Word: kaufmans
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MOVIES: Charlie Kaufman gives us a Spotless alternative universe...
That's the question, the double theory, posed in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the latest and loveliest alternative universe created by Charlie Kaufman, America's most--we should probably say only--intellectually provocative screenwriter. In Being John Malkovich, Kaufman transposed Lewis Carroll's rabbit hole into a chute that ends in the mind of a movie star. Human Nature had him musing on the internal battle of animal and civilized instincts. In Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, he spun trash-game-show king Chuck Barris' tales of CIA sleuthing and assassination into a deconstruction of the spy-movie...
Here, working with Human Nature director Michel Gondry, Kaufman wonders whether one person can be true to another, whatever obstacles pile up. On Valentine's Day 2004, Joel Barish (a wonderfully forlorn Jim Carrey) decides to skip work and--who knows why--take a train to Montauk on the frosty tip of Long Island. There he is accosted by free-spirited Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet, ornery and seductive). She lures mopey Joel into an affair, which proves to have as many abrasive spots as soft ones. Truth to tell, they're a wildly ill-suited pair. But, hey, bitter with...
...twists from memory to fantasy to "reality" (whatever that is in a Charlie Kaufman film) and for all the nods to the memory games played out in the brilliant stories of Philip K. Dick, Eternal Sunshine has a plot propulsion that's almost Spielbergian in its simplicity. A gentle creature gets lost and must fight to get back home--home here being his mind and his girlfriend, or what's left of them. The Spielberg movie this one most resembles is Always, in which a dead man tries to reconnect with his surviving wife...
Gondry’s success is at least partly due to finding, in Kaufman, a creative genius to match his own. One look at Gondry’s work in the recent eponymous DVD collection celebrating his music video and short film work, and his inventiveness is clear. For the Rolling Stones’ video “Like a Rolling Stone,” he created the technology so that the camera’s perspective continues to roll as if it were an actual rolling stone. In the White Stripes’ “Fell in Love...