The Science Of Sleep

[Ghostboy]

I loved this movie so much! Hooray for practical effects!

It's completely loose and rambling in the most beautiful way possible. It doesn't have the narrative structure of Eternal Sunshine, but it doesn't really need it.

It's clearly a very personal film for Gondry, and although it's very much a comedy, it's also very sad and melancholy.

And the ending is sheer perfection.

[modage]

i hate to say it but i didnt care too much for this film.  it's not even that i was disappionted because my expectations were high, its more that i didnt feel that the film got anywhere near what could've made it great.  i didnt have any delusions it would be as good or better than Eternal Sunshine, but as a filmmaker and storyteller it really does not make sense in his filmography to come after that film.  its easier for me to believe knowing that he had written this script years ago and was only recently able to make it, but i dont know that he applied much of the growth and maturity he'd picked up along the way to this.  i knew that gondry had a childlike sensibility but the film really borders on just immature (and embarrassing) in its view of love and relationships.  while it is probably something i could've related to a in high school or college but not something that means much to me today.  beyond that the film is long and its dizzying mix of reality and hyperactive dreams did not quite hold together.  and the score was entirely lackluster, i kept wishing and wondering what some jon brion could've done to save the film.  as it is, it should've been a 'lost' film after Human Nature, but coming off Eternal Sunshine its at best a curiosity.    sorry gondry!  i still love ya.

[MacGuffin]

Drifting in dreamland
In "The Science of Sleep," Michel Gondry steps from "Eternal Sunshine" into a handmade fantasy world where reality is just a state of mind.
Source: Los Angeles Times



Rather than using the sophisticated computer wizardry available today, filmmaker Michel Gondry prefers to call upon an old-fashioned array of camera tricks and animation techniques to create beguiling movies full of wide-eyed wonder laced with a touch of European sadness.

His latest film, "The Science of Sleep," even more than the rhapsodic "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," for which he shared a best original screenplay Oscar, takes the viewer on a journey into an idiosyncratic world made of yarn and whimsy, cardboard and melancholy.

This time, Gondry, whose visual style has marked the music videos of such artists as the White Stripes and Björk, wrote the film alone, drawing from bits and pieces of his personal history — the bad jobs he once held, the oddball devices he once created. Stephane (the charmingly feckless Gael García Bernal) becomes increasingly obsessed with his new neighbor, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), even as his vivid dream life becomes ever more real to him, spilling into his interactions with her and with his mind-numbing job at a calendar company.

The film opens inside Stephane's head, more specifically, inside his conception of his mind. Imagining himself as a makeshift television host, he oversees his life with cameras made from cardboard boxes, a shower curtain backdrop and window shades for eyelids. From there, the film pirouettes between Stephane's dreary workaday life and his vibrant dream reality, where he can fly free from responsibility.

"I think whenever you are in Stephane's head you should have the feeling he constructed this universe," Gondry said recently by phone in his high, sing-song voice. "I was not aware of it when I started, but as I went along, I realized it totally made sense to have this handmade quality going on in his head."

To realize his vision for such a personal film, which opens Friday, the French-born Gondry actually turned to others. Lauri Faggioni, who had worked with Gondry in the past, was enlisted to create any number of things that spring to wondrous life in Stephane's dreams through stop-motion animation — shoes that tie themselves, a boat that's filled with twig trees, a typewriter that becomes a monster, a toy horse that gallops across the room

Baptiste Ibar was recruited to paint the portraits for Stephane's idea for a calendar in which each month depicts a major disaster — a doomed airliner one month, an earthquake the next.

Faggioni first worked with Gondry when she was simultaneously asked by a costume designer to create a suit that looked like excrement to be worn by the comedian David Cross for one of Gondry's short films, and by the director himself when he wanted to animate the small vintage-looking cloth birds she was making at the time.

Subsequently, Faggioni worked with Gondry in a number of different capacities, including set design and choreography. It is an example of a way of working that Gondry says he picked up from singer Björk, collaborating with people who may lack for experience but make up for it with enthusiasm and fresh ideas.

"I like working with someone who is starting, because you feel everything is possible," Gondry said. "It's a great energy and it's by definition artistic because you can't predict what it's going to be. It's the opposite of a vicious circle, it's a positive circle. You get as much creativity as craft."

