Vanilla Sky

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For other uses, see Vanilla Sky (disambiguation).
Vanilla Sky

Theatrical release poster
Directed by Cameron Crowe
Produced by Cameron Crowe
Tom Cruise
Paula Wagner
Screenplay by Cameron Crowe
Based on Open Your Eyes 
by Alejandro Amenábar
Mateo Gil
Starring Tom Cruise
Penélope Cruz
Kurt Russell
Jason Lee
Noah Taylor
Cameron Diaz
Music by Nancy Wilson
Cinematography John Toll
Editing by Joe Hutshing
Mark Livolsi
Studio Cruise/Wagner Productions
Vinyl Films
Distributed by Paramount Pictures
Release dates
  • December 14, 2001 (2001-12-14)
Running time 136 minutes
Country United States
Language English
Budget $68 million[1]
Box office $203,388,341

Vanilla Sky is a 2001 American science fiction thriller film, directed, co-produced, and co-written by Cameron Crowe. Described as "an odd mixture of science fiction, romance and reality warp",[2] it is an English-language remake of the 1997 Spanish film, Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes), which was written by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil. The film stars Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, and Cameron Diaz, with Jason Lee and Kurt Russell appearing in supporting roles.

The movie received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song, and Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe Award nomination for Cameron Diaz's supporting performance. The soundtrack was also critically acclaimed and has since become a cult classic.

Plot

David Aames (Tom Cruise) was the wealthy owner of a large publishing firm in New York City after the death of his father. From a prison cell, David, in a prosthetic mask, tells his story to psychologist Dr. Curtis McCabe (Kurt Russell): enjoying the bachelor lifestyle, he is introduced to Sofia Serrano (Penélope Cruz) by his best friend, Brian Shelby (Jason Lee), at a party. David and Sofia spend a night together talking, and fall in love. When David's former girlfriend, Julianna "Julie" Gianni (Cameron Diaz), hears of Sofia, she attempts to kill herself and David in a car crash. While Julie dies, David remains alive, but his face is horribly disfigured, forcing him to wear a mask to hide the injuries. Unable to come to grips with the mask, he gets drunk on a night out at a bar with Sofia, and he is left to wallow in the street.

David is awakened the next day by Sofia, who apologizes for not helping him, and takes him home. The two continue to see each other, and David has his face repaired. Despite the seemingly perfect life, David finds oddities, such as brief visions of his distorted face, and a man (Noah Taylor) at a bar that tells him he can change the world. One day, when he goes to Sofia's apartment, he finds Julie there instead; all of the previous mementos of Sofia now showing Julie's face. Angry and confused, David suffocates Julie, and is later arrested and placed in a mental institution. The court psychologist Curtis talks about the incident with David over several sessions. During one interview, David sees a nearby TV advertisement for "Life Extension", a company that specializes in cryonic suspension, finding the name familiar. Under Curtis's guard, David is taken to the Life Extension offices, where the salesclerk (Tilda Swinton) explains they freeze people just after the point of death, until a cure for their ailment is available in the future - placing them in a lucid dream state. David becomes anxious and breaks free of Curtis, realizing he is in his own lucid dream that has gone wrong, and calls for tech support.

David finds himself in the empty lobby of the offices, and the man whom he saw earlier at the bar appears, claiming to be David's tech support from Life Extension, which is now known as the Oasis Project. As they ride up in an elevator to the top of an impossibly tall building, the man explains that David has been in cryonic sleep for 150 years, after he killed himself with a drug overdose. Because of David's severe acrophobia, his anxiety increases as he rises, trapped in an elevator while learning that when he signed a contract with the cryogenics company preserving him, he opted to start the lucid dream shortly after his drunken night when Sofia left him, under the "vanilla sky" from a Monet painting. However, during his sleep, the dream went horribly wrong and attempted to incorporate elements from his subconscious, such as placing Julie in for Sofia and creating a father-figure like Curtis. As they arrive at the top of the building, the man offers David a choice: either to be reinserted into the corrected lucid dream, or to wake up by taking a literal leap of faith off the roof. David decides to wake up, and envisions Sofia and Brian to say his goodbyes. Conquering his final fear, David jumps off the building, his life flashing before his eyes, and whites out immediately before hitting the ground. A female voice commands him to "open your eyes" (a recurring theme in the movie), and the film ends with David opening his eyes.

Cast

Production

Development

"In the days after completing Almost Famous, the opportunity to keep our film-making team together was too attractive to pass up. I'd always written my own original screenplays, but Open Your Eyes, with its open-ended and impressionistic themes, felt like a great song for our 'band' to cover."

