If you could erase someone from your memory, would you? Joel discovered it's a bad idea.

Rating: 10/10 (10 August 2004)

There are plenty of good write-ups about the details of this movie so I'll skip the plot details. I love movies, and this has quickly become my favorite of all time. It bumps Fight Club, Amadeus, Pulp Fiction, and Snatch down a notch and clearly stands out as the best for me.
Few people think outside the box, something I truly love to do. Often when I watch a movie that I enjoy, I find myself asking, "Could I have created that?" I enjoyed Top Gun, but I feel anyone could have come up with the storyline. The same for Aliens, another of my favorites... great movie, but I could have come up with that idea, EASILY.
Fight Club and Pulp Fiction are a little different. I don't know that on my own I would have come up with those techniques. Mememto is another interesting technique. But these shows are still linearly written and then shaken up. A neat technique, but just one step off the normal beaten path.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is many steps off of that path. It is one of the very few movies where I left thinking, "I don't know if I could have come up with that idea if you gave me a lifetime." I was jealous that someone had created something so very creative and that I doubted I could have thought of myself. THAT is MY kind of movie!
If you're the type that needs to be lead by the nose through a plot (a la Braveheart), then this movie is NOT for you. If you hate to really think during a movie (like with Memento), then forget it. But if you want to be stimulated by one of the most innovative works put on film, watch this movie.
By the way, I am definitely NOT a Jim Carrey or Kate Winslet fan, but they were superb. This has definitely turned my opinion of Carrey as an actor, and I am now convinced he is more than a rubber face and a goofy actor. (He's come a long, LONG way from In Living Color and Mask.) I have to credit Winslet, who I have eternally associated with the sappy, predictable, snoozer Titanic. A totally unusual character, but played very well by her.
I would only recommend this movie to someone looking to be stimulated by something completely different. If you're not the type to look past the violence in Fight Club, or the type that doesn't have the RAM to watch the reverse chronology of Memento, then forget watching this movie. If you truly savor stimulating, thought-provoking material, you have found one of the best.