I enjoy intellectually stimulating flicks, not to say i don't like a good world war 2 movie, but an action film purely devoid of intra-cranial simuli would make me cringe in my seat. Vanilla Sky did a good job of making me think as well as feel. I loved the first scene when Tom Cruise finds himself alone in Manhattan, and accompanied by a delicious soundtrack is searching through the usually busy streets. Then, a moment later when he is awake, and back in the crowded streets - the contrast, you can taste it.
I heard several comments along the line of "It was confusing" or "I think that the director had scenes at random to add to the clutter and make you confused." I too, felt the movie confusing, but the confusion was part of it. If you let the confusion carry you through the movie - and you accept it as a vital part of the flick, you would enjoy it so much more.
One thing that greatly lessened my attraction to the movie came at the end. All of a sudded i realized that I had indeed seen this movie before, only then Arnold Schwartzenegger was starring, and I think Sharon Stone was our leading lady instead of Cameron Diaz. I believe it was Total Recall. And then having the whole plot slapped in my face by Noah Taylor screaming "FOUR, FOUR, FOUR." felt dumbifying, however much i enjoyed the revealed plot (which seemed to be none of our explicit business up until now).
As far as the love story goes, I did not surprise myself by being a blunt oaf. Because all I saw at the amorous level of the movie was a player, who was looking for the next piece of fresh meat. So maybe i need to be convinced that love at first sight does exist after all.
In all a tantalizing artwork, maybe not a big-screener - more of a renter perhaps - but if you are like me, and don't think twice about moseying down to the theatre for any little piece of moving imagery, go see it. Indeed.
Open your eyes.
Surrealistic. Colour. Dizzy montages. Floating dreamscapes. I thought this film was an absolute treasure. I just came back from it & my head is still slightly spinning from its surprises & themes, reminiscent of the Matrix in terms of the main character's reality & perceived reality. David (played by Tom Cruise) is plagued by dreams, and nightmares. He is never sure where the fantasies end and his actual life begins.. Cameron Crowe's incredible visual and mood effects capture the confusion and the levitation of the nuances between dreams and life. It is very tightly directed & at times wholly celestial, for example the scene towards the finish in which we witness an endless glass elevator ride up a Manhattan skyscraper. And of course, the breathtaking (literally.. you catch your breath) opening sequence where Tom Cruise runs down an empty Times Square. In an unprecedented turn of events, Cameron Crowe was granted a three hour time window in which to complete their scene just after daybreak one Sunday morning. They wanted to do it the old-school way, without resorting to computer enhancement. Test audiences marvelled at the "convincing computer effect" regardless. The film is actually a remake of a mysterious Spanish film Abre los Ojos (or, Open Your Eyes), and is the story of a cocksure young man who has a very lax attitude towards life, being born into wealth, as well as handsome and charming and all the rest. He has inherited a magazine publishing fortune and runs his business with such a nonchalance and broad grin as though he has never had a difficult day in his life - and he hasn't. His peers, "the seven dwarves" as he calls them, are fairly obviously trying to get him out of the business; they refer to him as "Citizen Dildo" behind his back, but it is doubtful David would even care if he knew. He holds a party in his apartment which boasts an amazing array of pop-culture artifacts, my favourite being the hologram of John Coltrane playing his saxophone. He also owns paintings by Monet and Joni Mitchell. He immediately falls in love with Sofia (Penélope Cruz), much to the dismay of Cameron Diaz's character, "the saddest woman to ever hold a martini". Suicidally frustrated that David had been so casual about what he had regarded as their "fling", she drove them both off a bridge. And the film strangely unravels. I wasn't entirely sure why the film got an R rating, but I suppose the sexual content was fairly intense and violent. In this one particular scene, the nudity is non-explicit but the sex is very prolonged and visceral. Apart from this, you get to see Penelope Cruz's breasts, and they all speak about sexually related things, although to me it faded into the background - it wasn't until I researched why it got an R rating that I remembered. I have read more than a fair amount of reviews implying that Cameron Crowe's untarnished list of great films ended with Vanilla Sky. These reviewers claim that the montages are too confusing and that although they recognise this is done to create the suspense, it makes for a weak characterisation. In that, if we are constantly re-evaluating the realities in the film, if we are constantly finding our orientation, we are unable to find the time to identify emotionally with the main character. Apparently Tom Cruise's character was 'unconvincing', & we are left wondering, who is he? To this I say firstly that I don't think the movie was necessarily supposed to have been character driven by nature & stood on itself as a great film without that. Secondly, I did identify emotionally with David. The fact that he doesn't seem to have a clear, detailed personality as such in fact makes it easier for one to identify with his situation, as we can sort of project ourselves on to him & imagine we are in his place. He wasn't a definite character; he could have been anybody, and I like that. Penélope, who I had my doubts about before I saw this film, absolutely won me over. While she was introvertedly charming, and again not very well developed as a "character", she played the part of the dream so beautifully, or perhaps it was just me. She is so sweet like a little bird, & with her little jumps and skips and her cute spanish accent. I fell in love with her too. In an interview Tom Cruise was asked about Cameron Crowe's tendency to work with music. He says:
"Cameron is a musician also. He's a writer, a musician, a filmmaker and we just started playing around one day and he just had music. As an actor you just let it wash over you and see what color it's going to bring to the scene. He also does stuff where we're going along and he'll throw out lines at me, it feels like a workshop when we're working. Everybody is very comfortable and relaxed and there was a lot of focus on the scene and everyone kind of contributes. It helps the actors and sometimes you get different ideas and colors. For this movie we listened to Kid A a lot and to the U2 album. The Icelandic group (Sigur Ros) too. Of course, the Stones and Bruce Springsteen but a lot of Kid A. Walking through New York I think of U2 and I think of Radiohead."
