Netflix Streamer: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

In every movie enthusiast's experience, there is always one film that tends to get away from you in one way or another. When you try to go rent it at the video store, it's not there, and as luck would have it the store only possesses just the one copy. My personal favourite is when that said movie is on television, but you find this out half an hour into its broadcast. Such a movie for me has always been Eternal Sunshine of  the Spotless Mind, a thoughtful film by Michael Gondry that explores the notion of memories. When I realised it was on Netflix a couple of months ago I was ecstatic, setting aside the chunk of free time necessary to watch and enjoy the film completely. Unfortunately, it just so happened that every free moment I chose to try and watch this film was right before bed, and so I would watch the opening seven minutes or so and assign it for another day- realising I was too tired to give the movie the attention it deserved. When I finally watched the film last night,  I felt like I had conquered my white whale, and found a fantastic film.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind finds Jim Carrey as the eternally awkward Joel Barish who has recently gotten out of a relationship with the free-spirited, and emotionally inconsistent Clementine,  played by Kate Winslet. Joel has an encounter with Clementine that would make Gotye proud, and soon finds out that she has undergone a procedure to remove him from her memory. Joel, upset and angered, decides to have the same procedure done, while we the audience, watch as Joel takes a last journey through all of his memories of her, both good and bad.

Jim Carrey taking Somebody That You Used to Know to a whole new level. 

Of course, the obvious conflict occurs- does Joel actually want to get rid of these memories? And it's exactly there that Gandry gets us thinking about our own lives. Almost everyone I know has had memories that are horrible, as well as experiences and people that we would rather forget. The question is what would we do if we had the chance to remove them? Even after the film was over, I pondered this question over and over again in my dreams. The answer everyone would give if asked this question in public would naturally be some stock explanation about how we are a product of our experiences. But I think that when one looks further, it becomes a much more difficult question.

For example, what if deleting some memories would lessen or completely remove an irrational fear within you? Most of such fears began with an event that took place so long ago that most of us do not remember it. If one's fear of dogs could be cured by the deletion of some memory that they themselves cannot recollect, then I am sure that it would be a popular procedure.

Of course, the film is not just about memories, and focuses in particular on romantic memories, and of relationships gone terribly wrong. These motifs affect all of the main characters in the movie, with even the bumbling employees that carry out the procedure (Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood), finding themselves embroiled in the dilemma.

As we follow Joel on his journey through his own memories, it's impossible not to feel a nostalgia for any experiences you might have had. Here, both Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet excel as they commit the mistakes you have seen yourself and others you know make so many times. It's hard not to feel the gentle pain of past and current failures as you watch Clementine offer advice instead of just listening, or see Joel attempt to fix the deeply flawed Clementine and get frustrated when it doesn't work. What makes this experience even more profound is that most of the film, including Joel's journey through his memories, is shot out of sequence. Although this is slightly confusing at first, Gondry handles this with an intentional roughness that makes the checkpoint "day number... " frames in 500 Days of Summer seem unnecessary. In fact such is the nature of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, that the two films would probably make a fantastic pairing in the aftermath of a bad break-up.

In these winter months of celebration and thanksgiving, it is so easy for people to get depressed over the state of their lives compared to it's state a year ago. But movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind encourage us that whatever positive or negative experiences lie in store could just be meant to happen.

Lincoln : a review without the overdone "success in theatres" joke

It's funny how one can lose an entire Saturday lying around thinking, even though there are so many other worthwhile things to do, especially in the weekend just before thanksgiving. After throwing a rather enjoyable  Mad Men party (complete with time-period drinks, clothing and music mind you), I could not escape the fact that all the merrymaking that occurred in my little time-capsule of an apartment that night would not have been a world I would ever have seen at that time except from behind a bar or from a kitchen. I am black. And thus started my Saturday of thinking. That night, as I got to cleaning my apartment, I got to thinking about how far my people have come since those days, and yet a mere two weeks after the historic re-election of America's first black president,  all I could think about was how much farther we have to go.

There's an old saying that you can't know where you are going until you know where you have been. And so I decided to go way back- all the way back to the civil war in fact, and dragged myself out of house and down to the cinema to see Spielberg's Lincoln. I have to admit I was wary going into it, Spielberg does have this saccharine tendency and I was not about to sit through two and a half hours of watching an idealized impossibly moral and perfect Lincoln's whole life story, with those random anecdotes you here about in seventh grade social studies. After laughing hysterically with others in the theatre at the terrible preview for Jamie Foxx's new vehicle Django Unchained (complete with tagline : Django's Off the Hook!), my cynical side was put sharply in its place by what was undoubtedly one of the better political biopics I have seen.

