eternal sunshine de l'mind spotless..

[modage]

any idea how wide of a release this is getting?

i think the first week will open up in NY/LA, and probably the next weekend it will expand wider to cities like Boston, Chicago, and Gilmer TX.

[tpfkabi]

wow. that should be interesting.
especially since there is no movie theater in Gilmer, TX

[FooBoy]

It looks okay.

[Kal]

I want to see some others... including Spider Man... Criminal... Oceans Twelve... The Village... Troy... damn there are a lot!!!!

[Bethie]

any idea how wide of a release this is getting?

i think the first week will open up in NY/LA, and probably the next weekend it will expand wider to cities like Boston, Chicago, and Gilmer TX.

From //www.beingcharliekaufman.com

USA - 19 March 2004
Austria - 16 April 2004
Australia - 22 April 2004
Germany - 13 May 2004
Brazil - 21 May 2004
Argentina - 27 May 2004
Czech Republic - 27 May 2004
England - 30 June 2004
The Netherlands - 26 August 2004
Denmark - September 2004
Sweden - September 2004

It's supposed to be a wide release in the US.

I am so damn excited for this movie. Charlie Kaufman is genius. Fuckin' A. I want to marry that man.

[Just Withnail]

Denmark - September 2004
Sweden - September 2004

What fuck? No way? I'm assuming this means Norway as well. Guess I'll be buying the DVD way before seeing it on the big screen...

[MacGuffin]

Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood Bask In 'Eternal Sunshine' At Premiere

BEVERLY HILLS, California — "The Passion of the Christ" may have met its match, at least as far as source material is concerned.

"Charlie Kaufman — every time a script comes from him, it's the new gospel," Jim Carrey said at Tuesday's premiere of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," another unique film written by "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation" screenwriter Kaufman.

Carrey, who stars in "Eternal Sunshine," was one of the many Hollywood elite who spent their stroll down the red carpet at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences singing the praises of Kaufman and director Michel Gondry, who debuted on the big screen with 2001's "Human Nature" but is best known for directing White Stripes and Björk videos. Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst and beau Jake Gyllenhaal, Carrey mentor Rodney Dangerfield, fellow comedian Gary Shandling and director Cameron Crowe also caught Tuesday's screening.

"Michel Gondry is like this underground swell happening," Carrey said. "And you love to be part of him bursting out, 'cause he's going to be a really important filmmaker for a long time."

Kate Winslet, who plays Carrey's love interest in the movie, was equally excited when she got an offer to make the movie.

"If I could be graphic for a moment, you pretty much pee your pants," she explained of the casting. "I never thought I would work with Michel Gondry, who's from the world of incredible music videos. And Charlie's a genius, so I thought, 'I want a slice of that.' "

Mark Ruffalo, who (along with Wood) plays a lab technician who erases Carrey's bad memories of his relationship with Winslet, thought the same thing when he read the script.

"I basically had to beg," he said. "Those two together are very exciting. They're very irreverent about filmmaking."

Not that Kaufman and Gondry got all the attention at the premiere. A bald Carrey, always a show stealer, was also a hot topic, although not for the usual stunt-pulling or wisecracking. His performance in the movie is garnering rave reviews and is said to be his most different, or anti-Ace Ventura, yet.

"I always knew he had it in him; he's always been an amazing actor," Elijah Wood said. "To see what he went through to achieve this was pretty extraordinary. It isn't at all the Jim Carrey we're familiar with. Emotionally, it was difficult for him, putting him in that space, pathetic and heartbroken, and I know he called on a lot of personal experiences to be that, which is wonderful."

Dunst was also surprised and impressed. "He was very introverted, listening to his music, not the Jim Carrey you think of," she said. "It's a hard role."

The humble Gondry gave the credit to Carrey and Kaufman.

"When you take an actor of this level, you want them to commit to the project even if it's not a big Hollywood movie and that's what he did," the director said. "He was here for the story. Everyone loves Charlie's script."

The script was certainly what attracted Carrey to the role.

"It was an opportunity to show a different side and relax a little bit and let the audience come to me instead of going to them," Carrey said. "It's a romantic movie, but it's not romanticized.

