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Opinions! We all have them. Find out what people really think with polls and surveys from Crowdsignal.
What a dichotomy in this Final Four. In this matchup, we've got No Country - a good movie that doesn't offer much more than surface pleasures and should have lost in the Sweet 16. Then there is Eternal Sunshine, another solid film that I can see why people love, but should have lost to Finding Nemo. I'll take the Coen brothers film in this underwhelming matchup, but both of these movies should lose to whoever wins the other bout.
I had a hard time and really wrestled with this one. Neither is top three for me, the honors there goes to There Will Be Blood, Spirited Away and In the Mood For Love, but they are both great film. The Coens are among my favourite directors, but I have never viewed No Country as one of their best work. Gondry on the other hand is, in my humble opinion, a lesser director, but seems to have struck gold here; quirky, innovative and emotional, Eternal Sunshine, blew my socks off on first viewing. You have got to stick with what leaves you barefoot...
Of all the DVDs I’ve bought, never except for Eternal Sunshine, have I gone to grab up a copy from my local outlet as soon as I could get away from work on that particular Tuesday drop date. It’s probably redundant to say that it blew my mind, but it also showed Jim Carrey in a new light. And being a long time science fiction fan, here was a high quality SFer that was not Space Opera or over the top Fantasy. The best of the oughts! - Brian from Peachtree Corners, GA.
Eternal Sunshine is my vote , captivating , inventive and heart touching ; you expect a mainstream romantic movie , but the script is so creative and so well built that you get a deep study into the love relationship between humans that is ultimately shocking for the viewer. No country is a great film , especially the first hour , but the second hour loses tension with a sheriff that does not contribute to the thrill and with a chase that ends too abruptly for me.
I'm voting against Eternal Sunshine just because it beat that masterpiece by Lynch in the last round.
As much as I love them both, neither of these films would make it in the top 20 of my personal favorites of the 2000's. Before Sunset is a much better rumination on accepting the real against the ill-fated idealism of romance. And as far as a nihilistic Coen Brothers' tone piece with a cryptic ending.........please, give me A Serious Man any day.
But I can't pick either of those incredible masterpieces because, like a Cormac McCarthy novel, the universe is a cold and unfeeling place. And so is Filmspotting Madness.
No Country gets my vote.
They killed Kelly! (McDonald)
You B*tards!
These are both quality films, well deserving to be in the final four (not my top four but still deserving).
I'm casting my vote for Eternal Sunshine, for formal inventiveness and invoking emotional response other than dread.
If you need a reason to vote against No Country, the killed Kelly McDonald.
Or ask yourself if the Marshall's side of the story has enough time/depth to balance agin' the Chigure/Thanos side.
C'mon Filmspotters, lets not repeat 2007 again.
This match-up isn't really about which of these films is actually the better piece of art, if it were, No Country for Old Men would win by a landslide. This is a contest as old as humanity, nihilism vs. faith.
Faith in what? Eternal Sunshine is a well-made film to be sure, but what most others apparently seem to regard as one of its major strengths, I've always regarded as its critical flaw: that it ultimately just boils down to the banal idea that there is, in fact, a mystical aspect to what connects people romantically; that there is some force like destiny at work in what draws people together. In short, that the universe is magic.
On the other hand, No Country for Old Men is a masterpiece of existential horror, it confronts us with an indifferent universe, and a message that more people need to hear: "And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold. And I knew that whenever I got there, he’d be there. And then I woke up." And then I woke up! Wake up! No Country for Old Men is ten times the film that Eternal Sunshine could ever dream of being.
Just commented to say, do a ctrl+f and read the comment by "Ned from Southeast MI" below. So good.
I have to say this was honestly an easy choice for me, I know that iss not the case for most, but there is a visceral feeling I get when I watch Eternal Sunshine that I can't quite put into words. I feel the loss, the pain, the warmth of each little fading memory Joel has. As you break through the layers of the troubled relationship between the him and Clementine you see the one thing we all hope to have. A connection. A want to be together on a cold isolating beach in long island. I still get chills hearing jim carrey say "ok" at the end of the film. To me No Country is a movie about power, greed, death and the some of the worst aspects of society. Where as Sunshine is just about love. And if I have to choose between living in a world with those two options, I won't choose death.
