Anyone who has ever fallen in love with someone and broken up needs to go out and see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Go see it now, do not pass go, do not collect to hundred dollars, just get up, walk to the nearest theater and see it.

This film could have been Vertigo. It's not, but it really could have been. You get the feeling that you're watching half of the best film ever made interspersed with half silly inanity. (I think this Salon review captures that point.) But even with it's flaws you should all go see it.

In my old old post on "too honest greeting cards" one of them was:

[outside] Maybe someday I can change my name and we can meet again without recognizing each other and pretend that none of this ever happened.

That's what this film is about. Perhaps it's less a film that could have been Vertigo and more the "anti-Vertigo": A film that is not perfectly crafted or consistantly brilliant, but which addresses the same theme coming to the complete opposite emotional conclusion. The tragedy of Vertigo is still there, but it isn't a tragedy anymore.

Afterwards I lay on the grass in the circle by the west entrance to campus and closed my eyes trying to remember how that song from "The Little Princess" goes and realizing that it was a memory which I'd lost. And humming "oh my darling clementine, you are lost and gone forever, oh my darling clementine."