That outsider creativity can be key because Gondry isn't always direct about what he's looking for. "He starts to explain it, and he gets excited and it's hard to follow his train of thought," Faggioni said, speaking by phone from her workshop in New York. "But you get the gist of what he wants. He's not necessarily good at articulating himself, unless it's what he doesn't want. He knows what he doesn't want.

"He still thinks about things in terms of how a kid would tackle a project. It's from an excited place and there's not any real restrictions. He doesn't think in terms of restrictions."

For Ibar, "The Science of Sleep" was a first-time collaboration. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design who has been selling his paintings privately, Ibar was brought to Gondry's attention when the artist's sister was tutoring the filmmaker's son.

Again, the collaboration began with a few discussions, as Gondry presented Ibar with some basic ideas — which disasters to depict, a few visual cues — and sent the painter on his way. Ibar came back with a series of sketches and then created the 12 paintings within the span of about a month.

Ibar had been familiar with Gondry's work and found they had a mutual attraction to the childlike, slightly-off qualities that come through in the "disastrology" paintings. "He wanted a black humor, like a kid trying to do a painting of something really dramatic because the proportions are off and things are drawn funny," Ibar said. "But at the same time, it's almost more real than trying to capture it.

"That's the attraction to a naive feeling, the handmade aspect that Michel is really after. It's what makes his work so moving."

[Pozer]

i hate to say it but i didnt care too much for this film.  it's not even that i was disappionted because my expectations were high, its more that i didnt feel that the film got anywhere near what could've made it great.  i didnt have any delusions it would be as good or better than Eternal Sunshine, but as a filmmaker and storyteller it really does not make sense in his filmography to come after that film.  its easier for me to believe knowing that he had written this script years ago and was only recently able to make it, but i dont know that he applied much of the growth and maturity he'd picked up along the way to this.  i knew that gondry had a childlike sensibility but the film really borders on just immature (and embarrassing) in its view of love and relationships.  while it is probably something i could've related to a in high school or college but not something that means much to me today.  beyond that the film is long and its dizzying mix of reality and hyperactive dreams did not quite hold together.  and the score was entirely lackluster, i kept wishing and wondering what some jon brion could've done to save the film.  as it is, it should've been a 'lost' film after Human Nature, but coming off Eternal Sunshine its at best a curiosity.    sorry gondry!  i still love ya.

i think it's a perfect follow up and belongs just where it is.  why did the love & relationship stuff come off as immature (and embarrassing) to you?  i related completely.  and the 'childlike sensibility' is what this film is all about.  it's fucking hilarious and is not meant to be in the same vein as eternal sunshine.  can't wait to see it again.

[modage]

while it is probably something i could've related to a in high school or college but not something that means much to me today.

i related completely

how old are you?

the film is about as good as Human Nature.  despite its visual invention, it does not quite work. 

[Ghostboy]

I thought the relationship stuff was very on point - and I think it's very personal for Gondry, and probably fairly representative of him and his own relationships. I certainly connected to it quite a bit. There's also a deep layer of misanthropy to the film that makes it very sad - it seems all light and fluffy on the surface, but there are these undercurrents to it that really run deep, and which make it far more substantial than it may immediately appear to be. Without giving any spoilers away, this melancholy is why the ending is so especially beautiful.

Eternal Sunshine may have had a much stronger screenplay, but this film is scarcely its lesser for its lack of the same.

I'll have a long review of it up in a day or two.

[MacGuffin]

Michel Gondry's Science of Sleep
In Your Wildest Dreams
Source: Paste Magazine

You have the most fascinating dreams. Unique, vibrant and random, they clearly reveal your artfulness and intelligence—that is, until you try to tell someone about them. Somehow when you get to that part about the bear and your 6th-grade math teacher on the roller coaster, your listener doesn't find it half as profound as you're sure it must be.

"To translate a dream in a really striking way, you don't give a strict interpretation," explains Michel Gondry, the director known best for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, his Oscar-winning collaboration with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. "You want to keep some of that abstraction and you want to convey the emotional effect. If you just recount all the details, it's boring and it just interests you."

