![]() ![]() You felt at once dazzled and unsurprised, whereas much of “Eternal Sunshine” resembles one of those independent movies which are shot with a borrowed camera for ten thousand dollars. ![]() How tiring it was, as “The Matrix” plodded along its interminable paths, to watch the digital effects unfurl against a backdrop-of gesture, dress, and architectural design-that already gleamed with meticulous artifice. This is, of course, unrefined sci-fi, but one of the virtues of “Eternal Sunshine” is that, thanks to some careful roughening from Michel Gondry, it maintains the beautiful illusion of looking like shit. And so it is with Joel and Clementine: each deletes all traces of the other. She will presumably hand over his effects and then, after a blast from the Lacuna zapper, forget that the poor pooch ever existed. ![]() Thus, one mournful lady sits in the waiting room with a dog’s bowl and bone, unable to bear the loss of her late Buster. Specifically, he will put you to sleep, set up a brain scan, and blow away portions of your mind, like cobwebs or particles of dirt, leaving you with a nice clean space where a memory used to be. Mierzwiak will take your money and blow your mind. There, with help from his assistants, Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood), Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), who runs a sleazy little operation called Lacuna. Second, both Clementine and Joel call on Dr. First, the story runs backward, yanking us from the lovers on the frozen shore, through the fall and rise of their affair, and so on, until their original meeting. Kaufman, as he showed with “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation,” is not so much a conjurer with a trick up his sleeve as a guy madly sewing extra sleeves onto his jacket, and this mischievous new movie cannot restrain itself from pouring forth conceits. The premise of “Eternal Sunshine” is that scratch is a pretty radical place to be. But today, unbeknownst to each other, they are starting from scratch. Or, to be accurate, they have met before, on this same bleak strand, and spent the night together, and tumbled into love, and split in some distress. This is Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), and she and Joel are strangers. On a biting Valentine’s Day, Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) calls in sick and sneaks off to the beach-a glum arena for the battle of sand and snow, and as vacant as the moon until the arrival of a snuffling figure in flame red. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is written by Kaufman, directed by Michel Gondry, and set in the kind of weather that makes you pray for five minutes of sunshine, never mind the eternal variety. Do you feel clever, punk? Well, do you? Because that’s the only way to get your head around the latest Charlie Kaufman flick. ![]()
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