Echo

First of all, those who know me know that my boredom threshhold is incredibly low. Survival in life for me means the constant feeding on things that have variety, things that are new. So for me to watch a movie more than once means that it’s brilliant enough and thought-provoking enough that I can see, analyze or contemplate something new each time I watch it. I watched Abre los Ojos three times at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor during the two weeks it was there, and rented it once (that infamous holding period that lasted for months around the time that Vanilla Sky was released). The movie itself is great; I really like Amenabar, who also directed The Others. He does psychological creepy and high metaphysical-concept really intelligently and artfully. In this film, all the metaphysical and sci-fi elements are tied in really well with the themes surrounding personal vanity and ego destruction, both from external societal and internal Freudian forces.

Unfortunately, Vanilla Sky was a cartoonish bastardization of this film. I actually watched it twice (the second for analytical purposes); Tom Cruise’s performance wasn’t as gruesomely obvious and predictable on second viewing, but Penelope Cruz is annoying as hell. Yes, she plays the exact same character as she did in the original. But I don’t know if it has to do with her poor grasp of the English language, or the fact that her face is grotesquely tiny and mildly rodent-like, but her character was incredibly annoying and made me want to hit the mute button every time she was onscreen. I usually like Jason Lee but his acting was really stiff and caricatured. Where the hell was the directing? Was Cameron Crowe just calling it in? There were so many actor beats in the film that had jagged, artificial-feeling transitions. Even Kurt Russell was stiff. I felt I was watching the actors doing their first run through off the pages. Even if Crowe was going for characters that seemed mildly artificial and stiff because this was an artificial world, it didn’t quite work because the acting was still poor even before the “splice” point. Cameron Diaz was the lone bright spot as far as acting. She was very natural, very erratic, and very scary.

I hate that the movie bombarded the viewer with exposition. All the exposition about Life Extension and about how Cruise’s character’s subconscious deviated the world he had built was fairly insulting. I was really starting to get upset at how dumb and superficial they were assuming the audience would be. In the original, the exposition was so subtle that the viewer had to really work (THINK) to put everything together and understand the ramifications of not only this technology, but of the choices this man had made with his life and of the consequences. In Vanilla Sky, everything was spelled out and then underlined twice with a fat red marker. Even the music was so overbearing and obvious during the major plot points, they may as well have scrolled subtitles along with the music: “NOW WE ARE SAD…WE ARE SAD BECAUSE DAVID IS THE TRAGIC HERO WHOSE TRAGIC FLAW, VANITY, HAS BECOME THE SOURCE OF HIS DOWNFALL. HIS BITTERNESS OVER THE LOSS OF HIS GOOD LOOKS HAS CAUSED HIM TO LOSE THE GIRL HE WOULD HAVE HAD BEFORE THE ACCIDENT DISFIGURED HIM SO NOW HE IS RUNNING…RUNNING… TRIPPED…INTO A PUDDLE OF HIS OWN DISPAIR. DO YOU SEE HOW THE SONG ‘SWEETNESS FOLLOWS ‘ IS IRONIC BECAUSE SWEETNESS WILL NOT FOLLOW? IF THIS SCENE SHOULD MOVE YOU TO TEARS, DO NOT HOLD BACK. LET THOSE CHERUBS OF GRIEF AND COMPASSION BURST FREE FROM YOUR TEAR DUCTS SO YOU CAN WEEP INCONSOLABLY FOR OUR WAYWARD HERO.” Oh fuck off, Cameron Crowe. I’m fully capable of hitting my own head with a craphammer.