I loved the little eye-flick she does at Patrick when they’re on the way out the door to the frozen lake (what’s the name of that lake?).
Saw it for the third time last night, picked up even more. Very complex, subtle movie.
Hee. Except for the fact that it’s the Charles River. 
Saw it last night and I thought that it was a wonderful movie. Charlie Kaufman should have a hand in every PKD script that’s produced, he’s certainly able to capture the longing which fills many of Dick’s works.
I don’t necessarily think that Carrey was the right actor for the role (not slamming Carrey’s performance at all, BTW), but I can’t really think of another Hollywood actor who could do the “wounded puppy” look and still fit the part. William H. Macy might have been able to when he was younger, but now he’d look out of place.
I loved how Joel would walk from one room to another and in each room would be a memory. Favorite scene was when he and Clemintine walked out of the bookstore and the lights in the back of the store began clicking out.
I was skeptical about this movie when I first saw a preview for it, having never seen any of Charlie Kaufman’s other movies, but the reviews I read convinced me to give it a try. I loved it.
I can’t picture anyone but Jim Carrey as Joel, since “wounded puppy” so easily shades into “whiny bastard.” I really loved the flashbacks to the childhood kitchen, and the fact that Joel blended his child’s and his adult’s sensibility. “It’s amazing how intense this is!”
I loved this movie!
One thing nobody has pointed out yet: Joel’s memories of Huckleberry Hound were also erased, since they included the name Clementine!
The first scene was the day before Valentine’s Day (Friday the 13th - heh), not V-Day itself.
My favorite scene was the last beach house scene, and the car ride back from it, as all the last memories of her were drifting through his head.
Hearbreaking.
(plenty of snipping in this quote)
Is the name “Lacuna” some kind of joke? I don’t get it.
[spoiler]They “predict” it because it already happened. Reminds me of something I read for school recently, but puts it in a new light:
“He who controls the past, controls the future.”[/spoiler]
I lost track of the post above where someone mentioned that it was unclear whether the ending was happy or sad. I personally thought it was happy, but the difference of opinion comes from the fact that they didn’t try to make it either one. Their relationship will contain (just as it did the first time) both happiness and sadness, just like in real life.
Great movie. Definitely near the top of my all-time favorites list.
It means “a gap” – its usual context is in history (especially art history.)
It’s primary usefulness is in that it sounds smarter to talk about a “lacuna” than “this period we really don’t know anything about.” 
There’s also a minor form of brain damage sometimes called a cerebral lacuna. (More commonly called ischemic infarction, or a “mini-strokes.”)
Let’s just pretend I previewed that for punctuation and grammar, okay?
runs away
Thank you. I have no idea why it didn’t occur to me to just look it up…
Just got back from the film. Definitely a good film, but I had a few problems with it.
One of them is the timeline. During the erasure, Clem and Pat go out on the river. Then, apparently the next night, Clem and Joel go out on the river. So, when did Joel say “I could die”? If it hadn’t happened yet, then how could Clem remember it? Even if that quote was from a previous river trip, it strikes me as odd that Clem would invite Patrick and then a night later invite Joel.
Another problem is the “Meet me at Mantouk” line. That was Joel’s memory of Clem saying that…so why was Clem out at the beach? No actual communication occurred between the characters. If she just happened to be going that day, it’s a bit of a coincidence.
Those are the logical problems I saw. The other problems have more to do with me than they do with the movie, I suppose.
There were no likable characters in the film. Kate Winslet is yummy, but her character is seriously unstable, and the argument about “I’d make a good mom” makes me want to slap her. Joel is a fairly unappealing loser. His friends are just awful. The doctor cheats on his wife, Patrick is creepy, the technician guy is appalllingly negligent, and Mary is so callous as to steal food and dance atop an unconscious man. Bleah! Their whole world seemed tawdry and unpleasant and not somewhere I’d want to even visit.
It was also a bit predictable. The moment Joel mentions the pages ripped out of his diary, it was obvious that that was post-erasure. So the whole “I’m losing my last memory of you” didn’t feel all that dramatic, since I already knew they were getting back together.
