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Cameron Crowe
Vanilla Sky

8/ 10 [Edit this Release]
Type: Cinema Release date: 25/01/2002
sara_love by Sara Lovejoy [Edit this content] ▾ 8 comments 19:31 January 25th, 2002
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Cruise stars in this Cameron Crowe remake of Alejandro Amenabar's 1997 film, 'Abre Los Ojos' ('Open Your Eyes').

Cruise plays David Aames, a rich play boy type, who refuses "to let happiness in without a full body search". That is until he meets the beautiful Sofia (Penelope Cruz, reprising her role from the original film). David and Sofia bond over the course of a night and the future looks bright,until Davids 'friend', Julie (Cameron Diaz) turns up in a stalker like manner, outside Sofia's appartment and lures David into her car. She turns slightly psychotic, claiming to be in love with him, and also revealing that she is slighlty put out about being refered to as David's 'Fuck Buddy' (the girl has a point here). She is so miffed in fact, that she drives them off of a bridge. So far, so simple and ever so slightly tedious.

The story gets more interesting from here on in. David is hideously disfigured, well, enough to prove to the audience that The Cruiser has defied vanity and is truly a proper actor,and he is plagued by dreams that he can not distinguish from reality.

Crowe offers us a very sleek movie, with a strong aesthetic, but there are things that let it down. Cruise's disfigurement alters through out the whole movie, which is a little disconcerting as his limp seems to come and go, and the actor is prone to hystrionics, which Crowe should have made more of an effort to contain.

Overall this is an entertaining movie, with a bit more depth than your usual Hollywood offering.

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Vanilla Sky

This film was well and truly a headfuck. When it finished I wasn't actually sure if I had enjoyed it or not. I was just left a touch confused. This has never happened before. I even understood Pi for crying out loud. Hmph.
Old_Anonymous_Comments | 29 Jan '02, 11:28 | X | Reply

Re: Vanilla Sky

Saw the Spanish film on which it was based at the cinema (friend was studying Spanish at the time) and that was bloody mental. At least films like the amazing (which was amazing) are possible to work out in retrospect, but this one...headfuck indeed!

Headfuck = good, IMHO

Just saw it myself today. Films that fuck your head, i.e. make you think, have to be a Good Thing.

I imagine you now want to see it again, now that you know the ending etc., just like you probably would with any other really great film from the last decade or so (a few examples - The Usual Suspects, Pulp Fiction, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, Memento, Mullholland Drive). In my humble opinion, a film that is worth watching more than once obviously does more than just tell a story [or in the case of porn, does anything but tell a story ;)]. If a movie challenges you in some way, that has to be a positive. And if we get attractive and expensive stars, good-quality production and an excellent soundtrack too (is Hollywood finally maturing?), that's got to be a bonus.

I just hope it might cause the average(/stereotypical) Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz fan to think a little more than usual.

Re: Vanilla Sky

i've never walked out of a cinema after a film before with such a dazed, disorientated grin on my face. mindblowing film, headfuck is certainly the word, sterling performances from all the cast [even tom cruise was bearable], great soundtrack, this week i shall be mostly heartily recommending this film to everyone i can grab hold of.

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Dear lord, this movie was junk...

Four stars out of five? Did I watch the same film?

What a total, total worthless mess this movie was... a tribute to Ed Wood perhaps? Or three David Lynch movies edited randomly together by a media studies student on work experience? Either way, it was garbage.

The endless, pointless, tedious oh-look-aren't-we-postmodern plot twists would've been intriguing, had I actually cared about any of the characters in the first place. As it was, they were so obviously calculated to confuse that they weren't actually particularly confusing, and the movie ironically became utterly predictable in its self-conscious desire to be weird and enigmatic.

The ham-fisted attempts at symbolism (Cruise's half-disfigured face, the prosthetic mask, the dream-sequences) failed miserably in their attempt to dress this nonsense up as something deep and meaningful. Cruise's awful acting didn't exactly help either.

Of course it's all a waste of time, since the unbelievably rediculous Matrix rip-off that took over the last 30 minutes renders everything else in the movie meaningless anyway.

So basically, I didn't like it much. It did, at least, leave me wanting to see the original out of sheer curiosity (surely it can't have been *this* jaw-droppingly bad?), but that's about it. Avoid.
Old_Anonymous_Comments | 3 Feb '02, 00:03 | X | Reply

Re: Dear lord, this movie was junk...

wierd. Just watching the original Spanish version right not. Night let you know what this was like later on...

Re: Dear lord, this movie was junk...

isn't the original fantastic?

lanky

Re: Dear lord, this movie was junk...

I do actually agree with you,but the reason why i gave it four stars was because there is so much pap on general release and this will probably be the most thought provoking, 'hey man that's like really deep',piece of cinema that the average banana head will go and see this year.I do think that it does deserve some credit cos it is slick in its production,but what do we expect from Cameron Crowe, who even made OD-ing look pretty in Almost Famous.I think comparing it to an Ed Wood movie is unfair cos even if his movies are really bad,you gotta love him.And the David Lynch reference is way off cos there were no unexplained yet ubiqitous dwarves.It was at the end of the day an example of Tom Cruise PR wank,but if his name gets people into the cinema, who then might go and check out the original, then surely thats a good thing for european cinema, if nothing else.

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