But if there's anyone whose dreams would be endlessly fascinating in the retelling it would probably be Gondry, who not only visually conjured Kaufman's heady, sumptuous exploration of love, loss and memory in Eternal Sunshine, but created groundbreaking music videos like Björk's "Human Behaviour," the Foo Fighters' "Everlong" and The White Stripes as LEGOs in "Fell in Love With a Girl." He's also the first director to use "morphing" in a music video, and he's the technical innovator behind filmmaking landmarks like the method of shooting several still cameras in an array to create the illusion of someone hanging frozen in air, as seen in Björk's "Army of Me" video. (Later this technique was used to stunning effect in The Matrix.)

In The Science of Sleep, the first feature he both wrote and directed, Gondry applies this visionary invention to his longtime fascination with dreams, using plenty of his own subconscious adventures in the process. The story follows the days and (more often) nights of Stéphane Miroux (Gael García Bernal), a twentysomething artist who moves to his mother's native France after his father's death in Mexico. When he starts work at a dreary job and meets an intriguing neighbor coincidentally named Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), his dreams begin wreaking havoc on his waking life, and the line between what's real and what's a blip in his nocturnal synapses starts to blur just as much for the audience as it does for Stéphane.

To say the dreamscapes here are fantastical is an understatement; Stéphane's sleeping world involves, for starters: a talk-show set (for "Stéphane TV") made of cardboard and egg cartons, machines that take insect form, cities paved with LPs, and a rock band consisting of his coworkers dressed in cat costumes. It's up to us to guess which of these Gondry dreamed up while sleeping, and which he invented on the page.

"I've always been interested in the dream process," he says, explaining that, even as a child, he tried to make real-world connections with people while in a lucid-dream state—for example, saying something to a family member in a dream and hoping they'd repeat it to him when they were both fully awake. "That was the starting point for the story, connecting [with people] in dreams, but not being able to connect in real life."

Gondry decided to take that need for connection (referred to, by Stéphane, as "Parallel Synchronized Randomness") and add the possibly budding romance between Stéphane and Stéphanie, both creative but introverted people who have problems enough communicating without Stephane's increasingly shaky hold on reality. To make things worse, Spanish-speaking Stéphane's lack of skill in French forces the two to have limited, often bizarre conversations in English—a screenplay quirk Gondry fully intended. "You use a different part of your brain," when you have to speak with someone in your non-native language, he says. "It can give you some freedom to interact with people and ... you might feel less self-conscious about what you're saying." On the other hand, he adds, it can also lead to awkward misunderstandings and the feeling—that Stéphane has—of being an outsider.

Gondry, a Frenchman, has experienced this in the U.S., adding a personal touch to the story. But there's actually little in the film that doesn't seem personal. Among much else, Stéphane's apartment is in a building in Paris where Gondry once lived, and the office where Stéphane works is a piece-by-piece reconstruction—down to the wall hangings and typesetting equipment—of an office Gondry worked in more than 20 years ago. These details provided a sense of familiarity for the director as he took on the challenge of both writing and directing a film, something that was frightening, "especially after having directed scripts by Charlie Kaufman," he says. "It was very scary, but ... I guess I'm going to be scared no matter what, so I might as well be scared doing something I haven't done before."

Still, he's thankful to have worked with the "brilliant and original" Kaufman and says it's helped his own writing. "I cannot compare," he laughs, "but I try my best." It turns out Gondry greatly enjoyed being forced to clearly express himself and to "learn to communicate emotions" to the point that his dreams—quite literally—could become reality. At one point after a party during the film's shooting, he went back to get a bag from the reinvented office set of the place he once worked, and felt amazed by the point he'd reached in his career. "I sat for awhile and looked around, and I thought it was crazy that I had the opportunity to do this—to take a memory and have a crew of people re-create it. I'm quite lucky to have that."

Surely people who loved Gondry's work on Eternal Sunshine—not to mention Dave Chapelle's Block Party or the 2001 film also written by Kaufman, Human Nature—will be thrilled with his first foray into screenwriting. They'll also get to see film techniques Gondry says he's been "cooking" in his head for years, like the blast of "spin art" that starts the film, the illusion of flying created by Bernal swimming through a tank of water with projected animation, or Stéphane's fantastic invention for Stéphanie, the One-Second Time-Travel Machine. And this is just the beginning: this fall, Gondry will start shooting another film he penned (named, as of press time, Be Kind, Rewind), and he has plans for many more projects, including music videos—something he still likes to do.

