Vanilla Sky (2001) Review

rating: *****

the story: A perfect life goes off the rails in disorienting ways.

review: I just watched Vanilla Sky for the first time. It’s one of those films that took on instant notoriety, so that if you never saw it all you knew was that it was probably problematic at best, incomprehensible at worst. It could not have arrived in theaters at a better, or worse, time.

It’s a remake, but that didn’t help anyone make any better sense of it. It was just weird. 2001 gave us two other, similarly complex films at even more diverging ends of the spectrum. One was A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a Spielberg movie that was also a Kubrick movie, and no one knew what to make of that. The other was Memento, the movie that made Christopher Nolan’s career. With Vanilla Sky, this was a mind-bending confluence of films that seemed to try and reconcile the cerebral injection of M. Night Shyamalan into the language of American cinema. And of course only one of them survived in the popular consciousness, the new voice.

Ten years later Nolan had reprocessed it into Inception, of course, but that was well after Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had already gotten there, a critical favorite but a box office dud.

Funny enough, but Vanilla Sky might almost be termed an earnest remake of another Jim Carrey film, The Mask. Cameron Crowe seems to go out of his way to evoke the comparisons early in the film, from the casting of Cameron Diaz herself to Tom Cruise aping Carrey’s cartoonish antics for a brief but memorable moment.

And, I gotta say, I really wish anyone remembered any of this.

Crowe was a Hollywood golden boy for a split second. He had a huge success with Jerry Maguire, and then followed that up with the well-received Almost Famous, a version of his own origins. Then he made Vanilla Sky and suddenly could do nothing right.

This is easily his most ambitious film. Anyone, regardless of how they view the merits of the end result, should be able to admit that. Heck, it’s arguably Cruise’s best spotlight, too, at last willing to let it all hang loose. And it’s fascinating. And it spins its web about as seductively as any film appearance Penelope Cruz has ever made, so human and yet so very intoxicating at the same time. And the big twist, even if you know the source material, works, too, for all the subtle setup put into it. The results never lose sight of the end goal, and never wallow in misery. (The only real comparison I have to that is Steven Knight’s brilliant Serenity.) Cruise always has something interesting to work off of, a different character, whether Diaz, Cruz, or Kurt Russell or Jason Lee. There’s even Michael Shannon in a small role for future-proof credibility!

Having now seen it, and maybe it’s the subsequent history of film, and even the equally ambitious TV show Lost I have the pleasure to draw from, but I’m so, so glad to have done so. The history of film in the 21st century falls a little more clearly into place, and a classic takes its place in history.

Hopefully other viewers catch up at some point, too.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019)

rating: ****

the story: A former TV star's bid for career resurrection intertwines with the life of Sharon Tate.

review: A week after seeing it I'm still processing Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.  Sometimes I'm instantly in love with a Quentin Tarantino film (Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained), other times I'm not sure how devoted I'll be (Jackie Brown, Hateful Eight, even Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs).  The two-volume Kill Bill is sort of in-between, although the second one is closer to instant love.

But of all his movies, Once Upon...is probably closest to Jackie Brown, which was Tarantino's first taste of languid, of just letting his filmmaking speak for itself rather than splashy violence (Reservoir Dogs) or splashy stars (Pulp Fiction) do the talking (along with the characters, naturally).  Once Upon takes its tone from Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate, who today is best known for being horribly murdered at the behest of Charles Manson.  Tarantino has stated that he wanted Tate to exist apart from that narrative.  In fact, Once Upon... becomes his second film, after Inglourious Basterds, to deliberately rewrite history, in allowing Tate to avoid her fate, and it's in that regard that the film reaches its highest note and possibly the note on which the entire movie will ultimately be judged.

But Robbie's Tate isn't really the star of the movie.  That honor falls to Leonardo DiCaprio, who's featured as the former TV star, a fictional character, who has been struggling to find meaningful roles.  His TV show was a western, and by the time we catch up with him he's being cast in his latest guest spot in another one, and as Tarantino presents it the material becomes a movie-within-a-movie, something I wish he'd done with Django Unchained (as a flashback-of-sorts for the Brunhilda myth), which for some viewers might be a needless tangent, but it helps put the character in context, how he views himself, and thus how everything would turn out for all the characters if we followed their narratives equally.  Metaphorically, you understand.

