Overall Rating
  Awesome: 28.94%
Worth A Look: 26.05%
Average: 20.9%
Pretty Bad: 14.15%
Total Crap: 9.97%
16 reviews, 215 user ratings
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| Vanilla Sky |
by Greg Muskewitz
"We're not in Oz anymore."
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Vanilla Sky was supposed to be important, but then it opened and its word of mouth appeared to be gasping for air. Right on the heels of his Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe is not in Oz—or even San Diego anymore.Like me, he has been drawn to the allure of New York City, but even more so, Crowe has been drawn by Tom Cruise’s sweet deal to remake Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los Ojos/Open Your Eyes. (In return, or as part of the deal, Amenábar was to make The Others in English with Cruise’s then-wife Kidman in the lead, in exchange for a four or five picture deal.) As much as I had always wanted to see Abre los Ojos, seeing how I hadn’t yet gotten around to it, I felt it would have been a poor choice to watch it right before the remake. Viewings too close together could ruin my perception of the both. One thing that can be said of Amenábar—based on The Others as well as his conceptual origins of this story—is that he is one of those filmmakers. A trickster. A deceiver. A master, or conjurer of chicanery. One of those: an M. Night Shyamalan of sorts. It is obvious from herein out that any time I look at a film of his, it will be with a cocked-brow. Back on to Crowe, aside from retitling the twisty and tricksy thriller with its current silly label (normally, perhaps, a remake uses the English translation of the original film’s title, but since Amenábar’s was already marketed that way…), he seems more interested in overlaying the film with a burned-CD worth of favorite tracks. The gist of the twists is that a slacker, narcissistic playboy (Tom Cruise) jilts his “fuck-buddy” (Cameron Diaz) for his friend’s (Jason Lee) new attraction (Penélope Cruz, star of the original as well). However, after a freak accident where Diaz drives off a bridge to commit suicide while Cruise is along for the ride, he suffers a mightily disfigured facial rearrangement. A murder is bandied about, with much of the story being told in generous helpings of flashbacks as Cruise wears an eerie latex mask, though none of the doctor/patient sessions seem to clear up the discrepancies of shifting identities, giant coincidences, or what really happened.
Dreams, or the dream-state, is a major player in all this—a crazy nightmare is interjected unexpectedly here and there, leading one to wonder if any of this is real at all. (Shades of Waking Life, yes, but not nearly the miserable, unwakable trap.) The problem with this is that dreams, or a dream sequence, have no substance. When proceeding scenes stack up on top of one another only for a major revelation to remove the imposed substance, that stack capsizes itself, and the film is left flatter and less inhabited because of it. This was never a preferential theme of mine. Movies like Fight Club are all about the trick, all about the rug-pulling and gullible-hooking. It’s too easy to do when a movie takes itself so damn seriously. Boxing Helena was the opposite: it was trashed because of its deception (and its ridiculousness), but it was funny and quirky, and even though it wasn’t very good, I have less to complain about that movie than the pretension and haughtiness that Fight Club proclaims. (And when something truly creative or original is done with dream themes, especially a genuine equivocation that bewilders as well as inspires, such as in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive or Audition, it’s a completely different ballgame.) Despite the absence of Crowe’s personal vision, that which typically makes his films so good, he still ably strings the viewers along, forces them to pay careful attention—even if frustrating them while doing so. (And the clip of Björk, in her music video from “Big Time Sensuality”—a tribute since she was snubbed at the Oscars possibly?—wins Crowe a small point, albeit a very small one.) The performances are also a high, with Cruise’s mockish in-joke the most impressive.
With Kurt Russell and Tilda Swinton (better here in her small scene than in the entirety of The Deep End) and other random cameos (i.e., Steven Spielberg).Final Verdict: B-.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=4641&reviewer=172
originally posted: 01/11/02 04:57:09
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USA
14-Dec-2001 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
20-Dec-2001 (MA)
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