Ponderous remake

Rating: Null/10 (12 February 2002)

By chance I saw 'Open Your Eyes' just a month or so ago- and was rather nonplussed as I had been with 'The Others'. Not a bad idea, but nothing compared to 'Eraserhead', 'Lost Highway', 'Memento', 'The Matrix','Videodrome', 'Existenz' or 'Mulholland Drive' (which i saw at the Birmingham film festival a few weeks prior). Someone mentioned 'Total Recall'- this is right- in that it is Philip K. Dick. 'Total Recall' emanates from 'We Can Remember it for You Wholesale'- which shares many themes of Dick's fiction concering the reality of reality. Such books as 'Now Wait for Last Year', 'Ubik', 'A Scanner Darkly' & 'Valis' do this thing much more eloquently. Ditto the works of William's Burroughs and Gibson on a similar theme.
So, a remake of an average original by Cameron Crowe- a good rock writer and a talented film-maker- should he really be doing a sf-thriller when he is most famous for romantic-comedies? Did Alfred Hitchcock make 'Two Lane Blacktop'?
The advert looked great- a mixture of 'A Clockwork Orange' and the ideas for the original with a stellar cast. The film was, in actuality, a ponderous 2 1/2 hour affair. There was too much music- some of it worked: Radiohead's 'Everything...', the Sigur Ros. Though why was Jeff Buckley's 'Last Goodbye' only slightly played at the point of David & Sofia's last goodbye (well, not actually) prior to the car crash? This film has too much of a budget, the talked-up Times Square sequence was not the visual overload I was expecting. The everything is available ethos of Aames character is equally applicable to Crowe's film; the Coltrane illusion made me want to vomit. It is unlikely that Aames would leave Diaz's character for the underwritten love-epiphany with Sofia (Penelope Cruz, looking somewhat cosmetically enhanced from her appearance in the original and films like 'Jamon Jamon' and 'All About My Mother')...The 'Jules et Jim' references are tedious and don't quite fit- I take it the freeze-frame love scene is meant to be an allusion to the classic Truffaut film? The Dylan cover thing was quite intelligent, though 'Almost Famous' did a similar thing with the cover to Neil Young's 'Time Fades Away'...The supporting cast is good- Timothy Spall, Kurt Russell, Noah Taylor, Tilda Swinton. Though the use of the divine Alicia Witt as a mere receptionist is depressing- she would have made a great Sofia! The Spielberg cameo was another irritating facet- did he carry a poster for 'Minority Report'? (the upcoming Philip K Dick adaptation with Cruise)...This film was overlong, poorly rewritten and ultimately ponderous. Crowe should get back to making films like 'Almost Famous', 'Jerry MaGuire' and 'Singles'. Cruise should forget about attempting to make arthouse films and consider 'MI 3'...What could have been one of the films of the year is a big, big letdown- and chucking multiple examples of pop culture at the screen won't save it.