"And who hasn't been erased at some point?" he added with that familiar grin.

[Pubrick]

a bit late on that second scoop there mac.

Mini-Mac'd in the face, by about 5 months.. http://xixax.com/viewtopic.php?p=81689

[cine]

Fuckin' Leno. At the end of the Leno tonight, as he said his goodbyes, Leno said, "Elijah Wood! ... Gimme the movie." Elijah: "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind." Leno: "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind!" ... Fuckin' Leno.

[bonanzataz]

Fuckin' Leno. At the end of the Leno tonight, as he said his goodbyes, Leno said, "Elijah Wood! ... Gimme the movie." Elijah: "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind." Leno: "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind!" ... Fuckin' Leno.

i don't get it.

or was that the joke?

if so...

i don't get it.

[Stefen]

Leno is an idiot. He should know the titles of the movies the guests are there for. They sure aern't there out of enjoyment. Sadly, Lenos screw ups are the only good reasons to watch that show. Plus he has a hideous mug.

[cine]

Well he didn't even know the title of the movie. It was like he threw out all the significance of the film's release. "Ugh, yeah, don't remember the title. Say it to the audience for me because I have no idea." Looked really stupid.

[Bethie]

Fuckin' Leno. At the end of the Leno tonight, as he said his goodbyes, Leno said, "Elijah Wood! ... Gimme the movie." Elijah: "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind." Leno: "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind!" ... Fuckin' Leno.

I saw that too. I hate Leno. Elijah is adorable though.

[MacGuffin]

Captain Video Prepares for Takeoff
Source: NY Times



WHEN "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" opens next week, Michel Gondry is likely to be recognized as one of the most inventive filmmakers of his generation. But at his TriBeCa office one day last month, he looked more like a 5-year-old on his birthday.

As a boy, he once dreamed he had a bike with a cabinet attached in which he could stash found treasures. Now the cabinet-bike has led him to create a music video in which a man makes a car out of junk. At the office — so filled with colorful props it might be Toys R Us — a production meeting for that video became something like play time. The prop man, expected to bring a budget for the car, instead arrived carrying bits and pieces collected from the trash. As Mr. Gondry watched, a shopping cart became the car's chassis and a lawn chair the driver's seat, with a bathroom sink, a medicine cabinet and a wall phone fastened on. He picked up a wrench from the floor and placed it in the medicine cabinet, saying, "In my dream I would find something and put it in here." Then he sat in the car, put the phone to his ear and grinned. He may be 40, but he makes arrested development seem inspiring, and a very smart career move.

All this was for a work no one had even commissioned. But if Mr. Gondry's let's-make-a-video energy can inspire a prop guy to haul a sink to a business meeting, it can also fill the nerve-racking period before a film's release on March 19. "It's good for the brain to try to be creative at this moment," he said, volunteering that he is worried about how the movie will be received and whether it is any good.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is exceptionally good, a strange and touching romance about Joel and Clementine, a mismatched couple played by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, who choose to have their memories of each other erased after they break up. Most of the action takes place on the night the technicians — including Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood — are eliminating Joel's memories as he sleeps, and he recalls the relationship even while he's forgetting it.

With his poignant, toned-down performance, this may be the best work Jim Carrey has ever done. The intricate Charlie Kaufman script offers the mind-games of "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation," and then some. Yet this is distinctly a Michel Gondry film, and not simply because he collaborated on the story. The emotional warmth and tenderness — qualities not usually found in a brash Carrey blockbuster or a cerebral Kaufman screenplay — are typical of Mr. Gondry's work, drawn heavily from his own dreams and memories. "Eternal Sunshine" is filled with wit and magical images: Ms. Winslet's hair is bright blue one day, orange the next; Ms. Winslet and Mr. Carrey awake in a bed on a snowy beach. But it is also something of a love song to memory itself, arguing that even our painful memories should be treasured — as a hedge against the future, if not as tokens of love.

Although he directed one earlier feature, also from a Kaufman script — the 2001 comedy "Human Nature," which is surprisingly bland considering Patricia Arquette's character falls for a man raised as an ape — Mr. Gondry made his reputation as a creator of music videos and commercials. His work is so influential that you're familiar with it even if you haven't actually seen it.

