Open Your Eyes

Rating: 10/10 (22 July 2003)

Director Cameron Crowe reunites with mega-star Tom Cruise from their 1996 collaboration of the romantic-comedy "Jerry Maguire" to give you 2001's most erotic, complex, and thrilling film that is surely one of the best films of the year. This film is titled "Vanilla Sky." Though difficult it is to know everything about the movie, it runs in the line of "Memento" and "Mulholland Drive," the main questions it poses are these: How do we distinquish the difference between reality and dreams, what happens when they start colliding, do we hit the Vanilla Sky or go falling flat to the ground? The answers are harder to find than it might seem. I have watched this film many times, and for starters, what you might want to do is run a list of every scene and then but a check if it is real of an x if it is a dream. But first let me back and inform those about the plot. David Amies (Mr. Cruise) is a wealthy tycoon living the American Dream he inherited from his father and having the perfect f*ck buddy in Julie Gianni, played by a ravishing Cameron Diaz in too-few of scenes. At his thirty-third birthday party he falls in love, for what might be the first time, with Sophia, played by real-life sweetheart Penelope Cruz, who also turns in a sterling performance but was overrated by the critics, which gave less attention to the better of the two actresses. "The saddest person to ever hold a martini," is how Sophia beautifully describes Julie. David seems to agree when Sophia makes this comment, though you can see he is taken back. It is not until the next day that he fully knows just how sad his f*ck buddy is, and obsessed too. Julie stalkes David at the party, and apparently that night which he spends at Sophia's, because the next morning she pulls up in her teary blue-eyed car and takes him for a ride in which she confesses her true emotions for David, how she does not like to be known as his f*ck buddy, and then drives over a bridge, which apparently kills her and disfigures him.
Here the questions start beginning. Was the car ride just a dream? Is the beautiful, saint-like Sophia just a figment of David's imagination? Though I did say earlier that Ms. Diaz was in too-few of scenes, Miss Giani does pop up again, in the most expected time and place, when David is either alone in his bed or sleeping with Sophia. So are Sophia and Julie the same person, a symbol of David's misuse of women and his rambuscious tendancies? The questions I have just mentioned and a thousand more will pop up in your mind when watching this fascinating movie. I could not take my eyes off it. I didn't close them once.
Rated: R for sexuality and strong language.
Appropriate Ages: 15 and up.
GRADE: A+