Film
A tangled and twisted tale of romantic drama turned sci-fi thriller, Vanilla Sky is an unsatisfying and incoherent, if beautifully shot, film. Cameron Crowe's remake of the 1997 movie, Abre los Ojos, or Open Your Eyes, (directed by Alejandro Amenabar), casts Cruise as David Aames, arrested for murder after his charmed playboy life is devastated by his jealous ex-lover, (Diaz) whose suicidal drive off a bridge leaves his face disfigured, ruining his chance of pursuing love with his best friend's girlfriend, Sophia (Cruz) - confused? You will be ...
Told in flashbacks, the distinction between dream and reality becomes increasingly blurred, and who was murdered and when remains unclear for most of the film. The series of plot-twists and turns seem to have ultimately bewildered the screenwriters themselves, who eventually fall back on that old failsafe - "it was all a dream". This baffling journey is littered with themes familiar to those who've seen The Matrix, and Memento, with elements of the Phantom of the Opera, Death Becomes Her and Fatal Attraction thrown in to produce an overlong mess of a film which fails to justify its own creation by never addressing the mass of ideas it introduces. That the task of conveying these complexities - real life vs. waking dream, eternal youth vs. ageing, freedom vs. isolation at the top - is left solely to Cruise is perhaps a major miscalculation, as it soon becomes obvious that the real issue at stake is that of a 39 year-old film star, whose boyish looks cannot be eternal, and whose reign at the top of the box-office charts can surely no longer rely on indulgent star-vehicles like Vanilla Sky.
That said, Cruise's vitality does carry the film where the lumbering dialogue and train of unnecessary sequences disappoint. Diaz gives an unnervingly unhinged portrayal of jealous ex-lover Julie and the brilliant Jason Lee, playing David's best friend, is on familiarly verbose form. Alongside these impressive performances Kurt Russell's psychologist, McCabe, appears gratuitously overplayed, and the film loses its adrenalised stamina mainly in his awkward dialogue with the imprisoned David. Cruz is convincing as Sofia, "the last guileless girl in New York City", but although her off-screen chemistry with Cruise is well-documented, the pivotal scene in which the pair fall in love lacks intensity, and this implausibility undermines the premise of the entire film. As David's most redeeming features are found in his love for Sofia, the failure of the crucial love scene to convince robs Vanilla Sky of a sympathetic main character.
Crowe's long-winded, heavy-handed story-telling ensures that not a single theme or plot-twist is missed as the film, following the shock of the revealed plot, ambles along to a drawn-out and trite final scene. A welcome attempt to anchor the film to something other than Cruise's constantly mutating appearance is provided by the collage of jingly-jangly guitar music, and the soundtrack includes gems of Bob Dylan, REM and Radiohead; but Vanilla Sky's most redeeming feature is its cinematography: from the opening shot of David alone in a disconcertingly empty Times Square, to the closing sequence showing the magnificent pre-September 11th skyline of New York from the impossible height of a fantastic skyscraper, the film is a feast to watch, its jerky switches between dream and reality keeping the audience's attention when the story has completely lost it.
If you enjoy being challenged and unsettled by film, then Vanilla Sky is a must-see. Were director Cameron Crowe just as frustrated by the film's flaws, he could take up Sofia's intriguing promise to David of "another life, when we are both cats" as inspiration for a sequel... just don't cast Cruise.
"Chilly, a whiff of disinfectant, too much empty space". The opening scene of Swift's 1996 Booker Prize-winning novel makes no pretensions about the stark and mortal nature of the world which Jack, Vic, Lenny, Ray, Amy and Vince inhabit, and Schepisi's film version is no different. Telling the story of how the friends are on a journey to scatter Jack's ashes from the end of Margate pier - the departed man's last order - a picture of their life and friendship over seventy years is slowly pencilled in. Admittedly, its colours are dour, sometimes very slightly rose, but Schepisi is always conscious of the fact that this is south London and its occupants are jaded cockneys. Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone and even Helen Mirren, excellent as they are in the leading roles, aren't here to dominate the story by their sheer presence. This isn't a film of irrepressible emotion and natural beauty: rather, it's a tale of ultimate humanity and compassion, something that both Swift and Schepisi have chosen to communicate through the most unsentimental of vessels.
Ray's poignant comment that, "the world looks pretty good when you're looking out at it through tinted electric windows; even the Old Kent Road looks good", is perhaps the only real criticism I could have of the translation of Swift's book to the screen. Schepisi is clearly blessed with the ability to handle complex emotion - Six Degrees of Separation is one of his most adept films - however, in the case of Last Orders the lens that he chooses to put on Swift's picture of London life is perhaps a little too kind. In its barest sense, the story relies on the inescapable intimacy that is built up between Jack's friends to deflect from the sense of stoical mortality that permeates their setting. On film one cannot help but detect a greater sense of affection between the five, a certain softness that only the visual picture of them in their youth could allow. In short, Schepisi makes the pill a little easier to swallow.
Last Orders has a backdrop of ceremony and impending grief, yet it succumbs to neither of those two demons of genuine cinema. Its resilience and restraint are admirable facets of a story that could almost be too beautiful. In a strange way, I'm glad it wasn't so beautiful - it's Margate, after all.
Having got terribly excited about the prospect of reviewing a necrophilia fetish film, imagine my disappointment when I discovered Final Fantasy: The Sprits Within was a sci-fi cartoon. Admittedly, it's a big budget, gun-toting, alien-thwacking cartoon, and one that you couldn't knock up on Paintspa in an afternoon, but, nevertheless, the best-selling sci-fi shoot-em-up computer game doesn't translate that well onto video (remember Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat?). The main problem with the film is the "plot" and "script" (note the inverted commas) and the fact that the clichés are pulled out till the cows come home, or, rather, until peace is restored to the animated world of 2065.
The film's central character is Dr Aki Ross, a renegade scientist who has to find the two final spirits of the planet to save mankind from the omnipresent phantoms who are attacking the world of the future, while retaining a perfectly coiffed, slightly wind-tousled Pantene bob. "The question is," Dr. Ross says as one of her opening gambits, "will I be in time to save the earth?", but even at this early stage of the film, you really hope she won't be, and that she is obliterated as quickly as possible along with her macho ex-boyfriend, Captain Edwards, who provides all the sexual tension a PG-rated cartoon is allowed to. Along with a trusty band of cohorts who inevitably perish getting up to various phantom killing antics, Dr Ross and Captain Edwards fly spaceships, fire big guns and save each others lives during the painfully long hour and three quarters of the film, relying on flashy computerised animation to carry it - unfortunately, Final Fantasy uses its ration in the first fifteen minutes.
Combined with the blatantly obvious ending, paper thin script and unequivocally rubbish characters the film takes a rapid plunge after the "Ooh, they're computerised" factor wears off. Starship Troopers did this kind of thing much better 3 years ago with its tongue firmly in its cheek, and (shock horror) real actors - if you're looking for a decent sci-fi this week, Final Fantasy should indeed be your last resort.
31st Jan 2002