Vanilla Sky touches the idea of making a choice between fantasies, dreams, and all-consuming entertainment, and then the stark realities of actual life. Without giving the plot away too much, I was shocked at David's choice but not disappointed. Or perhaps I was disappointed in his choice but not shocked. It made me consider the way in which humans, when given the choice, will always choose knowledge over happiness. Ignorance is bliss, but no one ever chooses that path; as in the Matrix, no one chooses the blue pill. Humans resign themselves to "reality" (which is subjective anyway), & moan about the tragedies & the bleakness, but when given the chance to be comfortable and peaceful and to luxuriate in pleasantness and dreamy times, one will give it all up in the name of "truth".. it seems odd. But still natural. David's best friend Brian (played by Jason Lee makes references several times to the sweet and sour nature of life, i.e. things are more sweet, when you've experienced the sour. The beauty of life is more truly appreciated when the trials and heartbreak are fully experienced. When the movie was over, my housemate and I looked at each other and declared, this is seriously now one of my favourite movies. Shock, because I haven't seen a film on the big screen in forever that made it on to my Best Of All Time list. It's often hard to decide whether you are being objective because movies always seem better on the big screen, but I'd rather not be objective in this case because the whole point about whether a movie is enjoyable or not is whether you can find yourself inside it, and I for one was fully immersed. I dropped a coin on the ground as the credits were rolling, and when I looked up, the screen was purple, which shocked me; I walked outside and the cinema lighting was purple, and outside, a storm was brewing - the sky was violet too. Very, very surreal. Oh and the term "Vanilla Sky" is a reference to a Monet painting, and the way David chose to paint his "backdrops" in his lucid dreams.
This film opens with Tom Cruise waking up, set to Radiohead's Everything in its right place. He gets out of bed and hops in his sports car. As he enters the street that mid-morning, he notices it's quiet. When he gets onto the avenue, no one is there. He enters a deserted Times Square as the Chemical Brothers' Where do I Begin, I believe, starts pulsing. He gets out of the car and starts running, as we are presented with a barrage of digital images, flying by, as a woman dances on the screens. From that moment, I thought, ahhh... Radiohead, deserted New York streets, perfect. I have pondered pulling off a similar visual stunt for a music video or something in my small town at 3 AM. just beautiful... Vanilla Sky presented a really intriguing postmodern reality, I thought, literally composing a reality recycled from pop culture components.
Some elements of the film seemed cliche and overwrought, though I think that the actors bravely attempted to do what they could. In particular, the scenes with Cruise jabbering to the psychologist with that mask on smacked of pretension. The mask served as a nifty visual tool through the movie, though. In particular, at the dance club, seeing that ghostly mask from a birds-eye view created a great image.
Spoiler time. All right, this film presented the ultimate postmodern reality (his dream, mostly) framed within a lower-level rational "modern" reality (the Life Extension simulation). Much of the film is composed of people living within cultural ideals, as Cruise is the rich and gorgeous playboy, with his "fuck buddy" stalker and lovely exotic crush (Cruz). Once we reach the lucid dream segment, when he wakes up on the street, the reality crosses from rational but idealized, to complete postmodern recycling. The Vanilla Sky is Monet, the streets are from Bob Dylan covers. Of course everything goes to shit as the simulated reality "glitch" gets out of hand. I thought it was a bit of a pity for the film to encompass the new reality it was building within a computer simulation, but it was ok, still, unlike the end of A.I., for example.
Cruise's character is so horrendously empty and flawed, though he is so apparently idealized. When his face is shattered, he cannot psychologically do anything, and he pushes his friends away ferociously. In reality, he signs up for the lucid dream program and kills himself because he cannot handle "loss of face," if you will. Literally ugliness has made reality unbearable. The tragedy of the tale is that Cruz would have loved him even with his broken face. He had a lot to live for, even with a messed-up face. The tragedy is that it takes a life and death for him to understand that. Cruise's character effectively presented the lonliness and sadness hidden within today's societal role models.
