NEW REVIEWS!!! ........................................ The Butterfly Effect The Cooler Ella Enchanted Eternal Sunshine Hellboy Mean Girls 13 Going on 30 Used Cars The Whole Ten Yards

Imagine you could go back and take the memory of somebody out of your head. Would you? Have you? If you found out you had, what would that do to you? What if you were the one removed? This is the basic idea behind ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND. Charlie Kaufman once again gives us a story that, summed up in a single sentence, sounds really intriguing, but then you wonder how an entire movie could be about that, and when you see it you marvel at how rich the possibilities were, and that the surface may have only been skimmed, the rest implied to keep us thinking for hours after the film. I like Mr. Kaufman.

The core logline to the film is: "A man has his mind erased of his ex-girlfriend, but changes his mind after the troubled time of late have been removed and he is living in the good times." There's just so much more. What effect can one have on their personality when they go in and literally interact and try and understand, if not change, their memories? Does it make them better? Worse? Do they not change at all? What is it about somebody that makes a relationship work? Is it the love, the fights, the proximity, or the distances that make somebody change when they're with somebody else?

Clementine is a free spirit. This is movie speak for crazy. I know crazy. I've dated crazy on more than one occasion. Clementine didn't put out cigarettes on her body, nor did she make strange dolls (oh, wait, she did) nor did she... okay, there's the cigarette thing, but other than that, she's so so so much like some of my exes. Others at the screening admit they've been there too. Maybe us artistic types are attracted to the unpredictability of crazy, or maybe crazy is drawn to our arty side. Maybe we're so arty and they're so crazy, we're all that's left when the saner (more boring) people couple up. Who knows? All I know is that for as out there a concept as this is, I had no trouble relating to the situation, which says a lot.

There's too much to go into about the movie without giving important things away, so I will loosely discuss some stuff while avoiding being specific about the details, Still, if you want to avoid all knowledge until you see the movie, which I highly recommend you do, read on at your own risk. This isn't saying you'll risk any sort of bodily harm, unless you tend to fall headfirst into your monitor when you read the rough details of a film. If you suffer from this problem, I would suggest avoiding the internet altogether.

As Carrey's character, Joel, makes his way backwards through his relationship, he begins to interact with it. When he reaches a point where things were still good, the somewhat happy couple try and hide in other places in his memory. Joel, who had always been very guarded around his girl Clementine, now has to literally take her to parts of his life he had never shared. She literally and directly makes him confront some of these things, and they work together to keep him from regressing, but to deal with his life like a mature adult, much like she would have had they communicated when they were actually together. Whether he gets out of the process with any knowledge of her or not, his whole outlook on life has changed, and many of those moments in his life are gone or inconsequential now. They don't spell this out for you, which makes it all the more brilliant.

Okay, this last paragraph was tough to keep spoiler free, but I think it gets some discussion points on the table. Look deeper into this one, and watch for all the small details. I'm going to go now. I think it's time I start dating again, and there's this cute girl I've been seeing at all my hang outs who just looks really familiar for some reason. I even think she's a bit crazy.