When Calderon de la Barca wrote "Life is a Dream" some centuries back, he could not have imagined that an entity called Hollywood would expound many, many times on his theory and throw images across the screen that would make off-off Broadway stage productions of his play look neolithic. The latest dreamer is Cameron Crowe who has given the American treatment to Spanish filmmakers Mateo Gil and Alejandro Amenabar's "Abre Los Ojos." Crowe is the guy for the job, having written as a teen for Rolling Stone magazine and having put his own novel, "Fast Time At Ridgemont High" on the screen. Known for his hip style and for illustrating arresting characters like Jerry Maguire, Crowe has now substituted the cool realism of "Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous" for an out-and-out surreal adventure into the land of fancy--the expanse that every one of us enters many times during a twenty-four hour period for better or worse depending on what our subconscious evokes at night.
Like "Mulholland Drive"--which has more internal logical than "Vanilla Sky"--Cameron Crowe's new film leads some moviegoers to wonder "what was that all about?" and even Roger Ebert had to go to his screening room twice before he could make something of it. But if you treat the story as though it were a morality play, you could see that Crowe is teaching his principal character, the rich, handsome, popular, has-it-all, 33-year-old David Aames (Tom Cruise) that he has not been treating women well. The film's message, "Shape up" becomes clear by the conclusion of the 135-minute drama, as Crowe takes us deep into the man's interior faculties.
A good deal of the story revolves around the party lives of yuppies, principally of David--who entertains gorgeous women in his unbelievable condo and frequents some of the best clubs in Manhattan where every female looks like the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine and probably acts accordingly. David's main squeeze at the time is Julie Gianni (Cameron Diaz), who is enraged when David turns her out in favor of his new eye candy, Sofia Serrano (Penelope Cruz). What's more he steals Sofia away from his best pal, Brian Shelby (Jason Lee), giving him two moral strikes right off the bat. What David has not anticipated is the rage which his action fuels in Julie, so that by the time Julie takes goes out of control while driving him around Manhattan, seeming to forfeit her own life while leaving David inoperably scarred, the hapless man apparently loses his mind and ends up in jail for murder.
In the film's most stirring scene, Cameron Crowe pulls a David Lynch with a knock-your-socks-off identity switch that will leave you wondering what the heck is going on. It's no wonder that David needs to undergo a series of psychoanalytic sessions with dr. McCabe (Kurt Russell), who makes David realize that murder, and not his dreadfully mangled face, is the real problem.
Tom Cruise smiles too much, as expected, but perhaps this excessive showing of his teeth is evoked more by his character's contempt for women than by actual happiness or good spirits. When he cruises with Penelope and faces off with Julie, the chemistry is there, all right, and while "Vanilla Sky" gives "Abre los Ojos" the inevitable slick feel of Hollywood, taking away some of the more earthy ambiance of the Spanish version, Crowe does not ruin the latter in the way that George Sluizer wrecked his own Dutch-French film "The Vanishing" by Americanizing it with a happy ending. "Vanilla Sky" is among the more cinematic offerings of the year, casting aside the dull naturalism of, say, a "Joe Somebody" in favor of a moral exploration of an egotist's subconscious terror.
By : Harvey S. Karten
Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
Rating: 1
What does it mean when there isn't one original idea in the biggest, most anticipated films of this Christmas season? If they're not adapted from popular books (Harry Potter, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Shipping News), or biopics (Ali, A Beautiful Mind), or retread crap (Kate & Leopold, Joe Somebody), they're remakes like Ocean's Eleven and Vanilla Sky. Now, Ocean's was practically begging to be remade (it had been 41 years since the Rat Pack version), but it's been only three since the source for Sky - Abre Los Ojos - hit screens in the States.
Ojos, written and directed by The Others' Alejandro Amenábar, was a nifty but underseen gem about a young, wealthy ladies' man who becomes disfigured in an automobile crash after a one-night stand goes mental. The rest of the film had its star (Eduardo Noriega, who is 11 years younger than Sky's Tom Cruise) stumbling through dreams and hallucinations, unable to distinguish either from reality as it approached its mind-bending finale.
Sky is probably the most disappointing release yet from Oscar-winning Almost Famous writer/director Cameron Crowe (perhaps because it's so much less personal than his previous work). He does little other than changing the setting, dragging out the ending and adding lots and lots (and lots) of popular music and pop-culture references to Amenábar's film, leaving most of the dialogue and, surprisingly, the cracked structure completely intact. Of course, Sky looks much better because of its big stars and healthy budget, which was over 200 times larger than Ojos'.
Cruise (M:I-2) plays David Aames, a cocksure pretty boy who inherited his father's business when both parents were killed by a drunk driver ten years before Sky opens. Still living in Daddy's shadow (literally, since there's a giant portrait of the guy in David's penthouse apartment), the playboy holds the controlling interest in three successful magazines and a publishing house, although there is a stuffy, perpetually frowning board of directors who would like to bounce him because they see him as a dumb figurehead.
After nailing an ex-model named Julie (Cameron Diaz, Charlie's Angels) on the eve of his birthday, David meets and falls for the down-to-earth Sofia (Penélope Cruz, Captain Corelli's Mandolin) at his big shindig, even though she is accompanied to the party by his best friend and aspiring author Brian (Jason Lee, Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back). The insanely jealous Julie flips out and, after luring David into her car the following morning, drives over a bridge and into a concrete abutment (here's a tip for guys - when a woman asks if you believe in God, tuck and roll). The crash kills Julie and disfigures David, though nowhere nearly as bad as it did Noriega in Ojos, most likely because Cruise is such a vain prick.
Like David, viewers will have a difficult time wrapping their minds around what follows. He's clearly dreaming some things and experiencing others, or vice-versa, or maybe neither (you don't find out until the very end). One of the possibilities has David in prison accused of murder as he wears a prosthetic mask to cover his scarred face, while another scenario shows him in a relationship with Sofia and completely healed through the wonders of modern medicine. But neither seem believable to David, especially when they occasionally bleed into one another. He thinks it's all a conspiracy cooked up by the board of directors, since they can only wrestle control of the company away from David if he is declared mentally unfit (with Sky, Waking Life, A Beautiful Mind and Memento, 2001 may forever be known as the Year of the Dreamy Psychosis).
One of the problems Sky and Ojos both share is an extremely unlikable lead. It's tough to feel much sympathy for any of the stuff that happens to David, especially when we know he's played by a guy who's probably this cocky in real life. It's not at all like Cruise's character in the Crowe-directed Jerry Maguire, who starts out as a jerk and then slowly wins over the audience. And it's nothing like his T.J. Mackey from Magnolia, who is so over-the-top evil, you can't help but like him.
If there's one thing Crowe is good at doing, it's working his favorite songs into his films, but in Sky, the music is a little too distracting at times. There are instances it works quite well, though, especially when they subtly tie in to the story (Julie's cell phone ringer plays "Life is but a dream," and Peter Gabriel croons, "I will show another me," at an integral moment). But what he did to the ending still has my head shaking. You know things are taking too long when one of the characters looks at his watch out of sheer fucking boredom, like everyone in the audience.
Though it structurally follows Ojos like an instruction manual, Sky runs about a half-hour longer because of the incredibly prolonged finale. People who haven't seen Ojos may still dig the twist and turns in Sky, but even they'll likely be unimpressed with the ending. Viewers of the original, however, will be disappointed.
