Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

This romantic psychological/sci-fi thriller is pretty to look at
but basically empty inside; it’s a remake of Spanish director Amenabar’s
1997 “Open Your Eyes.” Why it was remade is a mystery to me, since this
big-budget film is neither better or worse, and offers nothing new except
switching the scene from contemporary Madrid to New York City. It still
is stuck with the basic theme of dealing with male vanity: that good looks
and having plenty of money count for everything in this world. There’s
a sci-fi addition to this vanity theme (same as in the original), that
if you have the money you can buy into a questionable corporate science
program that gives the promise of eternal life. The sci-fi part seemed
like a lot of psychobabble and failed to elevate the film. It only made
the film look as if it was artificially painted with artistic ideas, as
its carefully packaged style is accomplished through splendidly crafted
visual effects which cover-up the film’s lack of depth.

The “Vanilla Sky” (the title refers to a Monet painting) director,
Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous/Say Anything/Jerry Maguire), expands
his youth orientated film horizons with a film that offers meatier subject
matter. But his work here only convinces me that he can make a chic, mischievous
and stylish romantic film, but not necessarily a great one. He could not
go beyond the film’s fuzzy thematic prospects in this one, except to blur
the visions of reality and dreams without coming to any meaningful conclusions.

This romantic fable centers around a cad who gets his comeuppance,
as that is about what it all amounts to when all the sci-fi prattle is
over with. It’s most like Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut”, but without the skilled
director’s experience in telling about relationships and his ability to
mine its dream material for gold instead of gloss.

It’s a film that knows how to toy with the audience by playing mind
games, but I found no intellectual or emotional payoff in going along with
these sometimes intriguing games it played. It’s a long film that hits
dull spots in the middle, and the pedantic mechanical explanation of the
mystery in the film’s last fifteen minutes ruins any flow it had and stops
any chance of allowing one to think for themselves what the visions in
the afterworld it hints at would entail. Though, the original had no advantage
in its more evasive ending.

Tom Cruise plays David Aames, a narcissistic role that is right up
the Top Gun actor’s cool sleeves. He’s a vain, 33-year-old, playboy bachelor
tycoon who inherited a mega- publication empire when his parents’ car crashed
in a New Year’s Eve accident. He has 51 percent control of the company
and contemptuously calls the board who controls the other 49 percent the
Seven Dwarfs. They oppose his indifferent attitude to the business, his
hedonistic lifestyle, and call him contemptuously behind his back, Citizen
Dildo. He lives in a luxurious Manhattan Upper West Side duplex, and we
first meet the spoiled womanizer while he’s in bed with the luscious Julie
(Cameron Diaz). She is thrilled that he made love to her four times that
night and hides her love for him by saying they’re just friends and fuck
buddies, as she’s afraid if she told him how deeply she really feels she
would scare him off. He icily rushes out of their warm bed to go to a health
spa with the only friend he has, Brian (Lee), a book author on his payroll,
and purposefully manages to come fashionably late to his board meeting
– which only increases the polite friction recorded between both sides.

At David’s birthday party in his fashionable but uninspired decorated
place, attended by the notables he employs, he ogles the sweet and innocent
dancer Sofia (Penelope Cruz, who played the same part in “Abre los Ojos”),
who happens to be Brian’s date. She’s another beautiful object for him
to possess, as the parasitic Brian tells his mealticket friend that this
one I just met today — but I really love. But that doesn’t stop David
from flirting with her and going to her modest apartment where he stays
all night, and he enjoys himself by just talking without sleeping with
her. As a result of this rare platonic one-night stand, he falls in love
with her (a night of chastity seems a deeper love commitment in this flick
than a night of sexual prowess).

But the uninvited Julie crashes his birthday party and notices him
going for Sofia, and jealously follows him to her apartment. When he emerges
at dawn from Sofia’s, she offers him a lift and vents her jealousy while
asking: Do you believe in God? What does happiness mean to you? But before
those questions could be answered, her speeding car goes into a suicide
dive over a West Side bridge and into a brick wall killing her and leaving
him with a monstrously disfigured face.

We see David in jail, charged with manslaughter, talking to his prison
shrink, Dr. McCabe (Russell), while in a latex mask and complaining of
severe headaches, trying to figure out what is real and what is a dream
that turned into a nightmare. The surprises come when David gets surgery
to restore his good looks, but we are never certain until the film’s end
if this is so or if it’s part of his dream. During time with his shrink,
the film intercuts from the past to the present so that it’s hard to tell
what tense we’re in.

In one dramatic scene David goes to a disco with Brian and Sofia,
at first wearing the mask then in a daring gesture he wears the mask in
the back of his head so that both the masked face and his disfigured face
are seen (he becomes compared to a mythical Janus figure). When drunk and
in a self-pitying rant, he’s left abandoned on the gutter after walking
Sofia home with Brian.

The story after that melodramatic scene somehow leaps into a fantasy
sci-fi mode and the conventional storytelling ends, and as a result the
film loses its emotional grip and things become awkwardly confusing. Abstraction
takes hold, to the film’s detriment. 

The film had numerous flaws, not the least being why David would
choose an airhead like Sofia over the ravishing Julie. That would in my
opinion, be a reason for him to see a private shrink. Cameron Diaz stole
this film as far as giving an emotionally gratifying performance, being
the most attractive one in the film, and of showing that she’s the same
type of energized and ambitious compulsive as Cruise (she mopped up the
screen when Tom and her were together, and there seems to be no logical
reason why they weren’t a more permanent heavenly yuppie duo making the
Big Apple glamor scene). Tom is the glittering star the film revolves around
and his performance fits his egocentric personality to a tee. Ms. Cruz’
main problem is not in failing to convey her innocence and lack of guile,
which she does very well, but that she can hardly speak English and therefore
there was no breathe in her performance only a noticeable struggling with
her lines.