I've been annoyed by the Brothers' dominance across Filmspotting polls - not because I don't think they're geniuses who crank out excellent movies at an alarming pace (they are) - but because even with that stipulation, I think they've wiggled their with this crowd way into "overrated" status, or at least over-appreciated. If all they had was Filmspotting poll data to go off of, aliens visiting Earth would go home reporting that the Coens taught Ingmar Bergman and Orson Wells everything they know. I love you guys, but the Filmspotting fan community has allowed brother-love to become a zero-sum game that leaves no love for other masters. (Stop it, guys!)
That said, you gotta be kidding me with this matchup, yall. I'll gladly put my backlash on hold if it means keeping you guys from losing your minds. Along with "Fargo" and "Llewellyn Davis," "No Country" rounds out - and perhaps leads - my top 3 for these guys. It is *such* a masterpiece... West Texas noir that compromises *nothing* in the crafting top-notch thriller, but executed throughout with a steady eye on the human condition. Love, loss, regret, hope; it's all there, carefully observed, perfectly balanced.
"Eternal Sunshine" is clever, charming, and unique, but so were "Brokeback," "Nemo" and "Lost in Translation." "No Country," the second-best film of the decade; avenging angel.
Eternal Sunshine for me and it's not even close. The Coens have much better films, and there are also better films out there about killers, and killing. Eternal Sunshine is a gift that keeps on giving. I've revisited it at different stages of my life, and it always shines a light on different aspects of relationships, memory, and what is worthwhile about life, depending on what is happening in my own life. A great film can tell you different things about life, and yourself, as time goes on, and Eternal Sunshine is one of the best examples of that. On top of that, it's funny, visually inventive, wonderfully acted, and damn enjoyable to watch. I hope it wins the whole thing, but even if it loses now or in the finals and causes me great anguish, I'm happy that it happened.
I voted for No Country, but I really think the special effects in Eternal Sunshine should get some airtime on the show. Gondry has always felt like the modern day artistic progeny of George Méliès, and this is the feature film of his that perfectly marries form with theme.
Let's be clear - both movies are masterpieces. While No Country is more existential, dealing with morality and mortality, Eternal Sunshine is more human, exploring memory and relationships. BUT, in thinking about which movie deserves my vote, there's something to be said for pure originality. While the Coens masterfully adapted Cormac Mccarthy's book into cinematic gold (often word for word), the combination of Kaufman's inventive script and Gondry's creative direction gave us a story the likes of which had never been told before. Eternal Sunshine gets my vote.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is beautiful, wrenching, emotional, delirious, colourful, messy, funny, devastating, imperfect, inventive film that transcends all labels.
Old Country is an excellent thriller with a great villain.
No question. Eternal Sunshine is the best film of the 2000s.
The film medium allows artists unlimited opportunities to make their imaginations manifest, and Eternal Sunshine takes greater advantage of that canvas than No Country, via fantastical, phantasmagorical and unforgettable visual storytelling. It's all the more impressive that we're witnessing an internal journey on the screen. Don't let this film disappear like Joel's memories! Sunshine gets my vote.
Eternal Sunshine has way more heart and imagination. NCFOM is just about killing.
Eternal Sunshine captivated me without needing a monstrous villain to shock me, just through wonderful filmmaking and storytelling.
Although NCFOM was great, i'm tired of glorifying movies that get oohs and aahs with cheap violence and killing characters off. Too easy.
That being said, I'm gonna vote for There Will Be Blood in the finals against whoever wins this. A movie that turned violent but completely earned it!
I just heaved a heavy sigh. I voted against Mulholland Dr only to see it move on and voted for it only to see it perish in the flames that Sam stokes in his free time. Hopefully that curse is only about Mulholland and it won't affect No Country for Old Men in this battle with Eternal Sunshine. No Country is such a profoundly stylish exploration of the vagaries of resistance to chaos and evil. It's never so nihilistic as to suggest that resisting evil is pointless even as it endeavors to deliver the message that the struggle against it will not inevitably produce anything like what we would describe as satisfactory justice, as far far too many crime thrillers would have us lazily believe. That means that as much as I adore Eternal Sunshine and draw hope in my own life from the story of Joel and Clem's connection and dysfunction, and as much as I wish a random car accident would just decide this horrible matchup for me, there are no car accidents in the Madness, only collective responsibility for our own votes. And I had to vote for No Country.
I haven't rewatched either of these since my only rewatch when the DVDs were first released.