For the most part, though, writing films hasn't changed Gondry's directing style. He still likes to keep it "loose," leaving room for "some happy accident," and he still often lets actors make their own decisions. He says that in a restaurant recently, a waiter asked him if he wanted the food he'd just ordered for a first or second course. "I couldn't make up my mind," says Gondry, "so I said something and [the waiter] didn't really hear me, but he left, and I said to the person with me, 'That's how I direct people.' I knew he didn't understand what I said, but he made his own decision based on that misunderstanding, and I think that's as good as any decision I could make." Often if Gondry gives an actor direction, and the actor asks, "Okay, so should I do this?" and it's the opposite of what was requested, he still says yes. "It's not really important," he says. "It's just a question of moving forward and conveying the right energy."

He was very happy with the interpretations his Science of Sleep actors achieved. Bernal, not really known for his comic roles, manages to coax big laughs while also being disarmingly sensitive; Alain Chabat, a popular comedian in France, provides comic relief as Stéphane's raunchy coworker, Guy; and Gainsbourg—a highly respected French actress who has yet to gain a major following in the U.S.—fully "embodies" Stéphanie, Gondry says, bringing the sweet-yet-strong character beautifully to life.

Though Sleep and Eternal Sunshine are multilayered, Gondry says he doesn't want to make confusing films (he says he can't stand overly plotted thrillers), he just wants to make films he'd enjoy watching and create stories people can connect with. He says people probably connected to Sunshine because there was something to it (perhaps in the way its lead—Jim Carrey as Joel—appeared weak and rejected) that resonated with them. This is why he loves Charlie Chaplin films; though some people find them "too sentimental," Gondry says they touch us because they show that even our heroes can be vulnerable. "I feel like [in films] we need to talk about the little shames we have. Then people can relate and say, 'Oh, maybe I'm not the only one to be ... rejected, to not be strong.'"

At the same time, Gondry says, the best films don't explain everything to the audience. "I like movies that don't give away all their keys, because I like to look for them," he says. Like dreams, perhaps they should be a little abstract, a little more open to interpretation. And, like a dream described to someone else, a film's strength is all in the way the story is told. "It's all about figuring out how you're going to make the story happen," he says. "It's [finding] the invisible thing that you have to put in while you are telling your story that will make it special."

[MacGuffin]

Michel Gondry Dreams Big
Source: ComingSoon

A little over two years ago, French director Michel Gondry, who had already broken into American mainstream culture with his innovative music videos for the likes of Bjork, did the same for the movie biz with his second collaboration with writer Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, an eccentric romantic comedy that received many awards and accolades.

For his second film of 2006, after a sidetrip into the concert film, Dave Chappelle's Block Party, Gondry treads similar ground as "Eternal Sunshine," again exploring unrequited love, but this time telling a more personal story about Stephane, a young dreamer played by Gael García Bernal, who can't seem to win over his beautiful neighbor. The result was another inventive and eclectic film called The Science of Sleep, which went deep into the world of dreaming and dreamings.

"It was all happening during the writing of the script, so it's very autobiographical," Gondry admitted in his second interview of the year with ComingSoon.net. "We shot in the building where I used to live with my son and his mother. I wanted to explore a story that happened to me 25 years ago in '83, when I was in Paris, and two years ago in New York, so I combined them together, but it was important that this was shot in Paris. There's a sense of a small [calendar] company that is very typical of Paris, and when I was working there, I was doing Stephane's job."

Gondry even had a similar situation where his boss didn't appreciate his artistic creativity. "I proposed my paintings for a calendar, because [the calendars] were so crap, really tacky paintings or nude images, and I went to see the boss with my portfolio. My project was to do shop windows of stores-I had this impressionist style of painting coming from art school with very detailed paintings of shop windows and it got rejected."

Even though The Science of Sleep returns Gondry to his French roots, he didn't want to completely lose his newfound American audience. "I was not ready to go to France and do a full French language movie, because I've been living and working here most of the time," he said. "I think it's nice to have this layer of a foreign language to express emotion. My experience has been to deal with this language that I don't really masterize (sic) to express my feelings, and you get sort of a split personality when you move from one country to another and develop new relationships, some are in English and some are in French and they don't mix. It gives you a different type of personality and a very small degree of schizophrenia."

