Canadian blogger/journo Ofelia Legaspi is working her way through The Best DVDs You've Never Seen, Just Missed or Almost Forgotten, a book compiled by New York Times film critics. There are 500(ish) films in the book. That's a lot of sitting on your butt. Today Ofelia's tackling Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and contrasting it with Inception.
Kaufman's characters fight, not in million-dollar action sequences, but inside intimate homes. The only place more intimate and alive than the reality of Clementine and Joel's lives is when they go back deep in Joel's repressed memories, through some low-tech brain damage procedure that takes place in a small clinic and in the depressive patient's own dingy home.
Nolan's, on the other hand, is a construct that detaches itself from poignant and well-developed emotions the way its inception scenes have the Earth detach from its core. These scenes invoke awe but they seem to serve no purpose other than to showcase the capabilities of a "dream architect" whose mind maze creation is actually more decorative than plot-driven. (Source)