—Cameron Crowe, explaining his reason for directing Vanilla Sky.[3]

After the American debut of Alejandro Amenábar's 1997 Spanish film Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes) at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner optioned the remake rights. Hoping to entice director Cameron Crowe, who previously collaborated with Cruise on Jerry Maguire, Cruise invited Crowe over to his house to view the film.[4] "I’ve been offered a lot of films to buy and remake, and I never have because I felt it was too connected with the culture of that place, whatever country it was front," said Cruise. "But this was a universal story that was still open-ended, that still felt like it needed another chapter to be told."[5]

The title of the film is a reference to depictions of skies in certain paintings by Claude Monet.[6] In addition to Monet's impressionistic artwork, the film's tone was derived from the acoustic ballad "By Way of Sorrow" by Julie Miller and a line from an early interview of Elvis Presley in which he said, "I feel lonely, even in a crowded room."[3]

Filming

Principal photography for Vanilla Sky began in late 2000 and concluded in March 2001.[7][8] On November 12, 2000, shooting for the scene of the deserted Times Square in New York took place in the early hours of the day. A large section of traffic was blocked off around Times Square while the scene was shot. "There was a limit on how long the city would let us lock everything up even on an early Sunday morning when much of NYC would be slow getting up," said Steadicam operator, Larry McConkey. "Several times we rehearsed with Steadicam and Crane including a mockup of an unmovable guardrail that we had to work the crane arm around. [Cruise] participated in these rehearsals as well so we shared a clear understanding of what my limitations and requirements would be."[9]

Filming lasted for six weeks around the New York City-area, which included scenes shot in Central Park, Upper West Side, SoHo, and Brooklyn. One prominent location in the area was the Condé Nast Building that served as Aames Publishing and David’s office. After filming finished in New York, production moved to Los Angeles, where the remainder of interior shots were completed at Paramount Studios.[7]

Despite the film's distorted aspects of reality, the style of cinematography remains grounded for much of the film. "I didn't do anything that was overtly obvious, because the story revolves around the main character not knowing whether he's in a state of reality, a dream or a nightmare, so we want it to feel a little ambiguous," said cinematographer, John Toll. "We want the audience to make discoveries as [Cruise]'s character does, rather than ahead of him."[8] American Cinematographer magazine wrote a feature story on the lighting designer Lee Rose's work on the film.[10]

Music

Main article: Music from Vanilla Sky

The musical score for Vanilla Sky was composed by Crowe's then wife, Nancy Wilson, who previously scored Almost Famous. Wilson spent nine months working on the film's music, which was done through experimentation of sound collages. "We were trying to balance out the heaviness of the story with sugary pop-culture music," said Wilson. "We made sound collages of all kinds. We were channeling Brian Wilson to a large extent. I was recording things through hoses, around corners, playing guitars with cello bows, and with [music editor] Carl Kaller, we tried all kinds of wacky stuff. In the murder–sex scene sound collage, Cameron even used Brian Wilson’s speaking voice from a Pet Sounds mix session."[11]

Interpretations

According to Cameron Crowe's commentary, there are five different interpretations of the ending:

  • "Tech support" is telling the truth: 150 years have passed since Aames killed himself and subsequent events form a lucid dream.
  • The entire film is a dream, evidenced by the sticker on Aames' car that reads "2/30/01" (February 30 does not occur in the Gregorian calendar).
  • The events following the crash form a dream that occurs while Aames is in a coma.
  • The entire film is the plot of the book that Brian is writing.
  • The entire film after the crash is a hallucination caused by the drugs that were administered during Aames' reconstructive surgery.

Crowe has noted that the presence of "vanilla skies" marks the first lucid dream scene (the morning reunion after the club scene)—all that follows is a dream.[6]

Reception

Box office

Vanilla Sky opened at #1 at the box office in the United States when it was first presented on December 14, 2001. The opening weekend took in a gross income of $25,015,518 (24.9%). The final domestic gross income was $100.61 million while the foreign gross income was slightly higher at $102.76m for a worldwide gross income of $203,388,341.[12]

Critical response

The movie was acclaimed by audiences, but critical reaction was highly mixed. It holds a "rotten" rating of 40% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 162 reviews (65 positive, 97 negative).[13] Metacritic reported, based on 33 reviews, a "Mixed" rating of 45 out of 100.[14]

Roger Ebert's printed review of Vanilla Sky awarded the film three out of four stars:

Think it all the way through, and Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky is a scrupulously moral picture. It tells the story of a man who has just about everything, thinks he can have it all, is given a means to have whatever he wants, and loses it because — well, maybe because he has a conscience. Or maybe not. Maybe just because life sucks. Or maybe he only thinks it does. This is the kind of movie you don't want to analyze until you've seen it two times.

