Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011)

Melancholia is so honest, so bereft of its maker's seeming inability not to burden his films with at least one huge, garish, self-consciously edgy flaw, that Lars von Trier's disastrous press conference for it at Cannes now makes sense. That was just the cosmic balance reasserting itself, spilling out the usual tacky, ill-thought-out, offensive nonsense that weighs down so many of the director's half-baked screeds and cruel character studies. Here at last is a film that displays von Trier's genuine attempts to come to terms with emotions and thoughts, most of them at the darker end of the human spectrum, but without the, to cut to the chase, usual bullshit.

Few artists make openings as striking, gripping, or aesthetically distinct (not just from everyone else but the rest of the films in question) as von Trier, and his super-slow-motion montage here is one of his finest. Melancholia tantalizes with its apocalyptic, despairing imagery even as it clearly plays the film's finale up-front. This will not be a mystery of whether the Earth will die, something its title makes equally obvious. The apocalypse is coming, but neither von Trier nor his on-screen proxy can seem to care. As Justine (Kirsten Dunst) coldly asserts, "Life is only on Earth, and not for very long."

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Love is a dangerous game. It's a nerve-wracking, devastating affair full of desperation, anger, regret, and a pain so indescribable that all the music in the world has never captured it all. At least, that's what love represents when you lose it. Breakups and unrequited love generally result in a sort of emotional fallout, the kind that leads a man to spill his secrets to the barkeep before drunkenly singing "their song" to a room full of increasingly uncomfortable patrons. The reminiscing doesn't come until later.

Joel Barish hasn't reached that stage yet. At the start of the film he's dealing with a nasty break-up with Clementine (Kate Winslet), a free spirit who conflicted greatly with his own withdrawn persona. Jim Carrey takes all that manic energy he usually forces upon the audience and buries it under layers of nervousness and an empathic sense of shame. Already reeling from the end of their relationship, Joel gets another sock in the gut when he learns that Clementine went to the experimental medical firm Lacuna, Inc., which specializes in memory deletion and reconstruction, to erase the relationship from her mind.

Dejected and enraged, Joel rushes in and demands that Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) perform the same procedure on him. That'll show her. Even though Lacuna is inundated for the Valentine's Day season, the doctor pencils him in and tells our hapless protagonist to go home and collect anything with a sentimental attachment to Clementine. He returns to the office, sits in a special chair, and Mierzwiak's assistants, Patrick and Stan (Elijah Wood and Mark Ruffalo), get to work.

And that's where any possibility of describing the plot in words ends. Director Michel Gondry has always been someone fascinated with the wavy line between dreams and reality, but that was before he partnered with modern legend Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman too deals with the bizarre and fascinating line between dreams and awareness, and the two prove to be a formidable team. The result is a film that continuously pulls the rug out from under you just as you managed to get back up after the last time.

As the process erases Joel's memories, we see his dream personification wander through each memory, constantly upended as the world literally crumbles around him. As the process whisks him into each subsequent scenario Joel finds himself forced to confront the memories he paid to have erased, and he slowly reaches an epiphany: eradicating Clem from his mind will erase the only happiness he ever knew. Eventually he manages to convince the Clementine from his memory of what's going on and the two essentially try to outrun the universe that caves in around them.

Then things just get weird. Joel, in an attempt to "protect" Clem (this is dream Clem, mind you), he runs into older memories, regressing into his childhood while Clementine stares on in bemusement. Editing isn't normally the filmmaking aspect one focuses on with a romantic comedy-drama, but Valdis Oskarsdottir had his work cut out for him when he made a film written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry. Images jump, buzz, fade and warp like a hyperspeed music video, yet the style never gets in the way of the deep human understanding Kaufman and Gondry convey.

That understanding ultimately is what propels the film from being just an interesting experiment into one of the all-time best romantic films ever made, and certainly one of the ten best of the decade. Joel's not the only one with issues; the real Clementine must deal with the confusion left by suddenly removed memories, while a mysterious subplot involves Lacuna, Inc.'s secretary (Kirsten Dunst). Patrick's got something up his sleeve as well. Each of these stories adds levels of intrigue and depth to a story already overflowing with both, and it ensures that repeat viewings are rewarding.

Eternal Sunshine is one of those films I have trouble writing about, not only because I want everyone to experience it for themselves but because I worry that I'd only get lost in my platitudes. So perfect is every element -- the editing, the direction, the off-the-wall yet piercing script, the acting -- and so expertly and originally are they arranged that it stands on its own island. I can't imagine anyone having the balls to try to duplicate it, because it's so singular any attempt to build on it will immediately be seen as a ripoff. It boasts career-best performances from Carrey and Winslet, and at the very least all the other actors put in excellent work. Kaufman's script might lack the ambition of his later opus Synecdoche, New York and the wit of Adaptation, but he injects such a knowing sadness and hope into the film that he finally proves true the saying so many dismiss as pithy: 'twas better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

In the late ’90s, a snarky British gossip rag journalist named Toby Young found himself working at Vanity Fair, mainly because its editor-in-chief, Graydon Carter, saw a lot of himself in the young man. What followed was a five-year tenure that could generously be described as disastrous, during which he wore inappropriate clothing, vomited on people, desperately tried to get any woman he could and sent a strippergram to work on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day.

Eventually Carter’s nostalgia gave way to the realization that he was paying someone who only typed 3,000 words over the course of years that managed to make it past the editors and censors, and sent Young back to England. Upon his return, Young penned the memoir sourced for the film. Indeed, many of the events of the book make it into the film, albeit toned down even for an “R” rating. The names have all been changed to protect identities, with even Toby being renamed Sidney, though you’d assume he’d have no problem with his identity being used.

He shows up at the office of Sharps editor Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges) wearing a crude T-shirt and gets assigned to captioning photos — a necessity in a magazine, but hardly worth importing someone from England for. As the son of a baron (or lord, in the film version), Young has his credit cards printed with “Hon” for Honorable in front of his name to impress women, but can’t stop embarrassing himself long enough to ever mention it.

The more Sidney immerses himself into the celebrity scene (or tries to, at least), the more he learns the sordid truth about the shallowness of its stars and the twisted relationship between their agents and the magazines. The big publicist is Eleanor Johnson (Gillian Anderson), who ensures all her clients get positive print from Sharps. Young rebels at the notion of pampering a host of untalented celebrities and ends up annoying everyone from Harding to his immediate supervisor, Allison (Kirsten Dunst).

The problem with the transition is that Sidney loses his teeth. Played by the lovely Simon Pegg in the latest of his woeful miscasts in American films, he comes off as a charmer who nobly takes a stand against bowing to the demands of Eleanor, but makes nothing but mistakes. He often spits food on the rich and famous inadvertently, gets slapped a lot and even accidentally kills a dog.

In real life, Toby Young displayed the classic stalker mentality of desperately wanting to be in the limelight of the famous and to simultaneously tear it down. The more he discovered about the vapidity of the celebrity scene, the more he placed himself into a level of post-irony normally reserved for Andy Kaufman, self-destructing in some poorly thought out scheme of revolution.

Here, he’s simply an inept fool. The best and only glimpse we get of Young’s style in the film comes when he chats with an pretentious, overrated, Tarantino-ripoff director and cheerfully insists that “Con Air” is the greatest film of all time to get a rise out of him. The most infuriating thing about this adaptation is that moments like these are cast aside in favor of the lame insertion of a hackneyed love story.

The only friend Young has is Allison, but he longs for the beautiful, but vacant Sophie Maes (Megan Fox). I never really understood the fuss over Fox, as, depending on the camera angle in “Transformers,” she looked different and strange. If I learned nothing else from this film (and I didn’t), it’s that Michael Bay truly is a terrible director, because she actually looks like a human here. She also turns in a surprisingly solid comedic performance and holds her own against Pegg, albeit only because the film so thoroughly neuters him.

Of course, he eventually realizes who’s really stuck by him; yadda yadda yadda, you know how it will end, and it derails what was meant to be a scathing indictment of tabloid/fashion/pop culture journalism on a level “The Devil Wears Prada” does not even begin to approach. The acting is uniformly excellent, except for Dunst, who is at her usual loathsome “abilities.” Even Pegg gets laughs despite being far too charming to play Young.

However, in cutting down Toby’s exploits to ensure at least some teenagers could get in, it also removes the bile, and indeed the humor, from the story. What we’re left with is a clumsy, by-the-numbers romantic comedy with only occasional flashes of journalistic satire. Actually, it seeks to be a comedic parody of Federico Fellini's masterpiece La Dolce Vita; at one point Allison even cites it as her favorite film, and the finale takes place at a lawn screening of the classic. Yes, it's that kind of film.