Vanilla Sky

Yesterday afternoon I finally got round to seeing Vanilla Sky, which was confusing, disorientating, ambiguous and unsatisfactory, and utterly pretentious. Naturally I loved it. The dialogue is sometimes brilliant and sometimes dreadful (as Total Film pointed out a couple of months back, everyone talks like they're doing bad poetry). Penelope Cruz is genuinely sweet and it's easy to see why Tom Cruise fell in love with her (both on and off camera) but Cameron Diaz is also worth a mention, as a jealous lover.…actually, Diaz seems to spend a lot of her time doing slightly off-the-wall roles in weird films (cf. Very Bad Things, A Life Less Ordinary, Being John Malkovich - Charlie's Angels was by far the most mainstream picture she's done in a while.)

Despite great performances from Cruise, Cruz, Diaz, and - yes! - Kurt Russell, the real credit must go to Cameron Crowe, who turns pretention into art. I know that the critics have been far from kind, and I can see where they're coming from - there's far too much visual flair, a whole barrage of confusing scenes masquerading as introspective commentary on the subconscious (now that really did sound pretentious) and nothing makes sense for a long time. But regardless of whether you love or hate it, the whole experience - from the majestic opening shots of a famous New York location as you've never seen it before - through the clever and commentative soundtrack (easily one of the best aspects of the film) and the "interesting" storyline - is one to be treasured. It may not be perfect, by any means, but for all its pretention, Vanilla Sky dares to be different. And in the days of third-rate action flicks, copycat thrillers based on bad novels and derivative American high-school comedies, this has to be a good thing.

(Monday, 10th June 2002)