The Science of Sleep is even more distinctive for its exploration of dreams and dreaming to try to change your life. "I remember having strong dream experiences, and I remember sometimes being aware of my dreaming and experimenting," Gondry told us. "It's not a cult I follow or a way of life or anything, it's just I have a very weird sleep pattern and I have very hard time to sleep. But when I sleep, a lot of time, I dream very vividly and I can remember clearly a lot of them. I sometimes go to the internet and read about lucid dreaming, but it's a little too new age for me. I try to understand what could have influenced the dream after the dream and how the information from reality recurs in the dream, so I write that down, but I never really tried to influence the dream."

What about interpreting dreams, something that so many people try to do? Gondry's not having any of that. "I don't believe in symbols because I think if you dream of a garage, there's a very strong chance you've been in a garage and the memory of this garage is associated with another memory of something you experienced lately. So when your brain got reactivated in this memory, the memory of the garage got refired in the process. So it has nothing to do with a book you could define every image or symbol, because it doesn't mean a symbol that's universal, that's bullsh*t. I mean, a lot of people dream they're losing their teeth. They always say it's because you're sick or you're afraid of being sick. Maybe this is true, but maybe it's simply because when you were a kid, you lost your teeth already, and you see old people losing their teeth, and it seems obvious that you associate that with old age and death. Now, if you dream of a tree, it's a symbol of a penis and that's bullsh*t."

"It's a way I've been thinking for years," he said about coming up with the distinctive images in those dream sequences. "My house is in cardboard and staircases are in paper. To me, this is a very strong image. You can actually make something out of garbage and recycling textures, and they give you a sense of freedom and independence, that you don't have to ask somebody to help you. You can actually do it and it's easier to do it than to ask somebody to do it. I'm not saying I did it all myself. For this movie, I had a crew, but it was a small crew, and it was people who share my love for this type of craft. Ultimately, you feel that you're in a dream that has made by Stephane, not by the director. I guess if you know me, you'd see the parallel, but as an audience, you don't feel you're going into a CGI world that has been created by a team [of animators].

"It's true, there's a lot of CGI, but I think you really have to start with something real," he continued when asked about his use of computers to create the animated sequences. "I did a little bit in 'Eternal Sunshine' where the house is crumbling. Half the effects were done in CGI, but we had a lot on stage. We took this house and filled it up with sand and put the wood in water, and when you've established the esthetic, you can use CGI because you don't start from scratch. In this film, we couldn't afford to have complex special effects, and the fact that everything is done by hand lets you feel that you're always going into Stephane's constructions. I don't want to have any preconceived feelings about CGI and when it's used. I just saw a movie recently where all the effects were done in CGI and half of these could have been done in-camera and I regretted it, because it took me out of the film. Something that looks on the edge now, in five years is going to look very dated because the technology keeps evolving." Gondry then showed us how his animators took a cloth horse model and shot it frame-by-frame to make it look like a real horse.

When asked about the differences between working with Gael doing comedy as opposed to doing drama with a comedian like Jim Carrey, Gondry didn't see the difference. "It's interesting because they have this image of Gael, but to me, he's a comedic actor. I think my favorite movie he did was 'Y Tu Mama Tambien,' which was really hilarious. I think the situation comic, I believe him to be funny without controlling that. Like when he exposed his calendar, he came up with a broader version, which I was not expecting, but when I saw it, I thought it was hilarious. I had in mind him being very shy, but I like his take, that he's all confident and he's then speaking out loud and then shot down by the director. To me, he's extremely funny, almost Chaplinesque."

That humor was very important to Gondry especially when dealing with themes of unrequited love. "I'm starting from a place that feels to me like a tragedy, like anyone who goes through a break-up, but I don't want to be too heavy in the script," he confirmed. "I initially thought she was going to slam the door and walk away from him, and that's the end, or maybe he jumps through the window, but I don't want to leave with that on my eyes, so I was going to make it sweet at the end. But it's bittersweet, it's not necessarily happy. It's interesting because all the girls they believe she's in love with him, and all the guys believe she doesn't like him."