Ebert interpreted the ending as an explanation for "the mechanism of our confusion", rather than a device that tells "us for sure what actually happened."[15]

Film critic Richard Roeper identified the film as the second best of 2001.[16]

A more mixed review from The New York Times early on calls Vanilla Sky a "highly entertaining, erotic science-fiction thriller that takes Mr. Crowe into Steven Spielberg territory", but then it notes:

As it leaves behind the real world and begins exploring life as a waking dream (this year's most popular theme in Hollywood movies with lofty ideas), Vanilla Sky loosens its emotional grip and becomes a disorganized and abstract if still-intriguing meditation on parallel themes. One is the quest for eternal life and eternal youth; another is guilt and the ungovernable power of the unconscious mind to undermine science's utopian discoveries. David's redemption ultimately consists of his coming to grips with his own mortality, but that redemption lacks conviction.[17]

A negative review was published by Salon.com, which called Vanilla Sky an "aggressively plotted puzzle picture, which clutches many allegedly deep themes to its heaving bosom without uncovering even an onion-skin layer of insight into any of them."[18]

The review rhetorically asks:

Who would have thought that Cameron Crowe had a movie as bad as Vanilla Sky in him? It's a punishing picture, a betrayal of everything that Crowe has proved he knows how to do right....But the disheartening truth is that we can see Crowe taking all the right steps, the most Crowe-like steps, as he mounts a spectacle that overshoots boldness and ambition and idiosyncrasy and heads right for arrogance and pretension — and those last two are traits I never would have thought we'd have to ascribe to Crowe.[18]

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian[19] and Gareth Von Kallenbach of the publication Film Threat[20] compared Vanilla Sky unfavorably to Open Your Eyes. Bradshaw says Open Your Eyes is "certainly more distinctive than" Vanilla Sky, which he describes as an "extraordinarily narcissistic high-concept vanity project for producer-star Tom Cruise." Other reviewers extrapolate from the knowledge that Cruise had bought the rights to do a version of Amenábar's film.[2] A Village Voice reviewer characterized Vanilla Sky as "hauntingly frank about being a manifestation of its star's cosmic narcissism".[21]

Despite the negative reviews, Cameron Diaz's performance was critically acclaimed, with the Los Angeles Times' film critic calling her "compelling as the embodiment of crazed sensuality"[22] and The New York Times reviewer saying she gives a "ferociously emotional" performance.[17] Edward Guthmann of The San Francisco Chronicle similarly says of the film, "most impressive is Cameron Diaz, whose fatal-attraction stalker is both heartbreaking and terrifying." [23] For her performance Diaz won multiple critic's group awards, as well as earning nominations for the Golden Globe Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, Critics' Choice Movie Award, Saturn Award, and AFI Award. Penélope Cruz's performance, however, earned her a Razzie Award nomination for Worst Actress (in addition to her roles in Blow and Captain Corelli's Mandolin).

See also

References

  1. ↑ Box Office Mojo
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Guthmann, Edward (December 14, 2001). "Vanilla guy / Smirky Tom Cruise lacks the depth for complex, surreal film". The San Francisco Chronicle. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Crowe, Cameron (January 10, 2002). "So lonely I could cry: How Elvis inspired my new movie, Vanilla Sky". The Guardian. Retrieved August 17, 2013. 
  4. ↑ Rodriquez, Rene (December 19, 2001). "'Jerry Maguire' Director, Star Reteam". The Miami Herald. Lakeland Ledger. p. D6. Retrieved August 17, 2013. 
  5. ↑ Majumdar, Devdoot (December 11, 2001). "Interview: Vanilla Skies Ahead". The Tech. Retrieved August 17, 2013. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Mentioned by the director in the commentary track for the DVD release
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 "Vanilla Sky Production Notes". Paramount Pictures. The Uncool. Retrieved August 17, 2013. 
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Fisher, Bob (August 11, 2001). "Interview: John Toll, ASC". Local 600: International Camera Guild. Retrieved August 17, 2013. 
  9. ↑ McConkey, Larry. "Empty Times Square". Steadishots.org. Retrieved August 17, 2013. 
  10. ↑ Jay Holben (March 2002). "The Man Behind the Mask". American Cinematographer. pp. 52–55. 
  11. ↑ Kelly, Maura (August 2007). "Interview with Nancy Wilson". The Believer. Retrieved August 16, 2013. 
  12. ↑ "Vanilla Sky (2001)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved December 16, 2009. 
  13. ↑ Rotten Tomatoes. "Vanilla Sky". 
  14. ↑ Metacritic. "Vanilla Sky". Retrieved 2007-12-03. 
  15. ↑ "Vanilla Sky". Chicago Sun-Times. 
  16. ↑ "Ebert and Roeper best of the decade". Inner Mind. Retrieved 24 February 2013. 
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Holden, Stephen (December 14, 2001). "FILM REVIEW; Plastic Surgery Takes A Science Fiction Twist". The New York Times. 
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | "Vanilla Sky"
  19. ↑ Bradshaw, Peter (January 25, 2002). "Vanilla Sky". The Guardian (London). Retrieved May 27, 2010. 
  20. ↑ Review by Gareth Von Kallenbach, Film Threat
  21. ↑ village voice > film > Icon See Clearly Now by Michael Atkinson
  22. ↑ From Paella to Pot Roast - MOVIE REVIEW - Los Angeles Times - calendarlive.com
  23. ↑ Cruise lacks depth for complex role / Cruz, Diaz strong in 'Vanilla Sky' - MOVIE REVIEW - San Francisco Chronicle - calendarlive.com

External links

Films directed by Cameron Crowe
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