Another Hollywood rip off of a genuine masterpiece

Rating: 1/10 (1 February 2008)

Those folks praising Vanilla Sky for its genius are the same folks who praise Gus van Sant for his genius film, Psycho and the same folks who think Walt Disney wrote the original stories for Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. Come on, folks, let's give credit where credit is due. The only fascinating elements to Vanilla Sky are those taken from the original, Abre los Ojos. Abre los Ojos is such a fine and engaging film that I thought it would be impossible to make a horrible re-make of it. Even if Cameron Crowe re-shot this movie frame by frame, he would have an excellent film on his hands. But even he managed to muck it up. Cameron Crowe is one of the most overrated 'talents' in Hollywood. An average writer and director at best, he can only warrant praise when he's riding on the coattails of a true artist like Amenabar. Don't even bother with this schlock. Watch the original. Why Hollywood has to appropriate source material like this with impunity, I will never understand. Hollywood has done this with numerous Kurosawa films, i.e. The Magnificent Seven, The Outrage and even A Fistful of Dollars, though Leone eventually earned his place as a true master. And just about every American horror movie of the last decade has been outsourced from Japan. But for hacks like Crowe who insist on casting madmen like Cruise, the making of true art seems like a futile endeavor. Who cares about the self-congratulatory cultural references throughout the film? Most of them are from Cameron's own life...referencing his wife, his wife's work and several of his own films. Fifty years from now, all these references will be lost on a generation of viewers who could either care less or are oblivious to such allusions. It's because of lackluster filmmakers like Crowe that true art seemingly will never thrive in cinema. Just because he can recognize a good film like Jules et Jim and include some obscure reference to it in his own films doesn't mean he's in the same league as Truffaut. It enrages me that Vanilla Sky even gets a single kudo. Again, why don't we just re-make the original Star Wars and call it art? Oh yeah, Lucas already did that with Episodes 1-3. Anyways, how Cameron Crowe and Tom Cruise got to be so popular and bankable, I will never know. Why these two balloon-heads are generating mediocre film after mediocre film is almost as much a mystery as why people even watch them. Just look at Almost Famous. Cameron Crowe is rubbing it in your face that he's a wunderkind...a fifteen year old who hobnobs with rock stars and lost his virginity to a throng of insatiably hot groupies all the while trying to forge a cover story for Rolling Stone magazine. Let's try for once to reign cinema out of the hands of the aggressively mediocre and into the hands of daring artists. Until then, we'll just have to deal with unwatchable re-makes of true masterpieces and watch films that were created by accountants, lawyers and the hackneyed filmmakers they keep on the payroll.