To wrap things up, we asked Gondry what kind of freedom came from writing his own script, compared to his last few movies with Charlie Kaufman. "I have more freedom to change it because I don't have to ask anyone," he said, "I have confidence problems, so I surrounded [myself] with people who give me good support. It's a combination of being precise, to be able to do all the pieces of the puzzle that you know will hold it together to tell the story. In each parameter, I need to breathe life, and for the rest, you want to leave it for people to come up with stuff or it's only going to be one vision and it's going to very narrow. I leave the actors a lot of freedom in fact, and sometimes, my job as the director is to tell them if they make a joke that they forgot is repeated in the next scene. 'No, you don't want to do that now, because it's going to kill this line later.' Except for that, I don't give them direction for the first take, and if it works, it's great. As soon as I speak to them, they're going to forget their idea, so I'm always curious to see what they have in mind."

You can see how it all turned out when Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep opens on Friday, September 22 in select cities.

[MacGuffin]

New Gondry film takes fans inside director's mind

If you've ever wanted to get inside a movie director's mind, France's Michel Gondry will give you the chance on Friday with his newest effort, "The Science of Sleep."

Gondry, director of the critically lauded and quirky "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, opens the film in major U.S. cities this week and plans to show it across the country later this month.

It is a dream-like tale of a young man's inability to tell a woman he loves her, and the director said the story grew from his own experiences maturing into a man who is better at expressing himself in pictures than in words.

Much of "Science of Sleep" is told visually and takes place inside the mind of the main character, a young man named Stephane who falls head-over-heels for a woman, Stephanie.

"You want to feel at the end of the movie that you shared their lives," Gondry told Reuters, "and I wanted to express a lot of things that they experience, that I experienced in my life, that I had not necessarily seen in movies."

For moviegoers who did not catch "Eternal Sunshine," much of its romantic tale deals with the main character's memory. Movie fans also might recall 1999's "Being John Malkovich," written by Charlie Kaufman, in which audiences were taken inside the head of the actor.

"Eternal Sunshine" was co-written by Kaufman and Gondry, and Gondry's first directing effort, 2001's "Human Nature" about a woman with too much body hair, was written by Kaufman. So the pair share an offbeat approach to films and filmmaking.

HIS MIND; HIS WAY

"Science of Sleep" falls into the same quirky vein, but is Gondry's first effort as sole writer and director, which he said freed him to tell his own story, his own way.

"You sit down with a block of paper, and you can create a world. That is just amazing. A lot of people have asked me to remake movies, and I have no intention," he said.

Much like Gondry in his career, Stephane is a frustrated animator stuck in a dead-end job in Paris. Stephane meets and falls for Stephanie, who lives in the apartment next to him.

But Stephane cannot tell her, so his love manifests itself in his dreams. Over time, the boundaries between Stephane's dreams and his real life become blurred, and audiences are left to ponder what is fantasy and what is reality.

In "Science of Sleep," Gondry uses a lot of animation to detail the thoughts inside Stephane's mind. To help create his ideas he bought an old country house from his aunt and converted the property's shuttered sawmill into a studio.

"It was a freeing experience," he said. "Working in this small town, in this house, I would bring in life that was gone a long time ago."

"Science of Sleep," which premiered at January's Sundance Film Festival, is a low-budget ($6 million) movie that will play mostly in U.S. art house theaters and likely not be seen by mainstream audiences in movie megaplexes.

But Gondry said his goal with "Science" was not to create a Hollywood-sized hit, but rather to tell a simple story that touched people.

"I'm not talking about being commercial at all. I'd like for people to respond emotionally to the story and feel it's relevant to them and make them feel better," he said.

[pete]

saw this tonight.  great comedy and great romance.  the special effects go a little far sometimes, but the actors were good enough.  it was bittersweet and gondry understands his ladies a lot more than kaufman does.
I just feel bad; I have this best friend who makes this kind of movies all the time and he really is like a real-life action hero with all sorts of spontaneous interactions that spill right into his movies.  however, people like gondry and others will make him seem like a bandwagon jumper though he actually lives like that.

[last days of gerry the elephant]

while it is probably something i could've related to a in high school or college but not something that means much to me today.

i related completely

how old are you?

the film is about as good as Human Nature.  despite its visual invention, it does not quite work. 