 Daniel Day Lewis portrays Lincoln in his most defining hour, which interestingly enough is not the Emancipation Proclamation or the onset of the Civil War. Instead, the story finds Lincoln trying to figure out a way to pass the highly controversial 13th Amendment (no definition- look it up if you don't know!) while trying to win the Civil War itself. The film opens with such footage of a grim, hard, entirely-unromantic depiction of  a battle comparable to the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. The war is a mess and the steady flow of carnage has Lincoln visibly tired. The President needs the war to end, and yet the quickest way to end said war would surely not be to end what the South are fighting for in slavery. Thus, Lincoln is between a rock and a hard place, and it is not the hokey "Honest Abe" that frees himself James Franco-like into the hallowed halls of history, but rather a father and a husband fighting desperately to protect all who he has sworn to lead.

He's no Marsellus Wallace,  but "does he look like a b**tch?!"... I think not

Interestingly, Lincoln is not just Daniel Day-Lewis being a bad-ass. Spielberg fills Lincoln with many lighthearted moments, using a playful and witty script to make you laugh at the ingenuity of yet another drawn out metaphor from Lincoln, as Lewis' eyes twinkle in a way that makes everyone want to play in their grandfather's lap again. But Lewis' performance is aided by an excellent ensemble cast- in fact, key moments of the film take place without Lincoln saying anything or even being the one to drive the plot. In the end, it is the outrageous political bargaining of his staff as well as the ridiculous floor debates of the House of Representatives that really pushes the movie forward every which way, with Tommy Lee Jones excelling as the abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens. Because the movie is centred around an amendment getting passed through congress, Spielberg does well to make the House a central location in the film, building characters on both sides of the debate so that when the inevitable vote arrived, I could have cut the tension in the theatre with a machete.

But while the congress scenes give us good background and keep the plot driving along, I could not help but find myself looking forward to the next moment Lincoln would be on screen again, as it felt that each time I learnt more and more about the man from Spielberg's point of view. In particular, Lincoln's relationship with his wife was explored time and time again. This was done ever so gently at first ,with Sally Field , who plays Mary Todd Lincoln, giving (albeit sometimes forcibly) her opinion on matters to her husband. But as the uncertainty about the amendment and the war escalate, Field flips a switch- finally shedding the whiny chipmunk impression and showing us a woman still beset with grief over the passing of her son and anguished at Lincoln's lack of public mourning. In fact, at certain points Field becomes believably unhinged and in response Lewis sinks even deeper into his character in a performance that can only be called Oscar-worthy, if only for the fact that Lincoln actually managed to put up with a woman in such constant hysteria.

And what of Joseph Gordon Levitt? My boy is sadly miscast  , as any young actor could have played his role as Lincoln's oldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln. There really isn't much for him to do with the part and let's face it, a 19th century mini mustache just doesn't look that good on him, but you know you've had a good year when your worst movie role is in Lincoln.

One of my good friends, who is also black, has often shared the notion that there is nothing funnier than watching a movie dealing with race when you are the only black person around. I have to admit I had quite the chuckle feeling people around me actually looking at me every now and then throughout the film to see my reaction to different events. When the crucial vote finally occurred,  I honestly thought an old gentleman a couple seats away, who kept giving me smiles and thumbs- ups, was going to attempt to celebrate with me. Such a move I must say would not have been out of place , because so well acted and crafted was the film, that I felt as if I were there at that exact moment. I was moved, and so I returned that old man's smile knowing I had seen a really good movie.

As I walked home, I could not help but think that the man in the theatre was old enough to have been around before the sixties and that he had probably been to fancy parties where the only black men were waiters and staff. Now, more than forty years later and even longer since the days of Lincoln, that man was sitting next to a black college student who had begun his friday night at the front of the room and not the back.

Almost 150 years after Lincoln, we still have a long way to go, but I think I like my people's chances.

Skyfall: Haters can hate, but Bond is still here.

