Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

This review/text correspondence hybrid was written within an hour after watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for my Philosophy and Film (PHL 324) class during the fall semester of my sophomore year at college. My overall rating was 2 stars out of a possible 4. On my scale, 2 stars qualifies as "okay/average."

Just a quick note: This review will be different than others. This is not a warning, just a friendly bit of information before you read. This review WILL BE short. It will not be one where I ramble on and find more to say the further I go and deeper I get into analyzing a film or movie. How do I know this? Because I have already written it.

I sent it to D1 via a string of text messages. He had, strangely enough, asked me if I had seen it this past weekend, just two days prior to me watching it on my bed to close out another typical, long, boring, college Monday. He wanted to know my thoughts on the film when I saw it, which I, being a man of my word, texted him within ten minutes of completing the movie. He had presented me with a challenge – come to think of it, a better word would probably be ‘assignment’: look for parallels between Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010). Naturally, I included that in my text responses to him. For fun, and to even out the mental processing and observing of the movie, I gave him the assignment that we are supposed to cover in class on Thursday: think about how the film deals with the morality of memory.

Now, on to the review. Remember, this will be far shorter in comparison to what I usually write. In fact, this precursor to the review is probably twice the length of the actual review itself. (And the sentences will be more fragmented than usual and way more casual.)

“So I just finished Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I was not taken with it. It had a terrific cast that all underperformed majorly. It was a clever idea with a very pointless subplot. I did like how it started with the end.

"Its soundtrack sucked tremendously. The film editing and cinematography were shoddy.

But I liked the message of the film. I think that it is a very good movie about love. I give it 2 stars.

"I also didn’t see any similarities to Scott Pilgrim vs. The World except snow and vibrant hair color for the female leads. Ok, I can also see a comparison between the two focusing on how much we [as humans] are willing to put ourselves through before fully acknowledging what we want in our personal lives.”