The famous "bullet-time" effect in "The Matrix"? Borrowed from a video Mr. Gondry made for the Rolling Stones' version of "Like a Rolling Stone," in which Ms. Arquette walks through a party where time seems to have slowed. The current car commercial with a Honda Element made of Legos? Lifted from Mr. Gondry's most famous work, the all-Lego video for the White Stripes' "Fell in Love With a Girl." He was asked to direct the car commercial, he said, but turned it down, so the ad makers took his concept. "I just have my eyes to cry," he said about that, his French accent and inflection veering toward Inspector Clouseau much more than they usually do. He moved to New York from Paris a year and a half ago, and his English is perfectly good, even if he does call the star of his film "Jeem CAH-ray."

On the set, even when he was speaking English, "I was his translator," said Kate Winslet in a telephone interview. "Maybe because I'm European, I could always understand him. Jim would ask, `What did he want me to do?' and I would tell him."

Mr. Gondry didn't speak English while growing up in a middle-class family in Versailles, he said, but learned it when his career began to take off about six years ago. "It was a problem in the beginning, but I always used it as a buffer," he said of the language barrier. "When somebody asks me something and I don't have the answer, I have a little time of — `I'm sorry, can you repeat the question?' It's very helpful." Behind the boyish look — the polka-dot shirttails hanging out beneath the striped sweater — he's both shrewd and wry about his shrewdness

On the day a camera crew comes to his Greenwich Village apartment to shoot a promotional interview for the movie, he discovers that they've set up elaborate lighting in a nondescript room with a worktable. He immediately rejected the setting. The light was in his eyes and the backdrop looked boring. He asked the crew to shoot him in natural light, sitting on the unmade bed in his room.

But while he's his own best director, obviously in control of his image, the apartment where he lives with his 12-year-old son is a jumble of creative possibilities. The furniture might belong to a college student. One room has a laptop on the desk, an electric guitar on the floor, a drum kit — Mr. Gondry started making videos when he was the drummer in a French band called Oui Oui — and an unframed poster for "Eternal Sunshine," in which Joel and Clementine sprawl on a frozen river as if it were a sunny patch of grass in the park. As in his office, storyboard sketches and Legos are everywhere, along with yarn-covered props from "Walkie Talkie Man," his new video for the band Steriogram. In this buoyant, candy-colored video, the band members play yarn instruments and Mr. Gondry's son works the yarn sound-editing machine that now stands in their living room.

Surrounded by these funhouse props, he shows a short work-in-progress that turns out to be one of his most stunning, lyrical pieces. It is a test for a commercial for the French electric company, Électricité de France. There are swirling circles of light and bouquets of multicolored light bulbs; glimpses of the black-and-white tiles on his apartment floor; a brief view of a cityscape. But mostly this is a beautiful abstract light show set to Messiaen's music.

What look like high-tech effects were made quite simply, as most of his work is. He said he hung lights from string, swirled them around and shot. In the TriBeCa office a few days later he pointed out one of the homemade devices he used. It was another weird contraption — colored light bulbs mounted on a propeller-like piece of wood, attached to a fist-size motor that made the propeller turn. He switched it on and blew a fuse.

In that workshop-office, while the junk-car was being assembled, Mr. Gondry also chatted with two assistants and a production designer. He took part in a conference call from France about the electric company commercial, giving a thumbs-up when he learned he had the job. And he pointed out a zoetrope made of Legos, a prop he created last year to promote Palm Pictures' "Directors Label" series of DVD's, which included "The Work of Director Michel Gondry."

In addition to collecting his short pieces, he created something fresh for the DVD: a 75-minute autobiographical work, "I've Been 12 Forever," which offers a sly look at himself and his obsessions. It includes home movies and re-enacted scenes from his childhood and drawings and films based on his recurring nightmares. In the autobiography he says that four times a week, from ages 5 to 9, he dreamed that his hand had grown to an enormous size — an image that, the documentary points out, turns up in his video for the Foo Fighters' "Everlong," which is itself framed as a nightmare.

