret "creative" as "weird" if you wish.) All of his films bend reality in some way. In Being John Malkovich, the various characters see the world through John Malkovich's eyes, blurring the lines between the physical world and the world of the mind. In Adaptation, the story itself begins to conform to the screenplay Kaufman's on-screen incarnation is writing, blurring the line between fiction and reality. Eternal Sunshine blurs the line between memory and reality. During the erasure process, Joel knows his memory is being erased, and he tries to stop it, acting differently than he would have originally. I won't say that all of this is completely consistent. ( There's one rather large leap of logic...beware, the text beneath is extremely spoilery ) However, there's a large degree of unbelievability to the whole concept, but it's treated in such a matter of fact way that even this inconsistency doesn't feel terribly jolting.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind doesn't gloss over the frustrating parts of a relationship. There's no guarantee that Joel and Clementine would do any better if given a second chance. But it declares that love is worth the risk.

Pieces of April
directed by Peter Hedges
starring Katie Holmes, Derek Luke, Oliver Platt, Patricia Clarkson, etc.

Thanksgiving Day. A day on which most American families gather for a time of feasting, fellowship, love, peace, and joy. This Thanksgiving, April has invited her family (mother, father, brother, sister, and grandmother) to Thanksgiving dinner at the shabby NYC apartment she shares with her boyfriend Bobby. However, it soon becomes clear that April has never cooked an elaborate meal like this in her life, that she and her family are not (and never have been) on the best of terms, and that this Thanksgiving has all probability of being The. Worst. Thanksgiving. Ever.

April's stove breaks. Her neighbors ridicule her for using store-bought stuffing and cranberries. Bobby has a run-in with a gang. Her parents fail to think of a single good April memory. Her sister spends the entire car ride trying to get her parents to realize how much April's going to ruin Thanksgiving. Her mother is so dismissive that it's often difficult to sympathize with her despite the fact that she's a critical cancer patient, and yet, at other times, it's easy to understand her frustration with a daughter who never did anything the way she would have liked.

Honestly, the movie sounds like it has every possibility of being a sappy see-the-dysfunctional-family-learn-how-valuable-they-really-are-to-each-other tripe-fest. I won't say it doesn't have a dysfunctional family learning to accept each other's differences and perceived failings, but it's done in such an anti-maudlin hard-edged way as to be very refreshing and seem original. Even though it's really not. There's very little music in the film, and often it's the overdone music that really schmaltzes up crap sentimental films. The lack of it here was a real asset.

And if you know me, you'll know that I can't talk about a movie starring Katie Holmes without talking about Katie Holmes. Because I luurve her. After watching Pieces of April I saved screencaps from it, and I had to stop myself from capping every closeup of her. She plays April as a young girl trying to be tougher than she is, and lets the vulnerability shine through at just the right moments. ( cutting this for minor potential spoilers, including a bit of the ending, which I'm sure you can guess anyway )

I will admit that not all the parts were equally good. The section with Wayne and his new stove, while initially amusing, sort of went off the deep end at the end. But the movie treats everything in such a matter-of-fact way that it's easy enough to just go "whatever" at the end of that part and go on. Things like that are common enough in movies written and directed by the same person. The director-half can't bear to cut anything that the writer-half wrote, even if he knows it doesn't quite fit the tone of the rest of the movie. And I get the feeling that Peter Hedges had a bit of a soft spot for Wayne's stove. Ultimately, the lack of evenness in certain areas doesn't really affect the overall film. April's life itself is uneven, and the slight irregularities of pacing and tone as well as the hand-held camera sort of reflect that.

Grade: B+

Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson

The only other William Gibson novel I've read was Neuromancer, and while it was, of course, very good, I read it right after I finished reading a Neal Stephenson book (either The Diamond Age or Snow Crash, I don't remember), and I wasn't as impressed by it as I would've been had I read it when it first came out. I can only explain my uncontainable desire to read Pattern Recognition by noting that it has a very cool cover.

(Ironically, I also read Pattern Recognition immediately following a Neal Stephenson book, this time Quicksilver. But Quicksilver and Pattern Recognition are so decidedly different that I wasn't affected either positively or negatively for having read them so close together.)

Pattern Recognition follows Cayce Pollard, a sort of advertising consultant, as she's given a rather unusual task: that of finding the creator of a series of short anonymous video clips released on the web. These clips, known as "the footage," has garnered a cult of avid "footageheads" around it--people who talk to each other on posting boards and discuss everything possible about the footage, positing and defending various theories as to its origin, meaning, sequencing, etc.

I expected a cyber-thriller. And while the story sounds like it will be exciting and suspenseful, it isn't all action all the time. In fact, if I had to compare the feeling of the book to anything, I'd say it feels like Lost in Translation. It's not told in first person, and yet often you feel like you're inside Cayce. The fragmented sentences convey not so much exactly what is going on, but how it would feel to be there while they're going on. There's often a feeling of walking through a dream...Cayce is jetlagged a fair amount of the time, and that feeling of not-quite-being-all-there comes through a lot. Cayce thinks of it as soul-lagging.

But I don't want to give the impression that it's slow-moving and boring, because it isn't. Every time I picked it up I ended up reading 50 pages or more, which is unusual for me these days. I simply couldn't put it down. But mostly because the language was so...involving. Leaving it was like leaving part of my own life.

And Cayce's involvement with the online community; the posting board where people went to discuss the footage and argue about it, and which became a veritable beehive of activity after each new piece was released. It reminded me of how busy the Beta was after a new Buffy episode, and how over the next several days each one got picked apart and put back together, and connections with previous episodes were found, and clues to future ones were identified and theories flew around like crazy. Cayce's best friend was screennamed Parkaboy...she didn't find out his real name until near the end of the book. I guess it just reminded me of us.

Grade: A

Okay, so I was bored yesterday on my day off and decided to go ahead and make the review journal I was talking about a few months ago. I know, I decided not to make it, but then I was bored, so I changed my mind. I'm indecisive. It's a thing.

Also, despite the journal having "flix" in the name, I'm also going to use it for reviewing other stuff as well...books, tv, video games, you know. Whatever I feel like reviewing. But it got unwieldy when I tried to think of a name that reflected all of that. :p