Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind appears in an aspect ratio of approximately 1.85:1 on this Blu-ray Disc. Due to the cinematographic choices, Mind presented a bland picture, but one that the Blu-ray represented fairly well.
For the most part, sharpness seemed positive. Some light softness crept in at times, but not with any real frequency. Instead, most of the flick appeared well defined and detailed. No jagged edges or shimmering occurred, but I noticed some light edge haloes at times. Print flaws seemed absent, as I noted no signs of specks, marks, or other defects. Grain could be somewhat heavy, but this was clearly a photographic choice.
Mind presented a limited palette that featured largely stylized colors. Within those constraints, the tones looked fine. They were reasonably concise and vivid. Black levels seemed fairly deep and firm, while shadows were clean and well-developed. Mind wasn’t a great-looking film, but it seemed fine given its constraints.
Overall, the DTS-HD MA 5.1 audio seemed good, mainly due to the “inside the head” scenes. The soundfield came to life best on those occasions, as the mix used the rear speakers effectively for the scenes that dealt with those elements and created a lot of cool effects. Those worked nicely, but they popped up sporadically.
Outside of those situations, the mix stayed pretty subdued. It offered nice stereo imaging for music and a general sense of ambience, but not much more than that. Still, enough of these occurred to make the track active and involving, and it featured the surrounds in a creative manner.
Audio quality appeared solid. Speech consistently came across as natural and concise, and I noticed no issues related to edginess or intelligibility. Music seemed clear and vivid, as the score presented firm tones. Effects also appeared clean and accurate. They suffered from no distortion and boasted fine bass response during the appropriate sequences. In the end, the audio of Mind served the movie reasonably well.
How do the picture and audio of the Blu-ray compare to those of the original DVD? Audio was pretty similar, as I thought the limited nature of the soundtrack meant the lossless version didn’t have a lot of room to expand. Visuals were also restricted due to stylistic choices, but the Blu-ray was a bit tighter and more expressive. It didn’t blow away the DVD, but it showed improvements.
The Blu-ray of Mind duplicates the extras from a 2005 Collector’s Edition. (Both the CE and the original DVD featured identical picture/sound; the CE simply rehashed the prior disc and added a second platter of supplements.)
These begin with an audio commentary from director Michel Gondry and writer Charlie Kaufman. Both sit together for this running, screen-specific discussion. A definite disappointment, they don’t tell us much of substance. Gondry heavily dominates the piece. Kaufman relates no more than one or two useful tidbits, as he mostly remains silent.
Although a moderate amount of dead air occurs, Gondry proves chattier, but not terribly informative. He tells us a little about locations, casting, cinematographic choices, working with the actors, and general production notes. Some of the better elements connect to his interactions with Carrey, especially when he lets us know about disagreements. However, much of the time he does little more than narrate the film or praise parts of it. Ultimately this adds up to a pretty tedious commentary.
We get more from the director during A Conversation with Jim Carrey and Michel Gondry. In this 15-minute and 35-second chat, we get a dialogue between that pair as well as plenty of shots from the set. They discuss adaptations to the original script, character development, working on the funky sets and some arguments, dealing with story complications, and various anecdotes from the shoot.
The clips from the shoot are the best parts, especially when we see Carrey drive around in a bed. We also get a good depiction of how the movie uses forced perspective. It’s not the most informative piece, and it can be pretty fluffy at times, but it’s fun.
Next we discover A Look Inside Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, an 11-minute and 32-second featurette. This offers the standard mix of movie clips, behind the scenes elements, and sound bites. We hear from Gondry, Carrey, actors Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, Tom Wilkinson, and Mark Ruffalo, and producer Anthony Bregman. Basically just a promotional piece, this show offers simple notes about the story and character but little else. It’s eminently skippable excuse to show a lot of film snippets.
11 Deleted/Extended Scenes fill 25 minutes, 24 seconds. Mostly we see scene extensions, though we do view an unnamed girlfriend of Joel’s not found in the final cut. It’s unclear if these sequences precede his relationship with Clementine or where exactly they fall in the greater scheme of things, which means they’re interesting but less valuable due to the confusion. The longest piece comes from an extension of the first scene with Joel and Clementine alone; it goes on way too long and gets pretty tedious.
Another cut sequence features a phone conversation between Joel and his ex-girlfriend Naomi that would have preceded his first call to Clementine. We also see Joel’s early interview at Lacuna, another one of his memories in the process of extinction, and a short Joel/Clementine sex scene. None of these seem terribly valuable, but they’re reasonably interesting to see.
Next comes Inside the Mind of Michel Gondry. The 19-minute and 46-second program presents statements from Gondry, Winslet, Carrey, Bregman, producer Steve Golin, production designer Dan Leigh, conceptual artist Pierre Bismuth, and director of photography Ellen Kuras. It goes into Gondry’s visual concepts for the film and the processes used to bring his ideas to life. The piece gets into the ideas well, and it includes lots of fun information such as techniques cut from the film.
After this we get Anatomy of a Scene: Saratoga Avenue. This 17-minute and 18-second featurette looks at this sequence in which memories start to vanish. We get information from Bregman, Golin, Gondry, Kuras, Leigh, visual effects artist Louis Morin, and composer Jon Brion. They delve into the various components necessary to depict the material. It’s similar to the notes found in “Inside” but with a tighter focus. Good facts about the visual elements appear in this tight program. It also broadens to get into music and audio components so it covers the scene in a pretty complete manner.
A companion to the earlier feature, A Conversation with Kate Winslet and Michel Gondry fills 14 minutes and 24 seconds. “Conversation” is sometimes not the right term, as the chatty Winslet dominates the program. She proves ebullient during the piece as she needles Gondry’s accent and talks about methods used on the set. Gondry chimes in often enough to ensure this doesn’t turn into a monologue, however, and this proves to be an enjoyable and informative program.
The extras conclude with two components. We get a Music Video for “Light and Day” by Polyphonic Spree. I loathed the hippy-drippy Spree from the second I heard them, and this creepy video didn’t change my mind about them. It takes movie scenes and awkwardly alters the actors and settings to make them mouth the lyrics. This doesn’t sound bad, but in execution, it’s really disturbing. The Lacuna Infomercial runs 37 seconds and presents when it describes: an ad for the organization featured in the movie. It’s cute.
A pleasant surprise, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind looks trite at the start but it soon blossoms into something creative and involving. The movie doesn’t take too many predictable paths as it follows an unusual route to communicate the complications of relationships. The Blu-ray offers fairly good picture and audio plus a set of supplements that satisfies despite a bland audio commentary. I don’t know if the Blu-ray surpasses the DVD enough to recommend a double dip, but if you don’t already have an earlier version, this is a nice one to pursue.
To rate this film, visit the original review of ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND
