Last night I went to see The Eternal … … the one with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet How amusing to give a movie about memory loss a title that is impossible to remember.

Anyway, as I say, for all those of you with short term memory loss, it's about memory loss, and there is lots of pot and whiskey swirling and swilling about in it, and I haven't done any of the first or nearly enough of the second to really empathise with the main characters. The way I see it, this is one of those movies that romanticises and makes "real" the mental malfunctions of a particular bit of the lowlife subculture, in this case the one where people with enough brains and education to know far better nevertheless inflict brain damage upon themselves with drugs and booze. The romantic pretence embodied in this movie is that instead of just forgetting stuff, the characters decide to forget particular stuff, and there are Mad Scientists with Computers who do Frankensteiny things in reverse to their brains to make them forget stuff. Now I'm no computer expert, but it is my clear understanding that they have not yet reached this state of advanced mental destructiveness, where you can put a helmet on someone and then just chase their conscious mind around in their brain with scanners and zap whatever they then think about. The techies have a bit of a way to go before they can do that. I further surmise that when they do get to be able to do this, the people doing it will be quite well paid and inhabit buildings where people have security passes and advanced degrees, to say nothing of anti-drugs and anti-booze employment policies. Nerds in bedrooms don't pioneer things like this while remaining in their bedrooms.

So, I didn't believe in the various premises of the movie for one moment. Or perhaps it was that, on account of not liking the movie enough, I spent a lot of time analysing it, instead of just enjoying it.

I normally don't like Jim Carrey. Too manic and selfish and self-referential. For similar reasons, I didn't like Jerry Lewis or Jack Lemmon, although I did love Jack Lemmon's taste in movie scripts and two of my all time favourites have him starring in them – The Appartment and Some Like It Hot. Jerry Lewis, on the other hand, had crap taste in scripts and was himself crap, which made everything very easy.

But I liked Carrey in this. He cooled it down and behaved like a normal person (the way Jerry Lewis eventually did in a few less crap late movies), which under the circumstances was a rather peculiar decision but there you go, that's actors for you. Maybe, like John Hurt in Alien, Carrey reckoned that there was no point in him trying to upstage the real star of the movie, which was the Special Effects department. But I don't like Special Effects as much as I used to. As one of my cinema companions said, there was a nice movie in there in among all the craziness, starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, having a romance, which she would have liked to see. Me too.

The Two Nerds I just found annoying. The movie itself was apparently created by two real nerds named Kaufman and Gondry. I suspect these two real nerds of having done far too much dope and booze themselves, and that the Two Nerds were a fantasised self portrait, with the socially dyslexic and mentally damaged selves of the two real nerds kitted up to look like movie stars, in this case a fattened up Mark Ruffalo and the little one in Lord of the Rings. Both were ludicrously miscast in my opinion, especially the little one.

The boss of the Two Nerds, played by Tom Wilkinson, was likewise unbelievable. He seemed entirely sane, other than the small matter of what he did for a living and who he did it with, when the part surely called for a Mad Professor type.

And there was the basic problem with this movie, for me. A completely unbelievable scenario was created, and then you were asked to Take It Seriously, the way the Tom Wilkinson character did. I just couldn't do this.

Some of the memory loss effects were quite good. Things disappearing in front of your eyes, etc. But on the whole, I was underwhelmed. In a world of drug addled movie makers and drug addled movie goers, I felt left out. I didn't hate it, definitely not. A lot of it was quite fun. Kate Winslet is nice, after all. So, I might give it another look when it comes around on telly.