All I can vote on is what I remember: NCfOM is superior, nay, excellent example of a Coen Brothers thriller. Tremendous performances and dark, taut storytelling. But I can get all that and more from Cormac McCarthy's stunning novel. And now Anton Chigurh's sinister smile and creepy haircut have indelibly seared themselves into my brain, I can only apologise, but I don't need the film.
Whereas Eternal Sunshine is a unique work that blew me away and affected me viscerally while I was watching it. Carrey and Winslet are both fantastic, playing against type for that time, and the visual storytelling is peerless. It needs to survive, and YES, I do mean through to the final - it's the only one of the Final 4 in the Pantheon for a reason...
True story- this choice literally made my phone inexplicably shut down and restart itself. Such was the distress....
Eternal Sunshine. But don't ask me to justify it, because tomorrow it might be No Country.
I know the Coen's film is great, and I can imagine being an old man with no country for me and glad that my experience has been captured so masterfully. Instead, I am a slightly younger man, more likely to be wistful over a manic pixie dream girl, so I'm voting for Eternal Sunshine while I still value the melancholy... instead of knowingly smirking at it.
Coens! Coens! Coens! Coens! Coens! Coens! Coens! Coens! Coens! Coens!
I almost had to close my eyes and just pick one. This was a difficult one for me. I was always a huge fan of Eternal Sunshine... and could never imagine picking any movie over it. I recently rewatched both of these movies and I really think that No Country is the better movie. The suspense, drama and absolutely unforgettable scenes such as the coin flip, the killing with the bolt stunner, etc. help make this movie the clear winner. And really if Anton Chigurh and Joel Barish met face-to-face in a dark alley. I don’t think anyone would give poor Joel a chance in hell against “the montster”.
No Country is by far the superior movie. I love films that make the general movie going crowd mad like this one did. Amazing performances, great cinematography, tense, scary, funny...how could anything beat the Coen's best film? Well I voted for Eternal Sunshine because movies move you...they evoke emotions...they make you question decisions made earlier in your life...they make you cry...I'm just not ready to have Eternal Sunshine erased from my memory.
So glad Sunshine made it to the final 4.. it's well a masterpiece. But No Country is in a league of its own. Smart, funny, terrifying, not following the normal tropes (I mean killing off one of the main characters with no drama or backward place- spoiler- sorry! totally Brilliant) not to mention the most villianous villain I've seen in movies.. Back in 07 it felt like I was watching one of the best films ever made... will it be a 2007 show down in the final? we'll see,,...
I just rewatched "No Country for Old Men" this week for the first time since its release, and i bumped up my star rating -- it is really very darn near perfect. There is a brilliant richness to the Coens' work here that must be kept from the Unforgiving Flames of Filmspotting Madness. I love "Eternal Sunshine" for its originality, its fantasy-within-the-real-world quirkiness, and the heartbreaking sincerity of the performances ... but it isn't the polished a piece of art that future generations deserve.
What does Team Sappy have left to root for? The sun has set on Jesse and Celine; Bob Harris' whisper will stay forever untranslated; what Once was will never again be. We wanted love, but Filmspotting voters just weren't in the Mood; wanted Spirit only to see it banished away.
Now there's a choice between masterful, bone-chilling nihilism and messy, open-ended humanism. I'm turning in my cinephile badge and voting for the bleeding-heart mess. And next week, if somehow it becomes a battle of Heart vs Blood, you know what hill I'm dying on.
Can Josh please revisit Eternal Sunshine before he flippantly votes in the semifinals??? These are both fantastic films but which one provides some semblance of hope for the human condition and which one shoots you in the head with a cattle gun? The choice for me is clear, spotless even.
And don't get me started on the overhype of There Will Be Blood. I'm Eternal Sunshining this Madness all the way.
This is the kind of matchup that Filmspotting Madness was made for! I recently rewatched Eternal Sunshine and lead a discussion on the importance of identity and what we choose to forget. This film has made me rethink not only the way I think about my own life, but the way that I think about film making and storytelling. But... how do I say no to the brilliance of my all time favourite Coen brothers film? I feel like a stereotypical Filmspotting listener, proclaiming my allegiance to the Coen's, but it has to be done!
I love both of these movies. How to decide?
No Country is technically flawless and I can't imagine it being improved upon.
Eternal Sunshine is messy and can have nits picked...but it also contains a lot of truth.
Truth wins.