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Vanilla Sky is a sensual experience, but is as bare as the cover
of the Beatles White Album (it amazingly draws not one ounce of insight
into all the intrigues it raises). It’s big on background music of classic
rock from back when, such as the Beach Boys, R.E.M., Peter Gabriel, and
Bob Dylan.

It’s a star vehicle commercial film that I would not totally dismiss.

There’s one amazing shot, meant to be part of a dream sequence, early
in the film, of Tom Cruise driving his fancy Mustang down Broadway and
stopping to be absolutely alone in a deserted Times Square (something that
seems impossible). This was a real location shot and not done by computer
graphics, which makes for an eerie atmospheric shot.

The story — which might be, after all, just a story about a troubled
dreamer waking up, leaves a lot to be desired. Clarity is not part of the
agenda here, which is neither a good or bad thing in itself; only, I wanted
a little bit more meat on my plate before I bit into this excessive fantasy.

Prehistoric Hollywood movies (re)claimed for feminist cloud history every now require complex analysis to explain their relevance, but this teaming of Arzner and Hepburn is absolutely central to an understanding of women’s place within serious Hollywood. Hepburn plays lay the groundwork aviatrix Cynthia Darrington, courted by Christopher Strong (though why the nickname should bear his name and not hers is a mystery). She plays him along but independently pursues her job, significant Strong ‘Don’t ever stop me doing what I want’, only to disappointing collapse into typical Hollywood compromise and find herself pregnant by her (married) lover in the mould reel. Suicide is offered as the solely way out, but even in her expiring moments (a enormous-altitude record-breaking flight) she rebels against society’s required forbear and tries to replace her oxygen mask. Fascinating rigorously for the vacillation of its central (female) character, and for the scope in which aviation (itself a uniquely 20th century activity virtually closed to women) is used as a metaphor for dim-making and women’s attempts to farther ahead a foothold in that manly-dominated territory.

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“Kids in America” would be easier to source seeing that if it weren’t so exceedingly pleased with itself. Taking up the cause of true-life high schoolers punished for going against the grain, writer-director Josh Stolberg launches a scalding criticize on the stodgy conservatism of the American catholic school organized whole, contrariwise to end up stacking the deck in egregiously smirky and simple-minded ways. Stateside let go in 700 theaters won’t rack up much biz, though pic could construct its way into a scattering classrooms on video.

As may be guessed from its rather obvious title, “Kids in America” aims to inspire teenagers to boldly speak their minds, while giving everyone else an inside look at the repressive tyranny at the heart of the educational establishment. Pic mistakenly assumes, however, that because the contentious issues it raises are drawn from actual situations, dramatic plausibility should automatically follow. Not so.

Shortly after a girl is suspended for taping condoms to her dress to promote safe sex, a rebellious student named Holden (a nod to “The Catcher in the Rye”) uses the school talent show to deliver a withering attack on super-strict principal Donna Weller (Julie Bowen), who cares less about her young charges than her campaign to be elected state superintendent.

The stunt gets Holden (played by “Everwood’s” Gregory Smith) expelled, leaving him free to plot fresh anarchy against Weller and rally the students to take their First Amendment rights seriously. He’s aided by g.f. Charlotte (Stephanie Sherrin) and their other socially conscious pals, all smart teenagers from the fringes of high school society, who are encouraged to “change ‘da world” by their progressive English teacher, Will Drucker (Malik Yoba).

But even Drucker is outraged when Holden’s actions — he starts off by hijacking the school’s PA system and ends up torching a football field — land a student in the hospital. It’s the only time Stolberg acknowledges that even budding activists have a duty to act responsibly.

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Pic’s authority figures, however, are punished the most severely, none moreso than the power-mad, virulently homophobic principal. Played by “Boston Legal’s” very attractive Bowen, Weller is a screaming caricature who calls her students retards and says things like, “Bring me his head!” The idea that administrative intolerance might be systemic rather than the work of a Hitler-esque banshee — or that even the most censorious principal might still be a human being — is simply beyond this film’s imagination.

Instead, Weller is pilloried as a not-so-subtle stand-in for the Bush administration — at one point, she actually invokes the Patriot Act — while at the other end of the spectrum, Charlotte’s mother (Rosanna Arquette), a tofu-munching liberal who reminisces happily about her bra-burning days, is idealized as the ultimate in cool parenting.

Younger thesps are competent enough, though the overall group suggests an almost utopian model of peer diversity, with several of the characters — especially an openly gay student (Alex Anfanger) who rattles off references to Wham! and Bob Fosse — feeling more like types than flesh-and-blood adolescents.

Strenuously clever dialogue is very heavy on pop-culture references, and pic as a whole feels saturated with a love of filmmaking and the arts in general. During one earnest romantic interlude, Holden and Charlotte re-enact a series of classic kissing scenes from teen faves including “Say Anything … ” and “Sixteen Candles.”

Cast also boasts several established thesps in small parts, including Adam Arkin, Elizabeth Perkins, Charles Shaughnessy and George Wendt as a very likable gym teacher. Closing rap, performed by thesp Crystal Celeste Grant, suggests that the material would have made a more than adequate musicvideo.