ESOTSM DVD reviews

[cotton]

I found these in some magazines today. My moniter is broken and everything is fuzzy. Please tell me if you can read these or not.

Entertainment Weekly issue no. 786


The National Enquirer September 27,2004

[jimliker]

tks both articles r readable.

[clemato]

Those are great!

Some stuff about the commentary below:

No eternal interviewing sunshine

PEOPLE come to town. I interview them. It goes with the job. Actors, writers and directors want to promote their movies. I want to probe a little deeper. Usually it works, and we get along fine.

Those with whom I didn't, I can count on one hand: Stockard Channing: Nice person. We just didn't click. Raymond Burr: We got on great, until he became possessed by the devil while waiting for an elevator. Never did figure that out. Ashley Judd: She had other things on her mind. Leave it at that. Harrison Ford: He was irritable from the get-go. It was a group interview for "Clear and Present Danger." He got prickly with everyone. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they're having a bad day. Having a bad day does not excuse rudeness, but it can excuse lesser sins.

Which brings us to Charlie Kaufman. His writing shows genius. Consider "Being John Malkovich," "Adaptation." and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," which debuts Tuesday on DVD. Each is loopy, but brilliantly so. I love the films and looked forward to talking to Charlie. (With his curly hair and scruffy look, he's more a Charlie than a Kaufman.) At our first meet, for "Adap- tation.", he sat curled into the end of a couch. Expressionless, he observed as director Spike Jonze and I chatted merrily.

I eventually coaxed out a couple of gems about relationships and love, but Charlie simply did not want to play.

For "Eternal Sunshine" -- one of this year's best films, by the way -- Charlie's mood cooled, then darkened when I told him I was reviewing the movie.

He stands firmly against being interviewed by reviewers because, he said angrily, he feels they might become negatively biased.

Who knew?

He shut down.

I countered with this and that, all amounting to, that just isn't so.

Then director Michel Gondry walked in. Charlie told him what was going on. I gave him my nothing-to-worry-about argument.

Michel shrugged. We got rolling.

It wasn't a smooth roll, but smooth enough, thanks to Michel's candor.

His candor comes through on the commentary he does with Charlie on the "Eternal Sunshine" disc.

The film starts dark and surreal and becomes more moving as it unfolds.

A man played by Jim Carrey learns his girlfriend, played by Kate Winslet, has had all her memories of him erased because their relationship grew too painful.

He decides to have his memories of her erased, too. Midway through the process, though, he changes his mind. Then he has to figure out how to stop the erasing.

I watched the first half with commentary. Charlie comes across as smart, curious and insightful. I could have used the material.

"It's painful not having a say (after a film starts shooting)," Charlie says, his collaborations with Michel and Spike being exceptions. "That's really about my life in a lot of ways. ... To have a voice in that evolution (from script to screen) is really important to me."

Michel sounds as enthusiastic as I remember. Sometimes his French accent makes his remarks difficult to understand, but it's easy to go back to play them again.

Michel talks a lot about using smoke in scenes to create moods. He mentions how Carrey's playful fake suicide in the movie mirrors the playful fake suicide Michel devised to amuse his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend during filming.

In the scene where the stars lie on their backs on a frozen lake, Michel says he put a crack in the ice "next to Kate just to make it realistic. It's funny how it's become for people a symbol of the relationship going wrong."

Because it works on many levels, "Eternal Sunshine" is an easy movie to watch more than once.

Its writer may not like to talk to the press, but he sounds comfortable doing commentary with Michel.

Maybe he was having a couple of bad days.

From: Oakland Daily Review Online

[clemato]

Some Eternal Trivia:

* The title is quoted from the poem Eloisa to Abelard by Alexander Pope (1688-1744). This poem was used in Kaufman's earlier project Being John Malkovich (1999).

* Before Jim Carrey expressed interest in playing Joel, Nicolas Cage was considered for the role.

* The original script featured a cut beginning and ending sequence that took place in the future. In the end, an older Clementine comes in to have the procedure done and a look at her screen shows that she's had the procedure done multiple times and all of them involved Joel. At the very end of the script, an older Joel calls Clementine to ask why she hasn't called, but the technicians performing the procedure erase his message. Other cuts in the original script include a montage of memories people wanted erased, including a soldier seeing his dead friend on a battlefield and a girl who was raped at a young age.

* The memory-erasing company, Lacuna Inc., takes its name from the Latin word meaning a cavity, hollow, or dip, especially a pool or pond. Transfiguratively, lacuna comes to mean a gap, deficiency, or loss.

* The idea came to Michel Gondry from his friend the artist Pierre Bismuth who suggested, You get a card in the mail that says. 'You have been erased from someone's memory.' Gondry took the concept to Charlie Kaufman who worked out a story...

* A Metro North Commuter Railroad train from the New Haven line (red striped) doubled for the Long Island Railroad (which are blue striped).

* When Clementine and Joel are in the Montauk beach house, Clementine finds an envelope that says David and Ruth Laskin. David and Ruth are the first names of Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey's assistants.

* All of the train shots were shot onboard a real, moving, train.

* The opening credits appear almost 20 minutes into the film, at the end of the first reel.

* The voice whispering Montauk in the movie is actually a combination of Kate Winslet's voice echoing itself, and the voice of a worker at the production company Focus Features. Apparently, the young lady was asked to do a quick voice-over, before Winslet arrived, and it was kept in the film.

* The movie is based on the following quote from an Alexander Pope poem: How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;

* Another sub plot dropped from the script was Mary ( Kirsten Dunst) finding out that Howard made her get an abortion after they had the affair resulting in her desire to have her memory wiped.

* Mary's surname does not appear in the credits, but her nameplate on the reception desk at Dr Mierzwiak's practice shows it as Svevo. This very unusual name is clearly a reference to Italian writer Italo Svevo (real name Ettore Schmitz, 1861-1928), who was very interested in the work of Sigmund Freud and is believed to have corresponded with him