| David Arquette in therapy David Arquette is in therapy following his split from Courteney Cox. feeds.breakingnews.ie |
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: No 8 Michel Gondry, 2004Boy meets girl. They fall in love. Girl gets fed up with boy. Girl erases all memories of boy from her mind in a dubious brain-zapping procedure. Boy finds out and does the same. This is a romantic movie, Charlie Kaufman-style. It takes its title from a 1717 poem by Alexander Pope and charts the side of love that movies usually try to ignore: the arguments, the boredom, the irritating habits that drive couples apart and the dreadful, stilted moments that accompany a break-up. Love Actually, it ain't.As you would expect from the writer of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, this is not the story of a doomed relationship told in a straightforward fashion. Joel Barish is a withdrawn, greyish man, played with uncharacteristic restraint by Jim Carrey. Clementine Kruczynski (a brilliant Kate Winslet) is free-spirited, reckless and prone to dying her hair blue. When they meet on a train travelling through wintry Long Island in the film's opening scenes, it's as if they've never met before – but of course they have. The strange attraction that draws them together is down to the fact that, until very recently, they were lovers. Their forgetting is the work of Lacuna Inc., a shady New York company that liberates its clients from unwanted memories.Eternal Sunshine was Kaufman's second collaboration with Michel Gondry. The resourceful French director proved the perfect match to Kaufman's freewheeling script, which puts us inside Joel's memories as they are being stripped away. The film's concept – that a couple can delete each other after a painful break-up so they can live on in blissful ignorance – seems at first a pessimistic take on love. But chinks of light begin to shine through as Joel's memories of Clementine are systematically sought out and zapped. He recalls that, before the unhappiness set in, there were genuinely happy moments too and he recaptures (too late?) what made them fall for each other in the first place. In spite of all its pitfalls, Kaufman still makes love seem like the most precious thing in the world.RomanceJim CarreyKate WinsletKillian Foxguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The Gospel According to St Matthew: No 10 Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964A gay, Marxist Catholic: not the most likely candidate, you'd have thought, to make arguably the greatest of all religious films – and one of the very few based on the New Testament that doesn't lapse into hectoring, literal piety. Pasolini had already roused the wrath of the religious establishment with La Ricotta, a 35-minute comedy on the making of a biblical film; he actually received a four-month jail sentence as a result. But the Gospel According to St Matthew is altogether different: serious, spiritual and utterly clear-eyed about getting to the heart of the Christian gospel. And though Pasolini remained a non-believer, his film was dedicated to "the dear, happy, familiar memory of Pope John XXIII".This was Pasolini's third full-length feature, and with it he began his experiments with anthropology that would mark much of his future output. An hour-long documentary, Location Hunting in Palestine, showed him looking for places to shoot his film; intriguingly, he rejected modern Israel and neighbouring Arab areas for having lost the ancient biblical spirit. He ended up doing what you suspect he wanted to do all along: filming in the run-down southern Italian city of Matera. Pasolini's Gospel is a long way away from the literal interpretations we've become accustomed to from the Cecil B DeMille school. Everything is simplicity itself: the primitive backdrop, the sparsely sketched-in scenes, the minimal dialogue (practically all lifted from the biblical text itself). Pasolini's aim was to extract the ancient essence from the Jesus story; he does this not by exact recreation, but by inspecting faces, evoking Renaissance and medieval iconography, and mixing Bach, Mozart, spirituals and African masses on the soundtrack. If ever a film told a beautiful, brutal truth, this is it.DramaWorld cinemaAndrew Pulverguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Guests arrive for Brand and Perry's wedding Guests have begun arriving at a secluded tiger reserve in north-western India to attend the Indian-style wedding of comedian Russell Brand and American pop singer Katy Perry. feeds.breakingnews.ie |
Video: Leslie Nielsen, star of Airplane! and The Naked Gun, dies aged 84 Comic actor was best known for spoofing his matinee idol looks and authority figure roles guardian.co.uk |