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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 78.95%
Worth A Look: 9.21%
Just Average: 2.96%
Pretty Crappy: 1.97%
Sucks: 6.91%
16 reviews, 208 user ratings
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| Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind |
by Kevin Thomas
"Intelligent, beautiful and thought provoking. Score!"

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Something is brewing in Hollywood. I don’t know what it is, but they seem to know something we don’t. The power of our memories is cropping up again and again in current movie themes. The Butterfly Effect and the upcoming Japanese ‘2046’ all place great importance on our memories and our ability to change them, and this offering from Michael Gondry takes it one step less than The Butterfly Effect and asks what would happen if you could erase all the bad memories in your head?Joel (Jim Carrey, who seems absolutely determined to hammer all those nails into the coffin of his Ace Ventura typecasting) has just broken up with Clementine (Kate Winslet), and is going through the same whiny ‘She didn’t even seem to recognise me’ phase of a break up that we all do. However, she actually didn’t recognise him when they bumped into each other, as she has had all memory of him wiped from her brain. When Joel finds this out, he is naturally distraught, and so proceeds to invest in the same treatment. We are then taken on a journey back through his memory as it disappears behind him, as he remembers why he loved her and as he desperately tries to escape the process to hold on to the more precious memories.
The movie is, in a word, beautiful. The entire dream-like experience is soaked in soft hues, with haunting music (which occasionally sounds as though it has been lifted straight out of a Zelda game) complementing it perfectly. The visual effects are stunning, and the symbolism used to show the degradation of his memories is inspired (bookshops full of blank books, people with matrix-style disfigurations to their faces or worlds that are simply falling into non-existence around him).
But even when you wipe away the fantastic visuals, there is still a brutally honest emotional narrative holding it all together. Not once are you less than utterly convinced of the emotional hell that Carrey is suffering. If ‘The Truman Show’ showed that he wasn’t just a rubber face, this should finally cement his reputation as a brilliant actor. Winslet manages to play her wacky, emotionally-unstable wild girl to a tee, and the scientists of the memory-wiping laboratory all put in excellent performances (to the point where their own little personal storylines are almost as engaging as the central one).Intelligent, visually wonderful and hopelessly romantic; this movie might just about have it all. A fantastic movie on all fronts, and may have actually achieved perfection in the field of ‘Date Movies’. If that doesn’t earn it an Oscar, I don’t know what will.
link directly to this review at http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=8888&reviewer=368 originally posted: 05/25/04 10:15:50
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USA 19-Mar-2004 (R) DVD: 04-Jan-2005
UK N/A
Australia 15-Apr-2004 (M)
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