CD listing thanks to http://www.freedb.org/freedb_search_fmt.php?cat=soundtrack&id=f6115311 . Huzzah! First node of 2002!
You can sit in your seat, and think for hours, but your results and your opinions seem to differ every time. And after all of the debating and arguing has ended, you'll realize that somehow, in some strange yet fascinating way, this movie personifies your life in some way.
It's very difficult to describe how. The role that Cruise plays, and the plot drawn out for him in the movie, well... they leave something to be desired. It was acted well, though the ending and the final revelation of the true plot seemed to spoil what could've been fantastically surreal, yet just confusing enough that each viewer would draw their own conclusions. Without the last sentence of dialogue, though, the whole ending would have been trash.
"Wake up, David."
As for the personification of it all, it's in the eyes of the beholder. Trauma, friendship, the best sex of your life: they all are present in the movie, but you can immediately identify with what you felt at that moment, when you experienced those exact things. Of course, there are some who can't, which indirectly reminds them that their lives also remain something to be desired.
As everyone else stated, this movie is a very straightforward reminder of the postmodern reality that we live in, though David's "life inside the life" was more intriguing, and brings everyone to the "what-if's" that plague us often in our lives. Questioning reality and life is one thing, but to question it, live it, and recycle it for a born-again you? It's farfetched, but in an enlightning way, it's believeable.
This movie is really fantastic. Few movies have touched me so much as this one. It has a really great plot, and is really delightful to try to understand what goes behind the characters mind as the story unveils.
But we already have a lot of nodes reviewing the story. I want just to comment on the musical score of Vanilla Sky. It is simply fabulous. One of the reasons that I fell so madly in love with this movie was that I already had a lot of it's music in my mp3 collection. That really made watching it a much better experience.
Unfornately, the official Vanilla Track soundtrack doesn't contain all the songs that were played during the movie. So, here is a list of the musics that were played during the movie, in order:
Disclaimer: I found this list somewhere else on the Internet. I don't know how accurate it is, but it seems correct to me (from what I remember from the movie) Radiohead - Everything In It's Right Place Mint Royale - From Rusholme With Love Paul McCartney - Vanilla Sky Red House Painters - Have You Forgotten REM - All The Right Friends Looper - My Robot John Coltrane - My Favorite Things The Impressions - Keep On Pushing Looper - Mondo 77 Josh Rouse - Directions Creeper Lagoon - Wrecking Ball Peter Gabriel - Solsbury Hill Juliana Gianni - I Fall Apart Jeff Buckley - Last Goodbye Sigur Ros - Svefn-g-Englar Spacecraft - Earthtime Tapestry Thievery Corporation - Indra Sigur Ros - Agetis Byrjun Leftfield/Afrika Bambaataa - Africa Shox Chemical Brothers - Loops Of Fury Underworld - Rez Two Sandwiches Short Of A Lunchbox - Too Good To Be Strange REM - Sweetness Follows Bob Dylan - Fourth Time Around Joan Osborne - One Of Us Radiohead - I Might Be Wrong U2 - Wild Honey Bobby Holmes - Jingle Bell Rock Monkees - Porpoise Song It's Slinky - TV Commercial The Five Americans - Western Union Rollings Stones - Heaven Todd Rundgren - Can We Still Be Friends Beach Boys - Good Vibrations Elmer Bernstein - Summer's End (To Kill A Mockingbird) Sinead O'Connor - The Healing Room Sigur Ros - The Nothing Song (Njosnavelin) Freur - Doot Doot Chemical Brothers - Where Do I Begin Spiritualized - Ladies And Gentleman We Are Floating In Space Nancy Wilson - Elevator Beat
One thing I've noticed in reading these writeups is that one of the major points of the movie has been overlooked. That is, that David Aames is cryonically frozen from the start of the movie.
At the start of the picture, a woman's voice wakes David up to a New York that is utterly devoid of people. He runs down the street in a panic, screams, and wakes up to another woman's voice, the voice of Julie Gianni.
The previous voice belongs to Sophia Serrano, Brian Shelby's date to David's party and David's obsession for the duration of the picture.
The only problem with this is that David has not met Sophia at the start of the picture. For her voice to be on his alarm clock, or even in his memory, would require that he have entered the Lucid Dream before the movie began.
Therefore, much like the inhabitants of Paradigm City, David Aames is stuck in an infinite loop. His demise and exit from the system at the end of the movie is not real. Life Extension is evil; they do not honor their end of the bargain.
This is further corroborated by the Tech Support guy looking at his watch while waiting for David to finish saying goodbye to Sophia. That simple gesture says volumes about the character and nature of the people caring for David's soul.
Tech support is evil.
printable version chaos
Everything2 Help
