As Jami has more or less given up the blog (thank you Instagram) I thought I might as well turn it over to things that interest me, which at the moment is movies. I've been teaching an online class on Philosophy in Film and this has led me to watch lots of films I would not otherwise have forced myself to watch, and I've been very glad to have done so (in most cases). It's like A-Level English where they make you read Emma and you're glad you did. (But then again, they make you read Hard Times and you're not.) One particularly enjoyable unit was on Film Noir, and we watched Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, Sunset Boulevard, Laura, The Asphalt Jungle, Touch of Evil (all excellent) and Detour, D.O.A. and Kiss Me Deadly (they had their moments). Coming up are units on Personal Identity and Interpretation, the latter of which will be famously enigmatic films (e.g., Rashomon, 2001, 8 1/2 and STALKER) that should completely flummox the students. With that in mind I have been looking up "mindbending" films on the Internet, and one that kept coming up was this one, later remade with Tom Cruise (!) as Vanilla Sky. "But don't watch that one" they said, "it's not a patch on the original!" Well it must be truly appalling, because it turns out the original is a weak Twilight Zone episode stretched out to nearly 2 hours (which is at least an hour more than it warranted) plus Penelope Cruz naked some of the time (clearly a selling point). I definitely feel misled by the critic on Rotten Tomatoes said "If Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch had collaborated on a project, the result might have been something like Open Your Eyes." I suppose this could be true if it turned out they really hated each other, and each was trying to sabotage the project to discredit the other. It was the usual "is he dreaming?" "Is he going CRAY-ZEE?" plot. He keeps waking up (to the whispery sounds of the title put on his alarm by a femme fatale by the name of Nuria) only to find out ten minutes later that that was not real. OR WAS THAT THE REAL ONE AND THIS IS A DREAM?? Basic plot: young Spanishabouthandsome (in a very Spanish way) scion of millionaire (catering) parents who died a while ago in a car crash (a running theme) leaving him with partners who run the business leaving him free to lead a hedonistic skirt-chasing lifestyle. In the course of his womanizing he hooks up with the Louise Brooks-bobbed Nuria, who is clearly a little too obsessed with him. He throws a birthday party and she shows up uninvited in his bedroom, so in an attempt to lose her, he goes home with his best buddy's new girl, Sophia (Penelope Cruz) who refuses to sleep with him but clearly likes him, and so they both fall asleep on the couch after drawing each other. Among other unpardonable sins of this movie, she has lots of little ceramic sculptures of mimes in her "cheap" (read: better than you could ever hope for) apartment, and it turns out that she IS a mime. Anyway, when he walks out in the morning, Nuria is waiting (in a red dress in a red car) and promises him a quickie. She is clearly dangerously obsessed, and he doesn't even like her, but, this movie being this movie, he gets in the car and she drives them both off the road, apparently killing her and disfiguring him (No! Not his beautiful face!). (Another peeve: the disfigurement makeup would have embarrassed the FX crew of Doctor Who in the seventies, let alone a multi-million whatever-currency-Spain-had-at-the-time movie.) After recovering, he seeks out Sophia as she's doing her miming in a park (in the rain! Which streaks her white face paint!) and she is clearly disgusted by him (but tries to hide it) whereas he believes that she should be as obsessed with him as he is with her, despite being his best friend's girl-of-his-dreams, and only having met him once. After that it all dissolves into too much silliness, so I'll hit the high points: he gets surgery that totally fixes his face! Sophia loves him! His best friend is okay with him totally stabbing him in the back. But wait, as he wakes up in bed after making sweet sweet love to Sophia, and SHE'S NURIA! So naturally he slaps her around and takes her to the police. They say she's Sophia and what's his problem. His buddy says she's Sophia and shows him a picture of him holding what is clearly Nuria. He goes to her apartment and all the pictures that used to have Penelope Cruz in them now have the Louise Brooks woman. He even finds the sketch he made of her that night before the accident, and it's not of Penelope Cruz, it's her! Then she appears and hits him over the head because she thinks he's a burglar. Then she goes to get water - and she comes back as Penelope again! More sweet sweet lovin' follows remarkably quickly, but mid-coitus she changes back, so he naturally smothers her with a pillow. THAT'S the murder! But wait, it gets sillier. It turns out he IS dreaming all this, but 150 years in the future on a Virtual Reality machine, having paid to have his body frozen and woken up when they invent VR that will enable him to live out the life he wanted to have and erase the memories where he passes out drunk the night of the mime-in-the-park incident and lives a life of seclusion and depression until committing suicide. He finally works all this out and the movie ends with him being told that the only way to wake up in the future and live a REAL life (with a fixed face - it is the future, after all) is to kill himself in his dream. So he jumps off a skyscraper (the best part of the movie, to be honest) and we end with darkness and then the title being whispered again. Bet you never expected Cryonics to play such a big part in a movie set in 1990s Madrid!
Dumb. And poorly acted. God knows how bad Vanilla Sky must be. And now I have to watch MORE movies because I can't use that one. I'm putting off watching the depressing ones, but I fear I cannot much longer, as 99% of all worthwhile art is depressing. (Thank goodness for Jane Austen.)
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