Interminable Gimmickery of the Spotty Effort

We saw the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the other day. Aside from the utterly superfluous subplot involving the secretary and her "lost" memories (which came to a head out of fucking nowhere), it was a decent effort. The story, or idea, I suppose, was intriguing. The problem, though, is twofold. The director apparently received for Christmas a few years ago, a book entitled "1001 Camera Tricks and Pointers on Fitting them All into a Two-Hour Movie." That was one problem. Watch this film and don't get distracted. I dare you.
The other problem is that there is almost no character development in the film. Next to none. This is a major problem. See, Jim Carrey's character, who is something of a cipher, meets this ditzy extrovert on the beach in Montauk. They fall in love and then break up, and then both get their memories of the other erased to ease the pain. This is interesting so far, although Kate Winslet, who ought to be erased from cinema entirely for starring in that dog turd Titanic, is so unbelievably annoying for the first hour of the film that you might wish the film came with a memory wipe for the viewers, too.
Over the next hour or so, you'll be treated to the inner landscapes (but not inner workings!) of Jim's character's conscious and subconscious minds, as he decides that he wants to keep certain, intimate memories of his old flame and desperately tries to hide them, deeper and deeper in his brain, from the memory police who are trying to erase them. Sort of a Brazil meets The Matrix scenario: all the action takes place in Carrey's mind, but the environment is being manipulated from the outside and whatever he tries, the "bad guys" are right around the corner waiting to snatch his memories and reprogram him. Like I said, I dig the concept.
There is one particularly long and grating scene in which Carrey, transported back into his mother's kitchen, cowers under a table while his an oversized Winslet tromps around and converses with his mother. This, we might think, is finally where we'll get some insight into what the fuck is wrong with at least one of these people. To be brief: NO. What we are treated to is Carrey barely restraining his more aggravating tendencies (he comes so close, so often to mugging for the camera that that in itself is a distraction) and Winslet gibbering about the need to run and hide her memory further in Jimmy boy's subconscious. In the end, we get jack shit nothing about why Jim is the way he is. This will not be remedied in the subsequent scenes. Note to directors: If I don't understand the character or his motivations, then I probably also don't care about him. I will begin watching the background scenery if it is more interesting, and in this movie it is. That's a fatal fucking flaw, dude.
Now, someone argued with me about this just yesterday. They said, it's all in the subconscious, so there is no development, particularly of the girlfriend, since it's all projections of what Carrey wanted her to be. Not true, says I. The subconscious mind would pick up on little facts about a person without the observer being aware of it. If anything, the picture that emerges from the subconscious would be more accurate than that from the conscious. Thus, we ought to be seeing a more true picture of Winslet's (and Carrey's) character through these bizarre dreamscapes. Instead, we learn very, very little about them and, though we empathize with the heart-rending sense of loss that Carrey ultimately realizes he cannot outrun, we can feel no further. This is a movie about appearances and sets, not feelings, characters, or development. It's dead, lifeless, creepy. It might have been more than that.
The ending, for its part, is just bizarre. You can decide whether it belongs or whether it's just one twist too many. I feel that it's a sop to mopey art fags, the kind who will love this movie. Heartbreak, man, is like, eternal and inevitable, you know?

Stick it up your fucking ass, hippie.