Saturday, February 19, 2005

Eternal Coin Sorter of the High Concept Movie

We got Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind from Netflix and I have to admit I'm not very good with movies like that. I held my ground and didn't give up after fifteen minutes like I did with Memento, though, and it did pay off. It's one of those movies that will probably keep paying off for a few days, while my mental coin-sorter fits it all together and makes sense of it. I got the general gist, but I felt like I missed about 80% of the mise-en-scène's loaded guns. Maybe that's the mark of a great film, that you can watch it a dozen times and still not feel done. If I were an artist, I'd want people to revisit my work and find more in it, not just throw it away like some single serving Whip-It of "Friends." Sadly, I'm not an artist. I sit around in my room and bang out chord progressions that sound like stuff The Edge threw away thirty years ago.