I'm writing this a bit late, since I haven't been keeping up with my journal like I had intended. (Bad!)
But I can't get this movie out of my head. I think Charlie Kaufman is the brightest sunspot in cinema right now. The guy just exudes creativity like sweaty perspiration. I love Being John Malkovich, and now I love Eternal Sunshine even more. Adaptation didn't do anything for me, though I was impressed by his intelligence.
Eternal Sunshine shows the half of him I love, the half I want to see developed and exploited, his emotional half. Being John Malkovich was great because it started out really clever, and ended up incredibly poignant. Not sad, or happy, or sentimental, or emotional—just poignant. That's a hard chord to strike, so easy to miss the mark and become sentimental—which isn't bad at all, but is surely a much larger target.
There were moments in Eternal Sunshine where I was so in tune. When Joel said, "It can work, if we could just have one more go round," my heart swelled just a bit. At the end, I was so very happy that Kaufman's cleverness hadn't been awkward, or showoffy. He wasn't clever in a "what a smartass" way, or a "what a clever guy" way, but rather a remarkably unintrusive way, like he had no choice but to write something clever, because that's all the story allowed.
I'm frantically trying to scramble my thoughts together. As I've thought about this movie over the last week or two, it's opened up some thoughts for me.
Like how I shouldn't try to repress or hide my creativity, that perhaps I try to hard to be comprehensible and forgot about being interesting.
Like how great art is something you identify with. Of course I've always been told that, but I'm now really understanding it. Much of the reason this movie is so great is that I could relate to it. I doubt I could do that five years ago.
Like how we need to cherish wonderful things. Don't ask me to explain why that's any kind of revelation.
Like how I like having my heart strings tugged and yanked. I like crying at Forrest Gump. I envy the female species, because they're naturally open to this stuff. Fuck machismo, I'm tired of that tired nonsense ... *throws hands up* Bah!
Like how I should just write like this, even if I'm the only one that understands what I'm writing, even if I've got no point. I need to swing back over to the other side. I've been working on being egalitarian for so long that I hardly let any words escape the prison that is my wannabe-perfectionist mind.
Writing my diary on the web is probably a bad idea. It's what drives my self-inhibition, this thought that somebody might read what I'm writing, and that no, I didn't say it right ... is this all I really have to say? I know I have more insightful things to say than this!
I have a feeling a lot of my writing is going to degenerate into ranting about how I should write more freely. But that's okay, this dictate clearly dictates that I must not stop myself from ranting thusly, not until it passes naturally from my system.
Ahhhhhhhh.