items tagged with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

FRIDAY THE 13TH

When the original Friday the 13th debuted, I was living in Crystal Lake, Illinois, and just a month shy of 12 years old. So you can only imagine how jazzed I was when I saw director Marcus Nispel's Friday the 13th reboot this past weekend, and the movie not only opened with its victims-to-be hanging out at Crystal Lake (as the series' inspiration demands), but with a title card reading "June 13, 1980" - my 12th birthday!

YES MAN

It feels as though the teasers for Yes Man have been running since the first Bush administration, so I'm assuming everyone is aware of the film's 10-word comic premise: Jim Carrey always says "no," then learns to say "yes." If you're thinking the setup sounds an awful lot like the conceit behind 1997's Liar Liar, you're not wrong, and in his one-joke role as a depressed loan officer who decides to embrace life by acting against his natural impulses, Yes Man also requires Carrey to goose the proceedings with the sorts of rubber-faced buffoonery and "spontaneous" madness that the actor can pull off in his sleep. Unfortunately, that's exactly what he appears to be doing here.

BE KIND REWIND

It's easy to enjoy writer/director Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, but it's not the sort of enjoyment that lasts longer than your drive home from the cineplex, and the disappointment of the movie is that you really want it to be.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN

In Ang Lee’s agonizingly fine romantic western Brokeback Mountain, two taciturn young men – Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) – are hired, in the summer of 1963, to tend flocks of sheep on a Wyoming expanse. During the early days of their tenure, the men barely speak. Yet as the months pass, they form a solid friendship, and on one particularly cold night atop the mountain, Ennis and Jack share a bottle of whiskey and a sleeping bag, and – experiencing wordless, nearly aggressive desire – have sex. Despite the inevitability of the encounter, the sheer, naked hunger of the scene is startling, but a greater surprise comes some 20 minutes (and four years of screen time) later, in a scene so powerfully, emotionally true that – like much of Lee’s transcendently moving work – it hits like a slap in the face.

HITCH

As Hollywood romantic comedies go, the Will Smith vehicle Hitch isn’t bad, which, unfortunately, isn’t the same as actually being good. But judging by the film’s sensational box-office intake – not to mention the enthusiastic audience response at the screening I attended (people actually applauded throughout) – no one seems much bothered by the movie’s mediocrity; many viewers prefer a romantic comedy that doesn’t challenge or excite them in the least to films such as Before Sunset and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Sideways, works that understand and explore the nature of romance in ways that feel revelatory.