Although I usually find myself agreeing with Modage most of the time, I don't about Science.
I just came back from the show, it was quite enjoyable. I found the relationship to be relateable (and maybe it's because "I'm still in college", but all my life its been a similar game). The animations however, got a little over the top. Where in this case I could perhaps see eye to eye with what Modage was saying about them. Had they been used in a lighter fashion, maybe they could have stood out more? But when it got chaotic in his dreams it got a little over-done, but other than that no complaints or dissapointments. I actually enjoyed it more (way more) than Eternal Sunshine. 'Til this day, I'm not really sure what the big hype over that movie is...

[noyes]

I actually enjoyed it more (way more) than Eternal Sunshine.


'Til this day, I'm not really sure what the big hype over that movie is...

whoa really?

oh.. you didn't like Eternal. that explains it.

like an idiot i tried to get tickets at the angelika,
almost subconsciously knowing that they were already sold out for the rest of the night.
should've known that consciously.
seeing it next week.

[samsong]

impressive but it left me cold, and really fucking depressed.  like ghostboy said, it's fun(ny) and whimsical but it seemed like the muddled barrage of thoughts and emotions (some connected, some didn't) was an attempt to bury something much darker than any of the superficial elements of the film suggest.  it's endearing for its childishness but also juvenile and, like kids can be, annoying at times.  some of it feels like reading really bad 12-year-old girl poetry.  LOVED the special effects though at times i got tired of gondry indulging in his own virtuoso.  good stuff overall.

[pete]

I really enjoyed that the characters in this movie are actually spontaneous; they are not like the pretentious self-important people in The Dreamer or Garden State who contrive boring gestures and stunts and are photographed like they're the most brilliant thing ever.  stephane and stephanie do it like it's the most natural thing in the world.  I also like how the distinction between dream and reality is not so obvious, ie. sometimes there aren't clear cues and the special effects are priveleged signs of fantasy--they are just there to illustrate whatever needs to be seen, be they part of a character's conversation or his dream.  there is nothing particularly noteworthy about "whats at stake" or some other sort of great motivation; in its place is a fascination with how people with their private histories and worlds interact with one another.  I don't like it when people criticize a movie and then its defenders would jump in and say "well, that's the point!" 'cause I just think those are lazy counterarguments and do nothing to convince the critics except a subtler but just as smug version of "you don't get it."  so, don't take this defense the wrong way.  I merely think it's a very uninhibited movie that strives to be as organic as possible.  it plays out the entire romance from the first sight to whatever the hell that ending is, won't spoil it.  I don't think it's any messier or more indulgent than annie hall, but stephane just happens to be a bit less articulate than alvy singer.  when you're trying to depict the sparks that ignite a relationship, you have to include some magic in there.  I think the "magic" depicted in this movie, thanks to the screenplay which includes a good part of the hero's subconscious, isn't as precious as it is in ordinary depiction of romance.  the result may be a little deadpan if only because stephane seems head over heels all the time, but I don't think the film's abundance in one thing means it's lacking in anything else.  It's quite close to how I feel when I'm in love, and I look nothing like that dreamboat garcia bernal.

[Champion Souza]

Walking home from the theatre after seeing this I felt really depressed.  I don't know why, the movie itself isn't that depressing.

*May contain spoilers*  While The Science of Sleep isn't as good as Eternal Sunshine it's definitely better than Human Nature.  It reminds me of PDL a bit.  A female coworker told me she didn't like that movie because Sandlers character scared her.  She thought he was crazy enough to do real harm to Emily Watson.  It didn't seem to me that Barry Egan would harm anyone except himself (or a restaurant's bathroom).  In TSOS it is pretty clear why Stephanie is stand-offish with Stephan.  He's a nut, emotionally immature and unclear about his intentions.  Stephan apparently doesn't know how to deal with females romantically and pushes Stephanie away.  In PDL Lena is inexplicably attracted to Barry.  In TSOS Stephanie is quite understandably wary of Stephan.  He probably wouldn't physically harm Stephanie but I could see someone coming away with that impression in this movie too.   He really loses his shit.
The film is sweet and a little bit heartbreaking.  I had After Hours by the Velvet Underground stuck in my head all evening.