It's no wonder that someone so attached to his own memories responded to "Eternal Sunshine" when it was the germ of an idea. The artist Pierre Bismuth, a friend of Mr. Gondry, thought of a living-art project: he would send cards to people saying they had been erased from another person's memory. Mr. Gondry took this concept to Charlie Kaufman, whom he knew through Spike Jonze, who had directed "Being John Malkovich." In the Michel-Charlie-Spike trio — so artistically compatible, so competitive in a blatant yet friendly way — careers interlock all over the place.

Charlie and Michel took a five-minute pitch around to studios and sold the idea quickly, but Charlie had to finish "Adaptation" first, for Spike to direct. Michel was impatient to make a feature, so Charlie, who had wanted to direct "Human Nature" himself, turned his script over to Michel, with Spike as a producer.

"Human Nature" was poorly received. "I was really depressed," Mr. Gondry said, but he decided to do something constructive. "I took a notebook and I wrote all my problems and my ideas about the film — why I was upset by certain critics, what I thought was maybe true, and how I could change it." He ended up with 40 pages.

He said, "For instance, it was difficult for me to have Spike as a producer, because Spike directed videos after me and he always said he was inspired by me" — not stylistically, but in general — "and I kept reading that I was inspired by him." Looking back, Mr. Gondry realized that sometimes he resisted his friend's suggestions in a knee-jerk way.

His notebook includes suggestions, he said, "on how I should deal with Charlie as well, that is not always easy." On "Human Nature," he said, "I think I should have been a little bit stronger with Charlie maybe. We should have decided who was the main character of the story."

In a phone conversation, Mr. Kaufman pleasantly disagreed, saying, "I don't think in terms of main characters." But he saw the point of the self-correcting 40-page notebook, which "sounds like Michel," he said. "He's very meticulous, very kind of scientific in his approach to things."

Scientific in this crowd doesn't mean high-tech, though. In fact, Mr. Gondry and Mr. Kaufman agreed early on that they did not want the memory-erasing to become a distracting gimmick. There's the occasional wire attached to Mr. Carrey's head, but the focus is clearly on Joel and Clementine. He seems depressed even at his happiest; she is upbeat and flamboyant, especially when things so wrong; they are so destined for each another yet so doomed.

The actors play so strongly against type that Ms. Winslet even mentions it in the film's production notes, saying, "I'm playing `the Jim Carrey part,' and Jim's playing `the Kate Winslet part.' "

Ms. Winslet shows a surprising flair for romantic comedy, and Mr. Gondry got those affecting performances by pushing his actors in different directions. "To Kate I would say, `Go bigger, bigger, bigger,' but I couldn't say that in front of Jim because he would hear that and react to it," he said. "I would go to Jim and say, `The scene is very dramatic and you'll be very dark.' "

He added: "You can push actresses more than actors. There is this terrible Actors Studio/James Dean/Marlon Brando syndrome that's really damaging male acting. That's why I like Jim. I saw a movie with Russell Crowe, and he was holding an umbrella and already he was too macho to do that. Joel has to be able to be like a little child."

"Obviously I don't like macho stuff because I can't identify with it," he said. "I'll try not to have guns in my movies from now on. I regret that I had a gun in `Human Nature,' but it's no big deal."

He has put more of himself in each new film, and he promised that "the next one will be 100 percent me." For the first time, he has written the script himself, which seems a natural progression. After all, he said, "There's a little story in all my videos." He is lining up the production now, probably to be filmed in Paris, partly in French and partly in English. "It's about conquering your dreams," he said of the story, in which the hero "can't wake up any more because the people in the dream don't want him to leave the dream, and they hold him as a hostage." This does sound 100 percent him, right down to the sweet-tempered murder. As he described it: "There's a guy who commits murder in his dream but with an electric shaver. An electric shaver becomes huge and shaves everything in sight."

His own dreams sound inescapable. "I sleep very little but I dream a lot of the time," he said. And he remembers those dreams? The answer seemed to come from a happy meeting of his childlike side and his inner careerist: "Not all, but enough to make a living."  

[meatwad]

if anybody wants to see the new video Michel directed for Steriogram, here is a link


http://capitolrecords.com/steriogram/quicktime/