And at the end, they’re back together, then she plays the tape, and they’re apart. And the she shows up at his place, and they’re together. And then she hears his tape and they’re apart. And then he chases her and they’re together. It changes four times. It was a bit much, in my opinion. I guess this way there was an equality where they both got to reject each other, but it fell pretty flat for me. Too much waffling anticlimax.
All that said, I thought it was a good movie. Certainly makes one think.
I saw this on Saturday and thought it was brilliant. Not just the story, but also the way it was put together. The first transition of when he leaves the bookstore as the lights go out behind him, and when he walks through the door and ends up in his friends’ living room…all the transitions and everything were just flawless and amazing! I love visually stimulating movies, and this really gave me a happy headful.
And the acting was incredible! Jim Carrey has come a long way and proven that he’s an amazing talent! He’s gotten a lot of crummy “Kids Choice Awards” for Ace VEntura and the like, it’d be great to see him get something from the Academy, because he deserves it. I don’t see how anyone can watch this film and claim he has no talent.
And I have to disagree with you a bit there Sengkelat. Joel may not have been a very likeable character, but he was an incredibly easy character to relate to. No matter how fun and wild we may seem, often times people get the feeling that they’re just boring and dull when it comes to their relationships and significant others…I know I have. Whereas I feel I’m a much more outgoing person with a more dynamic social life than Joel, his insecurities and worries were all so natural and easy to relate to…even if you didn’t like his frailties and failings, they’re normal and real, which made it easy to associate with him. Like the scene wehre he’s remembering them having dinner in the restaraund and being one of those “dead couples”. That was great!
Definitely a wonderful film that I hope gets recognition come time for the Academy Awards when the time comes. If not, it’s still getting a spot on my shelf.
I finally saw it Saturday night as well. It’s well on its way to becoming one of my all-time favorite movies. The more I think about it, the better I like it–I even dreamed about it Saturday night.
All of the performances are good. This is Jim Cary’s best performance by a long shot–he totally sank into the character. I’ve never like Winslet in anything before, but she’s the epitome of the crazy-hipster girl. I’ve known lots of girls like that, and even dated some of them. Yes, they were all trouble. Someone no one has mentioned yet is Jane Adams as Carrie, David Cross’ longsuffering wife. She really stood out for me.
And I utterly disagree with the earlier comment that there were no sympathetic characters. There were no perfect characters, but how many perfect people do you know?
Pat stole the line from Joel’s art work, of the two laying on the frozen lake. In the picture, Joel had a bubble box above his head, in which he wrote the line that Pat stole. I’m not sure if he was thinking it, or actually said it. They had been to the river before, though.
Clem and Joel went to the river on their second “date”, their first “date” was when Joel went to her apartment… (the day they met… agian). It really doesn’t strike me as being odd that Clem went to the river shortly after going with Pat. There are plenty of repeated patterns that the characters fall into, it just seems like something Clem does.
The “Meet me at Mantouk” thing is obviously a sign of the connection the two characters had. I’m not saying Clem was somehow communicating to Joel in his head, but there’s little doubt Clem felt the urge to meet up with Joel again midway through her procedure. He knew if Clem tried to find him again, that would be where she would look. Speaking of the connection these two had, remember Clem telling Pat that she felt as if she was disappearing? Creepy!
Joel was, by far, the most likable. In fact, I would go so far as to say Joel WAS a likable character. Clem was all over the place. I didn’t find her character “likable”, but as quite a few people have stated on the message bored, including you… she was sexy.
I wouldn’t go near Clem with a 5 foot poll, but plenty of men would! I don’t think she meant to be the woman she was, and she did give Joel ‘somewhat’ of warning both times, even though she knew that it just made some men even more attracted to her.
As for Mary and Stan, I believe both had redeeming qualities towards the end. Stan really seemed to care for Mary, and perhaps he grew from the experience. Mary DID grow from the experience, I believe her actions towards the end proved that.
Just saw this on Saturday with the missus.
