boring

Rating: 1/10 (31 January 2002)

To begin with, to promote a movie for the fact to have shot a scene in an empty times square to me doesn't sound the only content that a movie should contain. You can do that also with CG or other special effect so that didn't impress me much. The whole movie was a stealing from dozens of films. Things I have seem before. IT could be summarize as a movie of a 30 years old crises as well. or the love-film of cruise-cruz. Sorry, that also doeasn't really attract me much to go to see the movie. I went to see the film because I was tricked: the trailer promised a thriller of some kind. The movie was very slow, incredible slow. It could have as well been an episode of the Twilight Hour or something. The plot was simple and didn't really need so much time to display. 30 minutes would have been enough. Cameron Crowe once again revealed that he is not really a skilled director. He just takes here and there, also the mixed filming technique is pretty annoying - you cannot tell what his style his. Beside the movie is made by cinematographer, director of photography, cameramen, set designer. The director is around to coordinate all this, you don't need much to be a director today. SOme new director know a lot of this stuff but sometime it looks like that director means just a name the production company wants to market as much as they can to sell the next movie and the next and the next and so on. Cruz acting, although she wasn't that bad in this film makes me wonder of how does she get in all these movies. I suppose she has a kickass agent because I don't think she is such a good actress as they portrait her in mags (see Blow with JOhnny Depp for instance). About the story of the movie, I haven't seen the original film (and that's another thing that annoys me, it was a movie made in 1997, is that necessary allready to make a remake? Don't hollywood writers have ideas on their own?), but everything was predictable from one scene to another and even often the dialogues were predictable, and I believe that's a very bad thing for a movie which is considered "brilliant", "imaginative", and so on... If you read the reviews anyway of the film in a few months, finally you will be able to read the real ones where writers will express their opinion finally because right now they are all just promoting the movies... it's marketing and business and I felt in it. Music. All those songs coming here and there... edited just like a music video... I felt like I was watching a promotional film for a CD Compilation sometime. As much as people would say, the songs are connected to the story... well, that's actually cheap... not a big deal if you ask me. It is easy to solve things that way. But on the other hand we all know how it work in the business. Even a non-sense tune recorded as a joke by a band against everything and most of all against "business" like the Radiohead tune in the opening scene can be negotiatable. I think that say it all... I worked for one of their videos once. And they were saying at that time - we are not going to do anymore videos! Yeah right. At leats a different attitude would be more coherent... but that's another story. To end, "Vanilla Sky"? What's the big deal with the painting and the story really? There wasn't much there either. My advice is to actually avoid this film. It is about time that some directors and production company get turned down. Don't give them your money! Beside, does someone remember "Almost Famous"? Well, also there the reviews said "Great", "Fantastic", "Amazing" and if you read reviews now the rating has gone much down. Power of media and marketing I suppose. It's not fair, I still believe movies must have a story to tell. Just a few scenes filmed in a spectacular way should be all a movie contains.