Eternal Sunshine and back to the Auteur Theory

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) - I'm a sucker for a movie with a good premise and so, apparently, is the director of this pretentious movie, a Frenchman named Michel Gondry. He also directed "Be Kind, Rewind", another movie with a really good premise that I wanted to see. Now I'm not so sure.
Here's the fun local angle: Jim Carrey lives in Rockville Centre and takes the train into Penn to go to work (we never find out what he does for a living). One day he decides to skip work and take the train to Montauk, so he runs around and barely catches the train in the other direction. We are forced to watch this action twice in the movie: so there was plenty of time for me to realize that he wasn't in Rockville Centre train station at all, but in Ronkonkoma. I guess you take your fun where you can get it...
The screenplay is by the same fellow who wrote "Adaptation" which Mike liked a lot and said I should see - and it's on the queue - and the screenplay is definately better than the movie. For instance, the Jim Carrey character keeps a journal, complete with cartoon drawings, but, for a movie supposedly about the interior life of it's main character, the director just doesn't know what to do with his character's journal writing which, you'd think, expresses his innermost thoughts.
And here's something else: he meets Kate Winslet out there in Montauk, and she's beautiful, kooky and has blue hair and she keeps pursuing him like he's the last man on earth, despite the fact that he says and does absolutely nothing interesting at all. Now, this is a screwball set-up that the script provides, but this 46-year-old director is tone-deaf: he just doesn't know what to do with it. Let me get into a little film history here:
"Screwball comedy" has come to mean any crazy, zany, madcap movie, but that's imprecise. A "screwball" is a scriptwriter's term for a woman who chases a man for no apparent reason. Two really good examples are "Bringing Up Baby" (1938 - Katherine Hepburn pursues Cary Grant) and "Ball of Fire" (1941 - Barbara Stanwyck pursues Gary Cooper). And they're both directed by Howard Hawks, a guy who, if he's known at all, is remembered for directing Westerns. The point is, Hawks was a director who could take a formula, a convention, and turn it into a great movie, time after time.
Which brings me back to the Auteur Theory, because after all this time, I can't think of a better predictor of whether a movie is going to be good or bad than who directed it.

PS - The exception to the rule is Victor Fleming. Mary was lucky enough to take a film making class with Ken Jacobs, one of the best comic directors who ever lived (there, I said it). Without mentioning the Auteur Theory at all, he pronounced during one class that "Gone with the Wind" was the worst Hollywood film ever made and that"The Wizard of Oz" was the best Hollywood film ever made, without saying (and without any students noticing) that they were both directed in 1939 by the same man, Victor Fleming.