I figured out the “twist” about a half-hour into the movie, thanks entirely to bad casting.
[SPOILER]Honestly, couldn’t they have hired some no-name schmuck to play the Patrick part? I knew from the moment that Frodo showed up to say something to Joel, that eventually he’d be revealed to have had (or have) a relationship with Clementine. Since I knew he’d show up again (being Frodo and all) I just watched for him. When I saw that he, too, worked for Lacuna, it didn’t take long for the dominoes to fall.
Other than that, the flick was okay, but I could have done without the waiting around for 90 minutes to make sure my assumption of how it would end was true. It was. 'Nuff said.[/SPOILER]
I could sympathize with some of the characters to some small extent…but I didn’t like them. I would make an effort to not have them as friends. And of course I don’t know any perfect people, but the people I know are flawed-but-likeable, rather than just generally unpleasant. I suppose it could be making a deliberate statement: Life is ugly and unpleasant. In that case, it’s not a flaw of the movie, it’s just my personal taste in not wanting to see that statement.
Ah, right. The photo proves they’ve done it before. Perhaps she takes all her boyfriends there. I still find it odd, but it’s not provably wrong.
Yeah, I liked that line.
I found his existence tawdry and unpleasant. Perhaps it was simply due to his bereaved state of mind. Perhaps the director wanted to show his desperation. Perhaps I just don’t like his fashion sense. I have a personal rule; you have to be happy alone before you can be happy with someone else. Joel broke that rule with a sledgehammer. That may be part of the problem I have with him.
There are certainly men who would date a woman like Clem. It just made it a little difficult to get into the romance when I was looking at her and thinking “No way, do notget together with this psycho woman.”
She definitely grew…but not in a direction that helps. She started out thinking that erasure was wonderful. At the end she thought erasure was terrible, and wanted to fix it. Okay, there’s growth. But did she ever grow out of getting stoned during medical procedures? Or swiping booze? She was a reasonably sympathetic character for me up until she showed callous disregard for Joel’s person and possessions. Stan would have been fairly sympathetic except for the same callousness towards patients.
Anyway, I’m certainly not trying to say you’re wrong; everyone feels differently towards different sorts of people.
I saw Eternal Sunshine on Saturday, and as with all of the Charlie Kaufman-scripted films I’ve seen, I liked it when I saw it and loved it four hours later. Few movies I’ve ever seen display the full arc of a relationship so well; you understood why these characters fell in love with each other, and understood just as well why they grew to despise each other and want each other erased. One thing I don’t think anyone here has yet touched on, is that as Joel’s memories of Clementine are being expunged, the bad ones go first, and he finds himself clinging to his better memories of their relationship. This seems to be a commentary on the nature of nostalgia; we humans tend to cling to the better parts of our past, to the point that we start to convince ourselves that the past was much better than it actually was (this would explain the high attendance at high school reunions).
How did Mary get the tapes and papers and stuff into the bag Clem had at the end?
-FrL-
After Clem had gone up to her apartment to get her toothbrush, when she came back downstairs her mail was on a table in the hallway. She picked it all up and put it into her bag, then looked at what was there when she was back in Joel’s car.
I hope there are deleted scenes on the DVD. There are several scenes in the trailer that aren’t in the movie.
http://equipoise.teemingmillions.com/images/et4.jpg
http://equipoise.teemingmillions.com/images/et6.jpg
http://equipoise.teemingmillions.com/images/et7.jpg
http://equipoise.teemingmillions.com/images/et14.jpg
http://equipoise.teemingmillions.com/images/et19.jpg
Why do you consider that a “twist”? The appearance of Woods should have immediately clued the audience that the pre-title scene was chronologically last.
I think the most haunting part of this movie are the memories that Joel lost that have nothing to do with Clementine. Specifically, we see in one of the memories that one of his favorite things as a child was his Deputy Dog stuffed animal, yet in the opening scene he has absolutely no knoweledge of DD. Plus, all those other memories where he was trying to hide Clem were all erased as well. 
What an absolutely fantastic film.