Absurdity

It'll be an enormous understatement to call this movie "odd", in which the story is heavier and more stagnant than the big rock with signified presence at both the opening and the end of the movie, while all the characters talk faster than a machine gun, all at once and all the time. For a comedy, this movie surely throws around a lot of fancy words, existentialism, nihilism, identity, nothingness etc. It serves its comedy purpose well by not taking these abstract concepts too seriously, but the movie goes to the other extreme by making the characters almost randomly burp out these words just for the heck of it, totally exempts itself from any concern of their original meaning it borders on blasphemy. Admittedly the movie has its cynical and funny moments, yet as hard as it tried to make u laugh, not heartily but pensively and self-contained, mind you, it eventually fell into cliché. I welcomed the weird yet undeniably original idea of "the existential detectives", given the pleasant experience I had with the crappy clinic of the eternal sunshine. But the problem is the ideas and preaches of the two detectives had almost nothing to do with existentialism itself, they sounded more like an amp-ed up version of some random preaches of a spiritual guru on day-time TV –"everything is connected", "there's no such thing as you and me"; "there's no remainder in the equation of infinity"...Caterine, the French "thinker", has at least a faint resemblance to a post-modern existentialist in comparison. Yet even her version of existentialism (or nihilism/deconstructism for that matter) is watered down and twist, she mentioned the "absurdly theatric" process of the alternation between what she called "pure being" and "human drama". Now "absurdity" is a keyword, if not THE keyword of early existentialism, which indicates contrast of the facts that there's no intrinsic meaning of being and human's incessant effort of finding one. It's a far cry from Caterine's assertion, makes you wonder if the director threw this conversation in just for the sake of mentioning that word. There are abundant superficial references of this kind in this movie, like the mentioning of Mcgregor totally out of context, and the flash of the book of Kafka in the trash. All these are not to say this is not an interesting and unique movie. There are some genuinely funny moments, like in Bernard's office when he turned around the back of his suite was printed with the scribble from the blackboard, it's self-mocking moments like this that saved this movie from being a self-important bore. And, personally, I appreciate that the director took time out of the busy soul-searching to take a jab or two at the hypocrisy of certain self-righteous religious ppl.