input: Note: These comments are for people who have seen the movie.

Vanilla Sky is a brilliant, complex, and thrilling movie that existentially explores exactly what the tag-line says: LoveHateDreamsLifeWorkPlayFriends. Maybe the movie plot can come into focus for confused movie-goers if one looks at it from a different angle.

Considering the following:

Now, I have not painstakingly gone through the film scene by scene, so I will have to further examine my assertions, (and I welcome your thoughts) but give this a try and see if the movie doesn't fall into place: Where exactly does the debatable 'splice' occur?

Now, I'm not talking about the splice as it is explained by the L.E. 'technician', since that sequence itself could be actually interpreted as a rationalization inside of David Aames's mind/dream/coma state, but the true splice between reality and dream.

It seems to me that the reality of the car crash, the way that it is filmed (no explosion, for example) is a likely 'splice' point, and that any particular sequence containing an existential/dream/coma/non-reality feel to it -- whether it's shown onscreen before or after the crash -- is actually a part of Aames' personal journey toward self-realization inside of his own mind.

In that respect, then, we are left with two questions at the very end(if you know of more, let me know): is Aames actually disfigured, and where does he wake up?

If you don't get entirely wrapped up in the exact sequence of details in the plot, or at what particular point his dreams are scattered throughout, this movie becomes a fascinating exploration of a human on a journey to find himself and what that means in today's pop-culture society.

Is the sentiment of this review positive or negative?
OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive

pos/neg ans: positive

input: So, neighbor was killing neighbor. Reminds me of Iraq. As I watched the American flag (50 stars in 1864?) being dragged behind the horse, I realized why burning that piece of red white and blue doesn't upset me as much as our destruction/indifference to the Bill of Rights. I'm a Southerner, and must have some historical memory.

Watching the Tobey McGuire character learn to respect the dignity of a former slave, as he looks at the scalps of blacks and Germans (his ethnic background) being wagered at a poker game.....was interesting. Many twists in this movie. The wife, who is forced into her marriage, shows both lust and a strong will, characteristics we're not used to seeing in 'respectable Victorian southern belles'.

The crazy wacked out renegade southerner gave me some insight into why my cousin, head of the Copeland Horse-thieving Gang, Inc. in Mississippi, was hung about that time. Bands of homeless men were roaming the countryside, armed. Remind you of Iraq? And how similar we are underneath the facade of religion and ethnic background? And why southerners are STILL fighting that civil war today.

Too bad we can't use that same knowledge in our handling of the country we've just invaded and are occupying, fomenting civil war everywhere. That's Mesopotamia, now called Iraq, who happen to have the misfortune to sit on oil. The wild-eyed killers in Missouri, raiding Lawrence, Kansas could as easily be the insurgents we're fighting now with no success.

Another anomaly was the father's tribute to the Yankees who move into Lawrence and erect a school "even before they erect a church. And for that reason, they'll win." Huh????? I was taught history in Birmingham, Al and we were taught that the North was much more industrial and richer.....that's why they won. Course, they also LITERALLY had God on their side. As you see here, when the freed slave indicates that he's cutting out to free his mother, sold into slavery in Texas. God, what a horrible legacy slavery gave us.

Acting pretty good, lots of blood and gore as the warriors ride gleefully into battle (but didn't hear any rebel yells, so reminiscent of football games in Alabama). You also get a real feeling for how stupid the war was, as the bushwackers and jayhawkers gather their forces for another raid. They have lost sight of why they're fighting, and so do we. Just more mindless slaughter.

You're also brought up to date with the limbless kids coming home from Iraq, as the bushwacker (ahh, what connotations) first has his arm seared shut, trying to save it, then has it amputated, and then dies. So much suffering for such a stupid cause.

The cinematography is fantastic. Now I have to get back to the DVD and get the production notes, one of my favorite parts of any movie. I suspect that this movie was written by a Gore Vidal, as the spoken language is of a type you would associate with that era, if you knew History. The dialogue is definitely thought-provoking. Not your ordinary blood and guts war movie, by any means. You see the wounded but still active-duty soldiers, still fighting cause they have nothing else to do. You see the southern raiders, living off the land, stealing indiscriminately. Yet, at the beginning, you've seen the battle stop, so the women could be evacuated from danger. As I read the escalating number of women and children dying in Iraq, I'm thinking, "Where did we lose our sense of honor as a people?" I have forgotten why I sought this movie out and bought it after 20 years, but some book somewhere lauded it. With good reason. Tobey at his best, pre-Spideyman. Buy the DVD or rent it. And tell me why others laud this, not just liberals cest moi.

Is the sentiment of this review positive or negative?
OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive

pos/neg ans: positive

input: Having seen men Behind the Sun I guess I hoped for an evolution in style & technique to match the larger scale of this movie. I was also quite interested to see someone make a hard-hitting fact-based fictionalised account of what happened during this most notorious of Japanese atrocities, but this is not it. This plays like a bottom-to-mid tier European Nazi exploitation movie from the 70s - e.g. SS Experiment Camp etc (perhaps more like Deported Women of the Special Section actually). Granted it has a greater scope and more people running around, but it resorts to the same cheap and cheerless device of lots of hapless non-actors limply falling over to the sound of ridiculously fake gunshots, spiced up with the occasional poorly executed 'shock' sequence. The admittedly horrible documentary footage is roughly spliced in between scenes so hackneyed that even these real images are robbed of much of their power. Watch channel 4's 'The Holocaust' (aired recently (still running?), as of 1 No 2006) for a genuinely disturbing documentary on the evils of war (featuring excellent in-context use of actual footage). This is the type of treatment the horror of Nanjing deserves, not this hackneyed exploitation garbage (a better executed exploitation movie minus the disrespectful use of stock footage would have been fine, but again this is not even a very good exploitation movie). Rating: 3 (5 as exploitation, 1 as a treatment of the subject).

Is the sentiment of this review positive or negative?
OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive

pos/neg ans:
negative