Let me spare you what you already know. Skyfall is clearly a good movie. Even if you haven't seen it,  nearly every critic from here to Timbuktu has more or less proclaimed it a hit , and every person happy to post about something other than the finally ended election spin-off has blown up Facebook with the news. Thus rises my challenge, and why I held off for almost a week on writing this particular review.

Surprisingly, an extremely intelligent person I know told me he hated the film , going as far as to publicly denounce my general opinions about all movies because I enjoyed a film he apparently nearly slept through. Now it goes without saying that for his blasphemy this friend of mine has been rebuked, and that the half a bottle of a certain Russian beverage that was once his has been amply drunk in memoriam of his once revered taste. But still, his assessment of the film, as misguided as it was, left me agitated. Common sense dictates that if there is one person who feels such a way about a film, that there are many others. So naturally, I sought them out, asking them what it was they had against the film. What I got instead was not a barrage of criticism against the film in particular, but rather the entire James Bond series, which as luck would have it celebrates its fiftieth anniversary with the release of Skyfall.

Skyfall finds its title character in a position we are unaccustomed to seeing him in. He is weak, failing medical and psychological examinations in a time when MI6 is under fire as being out of date and more trouble than it's worth. We see Daniel Craig physically domineered, bleed from bullets and at times look almost deliberately old- something completely contrary to the criticisms of Bond I heard as a character with no wounds, or physical limitations. The camera never hesitating to scan an unshaven face, with  sharp grey hairs reminding us of streaks in an aging lion's mane. And yet, in those same camera shots of a smirking Bond, there lies the genius of director Sam Mendes, for it is in acknowledging the series' past faults that the latest Bond really makes its money. Funnily enough the faults that film addressed lined up exactly with most of the criticisms of people who didn't like the series.

Bond picking some scabs...or looking metaphorically in the mirror.

Firstly, Skyfall actually makes use of it's acting cast. One of the major attractions with James Bond other the years is that it has often been a who's who of British acting, with legends such as Judi Dench, provided with glorified cameos, with dialogue and screen time horribly similar to the "six-lines a movie phase" that plagued Alan Rickman (Snape) in the first two Harry Potter films. In the Daniel Craig era however, Dench's character , known as M, has been given decidedly more meat to work with and it is around the troubles of her character that Skyfall is centered, giving the bond fan a view of the world of MI6 that has been seldom visited in previous Bond films. But while finally giving the old their due, Skyfall also ushers in a new crop of characters, in particular Naomie Harris and Ben Whishaw, who usher in a new energy and deliver strong performances that cap an exciting year for both, with Naomie Harris soon appearing as Winnie Mandela in a biopic based on The Long Walk to Freedom, and with Whishaw's impressive turn in my earlier reviewed Cloud Atlas. Mendes puts the icing on the cake with a measured deployment of Ralph Fiennes, ensuring the presence of a British acting legend in the series will continue.

The major star of the film remains Daniel Craig, settling into a balance of character that after the love affair of Casino Royale seemed like just a marriage of convenience in a below par Quantum of Solace. Craig's Bond is just as suave and yet Bourne-like as in the past two installments, but is also witty, dry, and funnier. Perhaps the most refreshing thing about Skyfall is that it abandons the obvious giggles of Bond-girl names like Pussy Galore (I shit you not- it happened) and instead opts for clever dialogue and hilarious innuendos provided from the unlikeliest of sources, while never losing it's serious image. Mendes uses this clever writing to make fun of previous James Bond films, having characters like Whishaw's "Q" remind a Bond disappointed with his weapon allocation that it's not all about the exploding pens. Only one sequence could let Mendes down in this film, and it's one that I will not say too much about in case you haven't seen the film. What I will say, is that the movie line "This is my house and I have to protect it!" fluttered around the theatre for a few minutes before everyone realized that we weren't watching some child star from the nineties who managed to somehow date Mila Kunis, but rather Daniel Craig teaching Bond new tricks while respecting tradition, just as much as Adele's haunting introduction music surely reminded viewers of Shirley Bassey's memorable Goldfinger.

Well at least we know Mila Kunis isn't shallow...

Bond is clearly going to endure, and with Craig scheduled for two more films, and the speculation surrounding Idris Elba (coincidentally playing Mandela himself alongside Naomie Harris) as a possible replacement rising, the show will clearly go on. I for one await intrigued; acknowledging Skyfall not as the best Bond movie of all time, but as a sign of good things to come.