This isn't really a movie review. It's more a reaction. After watching this movie, I feel like running around screaming, "You're missing the point! You're missing the point!" Perhaps I'm missing the point. The film gets kudos for being clever and quirky and well-filmed, in a Being John Malkovich kind of way. Clever, quirky, but there's a spiritual barrenness underlying it. Shouldn't art be more than clever? Shouldn't it reach deeper? Limericks are clever  we don't call them art. The underlying message in Eternal Sunshine isn't all that original. I am tired of seeing movies about love and loneliness. How many movies have we all seen whose basic point is that if you just reach out, take a chance, find romance, this will fend off the ravening wolves of loneliness at the door of modern life?

In a culture that desperately needs a sense of community and connection, peddling movies and songs about romance is like giving cotton candy to a starving person.

It isn't what we need! Finding romance is not the way to fend off loneliness and alienation, a change in the culture is. If we all felt connected to something that mattered, to other living things, to communities we cared about, romances wouldn't be the be-all and end-all of meaningful existence, it would be just one among many of life's joys.