Obscurity Hall Of Fame: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Hey folks- it's been a busy week. It looks like I'm a little ahead of myself in trying to become the Bill Simmons of movies (for non-Espn.com fans, he's a sports columnists that frequently gets complaints that he never posts enough). But hey, you try taking six classes at once sometime.

To make up for lost time, today's post is extra-long and extra-dear to my heart. It's not often that people as into movies as I am can definitively name a "favorite movie of all-time," but Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, passes all the tests for me: gun to my head, desert island, etc.

I saw this movie six times in theaters (once at a budget theater across town), bought it immediately on DVD, traded with Dave later to get the two-disc special edition DVD, watch it at least three times a year- the list goes on and on. The centerpiece of my living room is this poster, my girlfriend and I quote minor lines from it all the time, and here's the best part- this year for Halloween we're going as Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski.

And I thought that everyone had seen this- after all, the great Charlie Kaufman took home the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for it. But in trying to describe our Halloween plans to people that I know, even the young, trend-setting hipster crowd I run with, not that many people had even heard of it- and the ones that had watched it did so only because we forced them to, A Clockwork Orange style.

So consider this the honor position, magna cum laude inductee into the Obscurity Hall of Fame. For the uninitiated, it's about Joel (James Carrey), who discovers that his recent ex-girlfriend of two years, Clementine (Kate Winslet) has had him erased from her memory by a company called Lacuna, Inc. And he decides to do the same thing.

Much of the movie takes place in his head, as he navigates his memories of Clementine and realizes that he may have made a mistake. The memories start to disappear in roughly backward order, giving the film a very Memento-like structure, though Kaufman is quick to point out that he was writing it well before Memento came out. It's a complex film in structure- some may say needlessly so, but if you watch it more than once it's simple to understand.

The performances are brilliant: Jim Carrey is not my favorite comic actor, but he transforms himself into an introverted, nervous artist so well that you really feel for him. Kate Winslet is going to win one of those "body of work" Oscars pretty soon, even though she's only 32- she's so convincing as the impulsive Barnes and Noble worker that I do double takes every time I see her speaking in her British accent elsewhere. She is Clementine to me.

Tom Wilkinson, currently earning Oscar buzz for Michael Clayton, leads a terrific group of supporting actors as the head honcho of the oddly ramshackle Lacuna memory-erasing service ("Lacuna," if you're wondering, means a gap or missing part). Kirsten Dunst got an inordinate amount of press for her small part, but she plays a naive assistant well. Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood are excellent as one eccentric and one creepily pathetic memory technician, respectively.

This film is the whole deal- excellent acting, Gondry's expressive visual interpretation of having your memory erased, an excellent score and soundtrack production by Jon Brion, one of my favorite musicians of any format. It's not often that a film leaves me speechless immediately after the credits roll, but I had nothing to say after this one.

Unless I met someone that hadn't seen it. Then I can talk your ear off.