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With
names like Cameron Crowe and Tom Cruise associated with it, I
expected great things from "Vanilla Sky". But sadly,
the only thing great about this movie is the one thing that has
nothing to do with it at all.
As word has it, when Tom Cruise saw director Alejandro
Amenabar's complicated "Open Your Eyes", he
immediately bought the rights to it under one condition, that
Cruise produce his first English speaking film, "The
Others".
Now "The Others" is one of the year's finest films and
the "Open Your Eyes" remake "Vanilla Sky" is
destined for a big box office drop off once word of mouth gets
out. This erotic thriller/ dreamy nightmare is an unbearably
slow moving mess that becomes more of a headache than a
head-trip.
The film stars Tom Cruise as David Aames, a wealthy New York
City magazine publishing executive who has inherited his whole
life from his father. David has managed to coast through the
everyday world, doing what he wants when he wants to do it.
Looking at David, you see that the benefits of having a rich
father are endless.
He drives a jaguar, skips work to play T-ball with his best
friend Brian (Jason Lee), and is having sex with a beautiful
model named Julie Gianni (Cameron Diaz). The relationship is in
no way serious, though Julie would like it to be. David has a
blank spot emotionally for her and that is the only thing that
prevents him from living a perfect life.
Then one night at his birthday party, he meets a dancer named
Sofia (Penelope Cruz) and they hit it off instantly. What David
doesn't know though is that Julie showed up unannounced at his
party and saw him flirting with her.
The next morning, David is surprised to see her sitting in her
car outside of Sofia's apartment. She coaxes David into her car
and then turns very depressive and suicidal, and before he knows
it, Julie has driven her car right off a Riverside Bridge,
sending her to an early grave and leaving David with facial
disfiguration.
This is all being told in narration by David, who is being
analyzed by a prison psychiatrist (Kurt Russell) after he is
arrested for murder. While we wait to see who David has actually
killed, we also wonder why David wears a latex mask, even though
later on in the film he has managed to find a surgeon to fix his
face.
David is also a man who goes in and out of dream sequences, not
knowing whether or not they are his real life or if they are
actually just dreams. There is one point where he is lying in
bed with Sofia, and then out of no where, Sofia becomes Julie.
Only while David is going in and out of dreams, the theater
audience is going in and out of consciousness. The film is much
too long, and the things David encounters on his journey are
little more than blips, and not the stuff that makes good drama.
For that we have to find some kind of likeness in David, and
even though Cruise plays his admirably, I still didn't feel like
caring for this character.
"Memento" director Chris
Nolan should have told Crowe that the main part of making a
thriller is giving the viewer some kind of hint as to what is
going on. He, on the other hand, continues to keep his audience
in the dark until the very end. Crowe has a hard time finding
the interest beneath the material for "Open Your Eyes"
and so all he has here is a quickly tiresome film.
What is very awkward though is that Crowe can't even create any
chemistry between Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz, which is
something he is usually so good at creating. Cruise brings a
sort of playfulness to the leading man role, but the romance is
so underwritten and the dialogue is so poor that any bond of
love between these two people seems very weak.
Tom Cruise does manage to shine in this film none the less. He
runs through it like a maniac on speed and does manage to make
the audience feel sympathetic toward his facial scars, even
tough in the process; I was pretty repulsed by the characters
need for self-pity.
Supporting actress Cameron Diaz does much better work and I hope
a nomination comes her way for it. She has a very small role,
but it is both a sexy and dangerous one as well and she
incredibly manages both. One of the best scenes of this year is
the one with her and David in the car because she shows such
vulnerability and pain that you end up siding with her instead
of the frightened David.
These two performances are so good that it almost hurts to pick
on Penelope Cruz. She still sounds as if she is having a hard
enough time with the English language, let a lone trying to play
on the right emotion to satisfy a specific scene.
One nice thing Crowe does manage to do is add mood setting music
from both R.E.M and Radiohead. As for the film itself, it spends
too much time leaving you wondering what is going on, which is
one of the reasons why it will probably not become a hit.
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