ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

Your heart has been broken in a love relationship that ends....

Someone offers you the chance to literally erase that relationship--that person--and everything about it and them--from your memory forever.

Would you do it?
Should you do it?
COULD you do it?

This is the premise of ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND.

The film takes place in the mind of its main character Joel, played with vulnerability by Jim Carrey, where he literally disappears into his character. As Carrey remembers Clementine, the great love of his life (played with luminescent beauty by Kate Winslett), each memory is systematically erased....or ...is it?

The Japanese film AFTER LIFE illuminated the dilemma of having to choose one memory in which to spend eternity. In ETERNAL SUNSHINE, the haunting question is the erasure of memories of those we loved and who have loved us. What happens to our experience of those memories if the love transforms into pain and sadness? Do we live in the sunshine of the love or do we suffer in the pain of the aftermath of heartbreak?

No matter how deeply our pain runs, would we erase memories if we could? If we could erase memories, would something still remain in the depth of our unconscious, waiting to be triggered? We know time is an illusion, and we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

This film presents us with the hope that our running can finally come to an end. It's a reflection of promises we make, knowing that no disappointment or heartbreak can erase the blueprint of our soul.

FINDING NEVERLAND

FINDING NEVERLAND is touching and beautiful. Set in 1903 London, it is loosely based on the true story of how James Barrie found and was inspired to write PETER PAN. Its name defines both the journey of every character and also the very soul of the film's essence.

Johnny Depp played Barrie as one who knew that there is a unique place in the hearts of people where belief in magic is eternal.... Neverland. Depp's Barrie is a man deeply in touch with his own inner child. This threatens his relationships with his producer and his wife. Barrie pressed on with his quest to manifest literary art that changed the face of theater. The musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber might not have seen the London stage if Barrie had not been devoted to creating Neverland.

Kate Winslet played widowed mother Sylvia Davies whom Barrie encounterd in a park one day with her four young boys. Sylvia seeks a way to find adventure for her young sons to help them heal their sorrow over the death of their father. Barrie introduced her to his own vision of Neverland, to which she is drawn for her own reasons. Barrie is enchanted by Sylvia, and her sense of love and openness, so different from the chasm between Barrie and his own wife.

The boys are also in their own search for Neverland as they wrestle with their sense of abandonment and grief. Barrie introduced the boys to play and imagination that begins to ease their mourning and also engenders in all of them the sense of their own potential as human beings. Barrie found his inspiration for Peter Pan and the Lost Boys with these four young men.

FINDING NEVERLAND allows and encourages us to feel better about our own humanity.

PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

The film is a melodramatic, tragic love story. It is a gorgeously costumed and directed film. With both a new prologue and epilogue not in the play, they contribute beautifully to the story of Christine and her tragically obsessed admirer.

The Phantom's taking Christine into his underground hideaway grotto was a breathtakingly beautiful and mystical journey.

Emmy Rossum played Christine with a deep sense of compassion, innocence, and gentleness. Gerard Butler's portrayal of The Phantom was powerful, tragic, and fragile.

BEFORE SUNSET

Directed by Richard Linklater, BEFORE SUNSET a sequel to BEFORE SUNRISE, was shot 9 years earlier with the same director and two-actor cast.

SUNRISE was about two young people who met for one night in Paris, fell in love, made love, and promised to meet again. SUNSET is set many years later. Ethan Hawke has written a book and is back in Paris where his lost love Julie Delpy comes to his book signing. They reunite to reminisce....all in the first 5 minutes.

The film plunges into love, vulnerability, lost innocence, and longing. Hawke and Delpy both give witty and devastatingly honest performances.

BEFORE SUNSET explored grace in which we encounter others who inspire, empower, and stimulate us to explore the depth of our souls. The film is a mixture of drama and dialogue that combine to create moments in film which last forever in the hearts and minds of those who are open to its revelations.

THE NOTEBOOK

A great love is fated. Two people lock eyes and they just know they want to be together forever. Forever means exactly that....obstacles, challenges, time and distance dissolve---the love survives and blazes brightly throughout their lives.

It is that fated and inevitable "forever" kind of love that breathes passion into the core of the beautiful and poignant film version of Nicholas Sparks' novel.

Set in the 40's, the film's love story revolves around two teenagers Noah and Ally who meet and fall in love. During one idyllic summer Ally's parents split them apart. They both go their separate ways.

James Garner and Gena Rowlands play the elderly version of the young lovers in the film. Garner reads the story of the two young lovers to Ally in a rest home because Ally suffers from dementia and cannot even remember who he is. It doesn't take long to figure it out and the poignancy of the situation provided subtext to the love story.

The pure sexual chemistry between the young lovers was so fierce and overpowering for them both that it is wonderful to actually witness how that facet of their love evolves as they enter their "twilight years". This is the rare film that really shows a wider panoply of love, from youth through some maturity and then to old age.