Just below DiCaprio is Brad Pitt playing his former stunt double, now personal assistant.  After, oh, about a decade of sliding toward irrelevance and being best known for his relationship with Angelina Jolie, Pitt's performance in Once Upon... is almost akin to Travolta in Pulp Fiction, a giant reminder of his considerable talents, the full impact of his charismatic screen presence.  He's got the best scene, too, a fight with Bruce Lee that becomes better as it builds, which is interesting for Tarantino, who usually accomplishes the bulk of his work with words.  It's another subtle evolution of his filmmaking mastery.

Among the supporting players are Al Pacino (allowing himself a rare character role), Bruce Dern, and Kurt Russell, who's probably in the best sweet spot of his career (previewed, in some ways, by Death Proof, with a great spotlight in Hateful Eight).

But the ending is the real selling point.  As I said, Tarantino allows Sharon Tate to cheat fate.  In doing so, he probably allows Tate's husband, at the time of her death, Roman Polanski a reboot as well.  Polanski at one time was known simply as a brilliant director.  He was just coming off his breakthrough film, Rosemary's Baby, at the time, and would later direct Chinatown and The Pianist, but his career was forever tarnished by a rape charge he chose exile from America to avoid prosecution over.  Is it reasonable to assume Tate's death played a role in the sequence of events that led to this fate?  Is Tarantino saving two lives here?  That's how I choose to view it, anyway.

Giving Tate the focus, rather than Charles Manson, is itself a noteworthy choice on Tarantino's part.  It takes the power away from Manson, who entered virtual cultural immortality as the result of ordering Tate's murder, and Tate herself became just a name.  In effect, Tarantino is addressing two major sins, and offering a chance at correction, that've haunted Hollywood for fifty years, which is noteworthy in and of itself at a time when Hollywood has been playing a moral authority.  Is it a direct criticism?  Will Hollywood even care, come the Oscars next year, or merely be flattered, as it tends to be, when presented as subject matter?  If it gives Tarantino his long-deserved Academy recognition, all the better.

Perhaps, in time, I'll better understand how much I appreciate this one.  For now I'll be a little cautious.  But like all Tarantino's movies, it won't be easy to forget.  Not by a long shot.  Yeah....

Tombstone

**

directed by: George P. Cosmatos, Kevin Jarre
starring: Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Sam Elliot, Bill Paxton, Powers Boothe, Michael Biehn, Charlton Heston, Jason Priestley, Jon Tenney, Stephen Lang, Thomas Haden Church, Dana Delaney, Michael Rooker, Billy Bob Thornton, Billy Zane, John Corbett, Terry O'Quinn, Frank Stallone

Released in 1993.

Tombstone is not as good as Wyatt Earp.  Both films were released around the same time, both feature the same characters and the same scenario, but one does it better.  Don't get me wrong.  It's certainly worth watching both.  Tombstone probably has a better overall reputation, mostly because it's not the one starring Kevin Costner in yet another historical epic.

What both films unmistakably are is Hollywood's attempt at the time to keep the Western alive.  The Western was a genre that dominated movies and television for decades.  With the passing of John Wayne, its most iconic star, however, the Western fell out of favor with the general public.  Everyone moved on, and for a while it was a lot easier to pretend it simply no longer existed.  Yet Hollywood loves to revive things, and in the 1990s the Western was the subject of a persistent revival effort.  Clint Eastwood, who had earlier made his name with the "Man with no Name" trilogy, scored with Unforgiven, but then no one seemed to know what to do next.  Instead of a monolithic presence, it had become a specialty genre.  Tombstone represents one way to make this special attraction a real attraction, by amassing a notable cast in the place of a notable star.

Kurt Russell has been a Hollywood project since he was a kid.  He's been a successful star, sure, and has had his share of signature hits, but he's never really been iconic.  As this film's Wyatt Earp it's much the same.  He's not really a Western actor, anymore than he's any given genre actor, just someone who can appear in any given one and be fairly respectable.  He's the main reason why there has to be so many other notable actors in the project, beginning with Val Kilmer, who at this point in his career cuts a more recognizable figure as Doc Holliday than his Wyatt Earp (and in this role, superior) counterpart Dennis Quaid.  Everyone else is far lower on the instant recognition scale, but the cast is packed with talent all the same, even a few (Thomas Haden Church, Billy Bob Thornton) whose subsequent careers make their appearances here more significant to newer audiences than those who saw them originally.

You can certainly enjoy Tombstone for what it is, but it didn't at the time and never will represent anything more than a movie Hollywood made to be a Western, rather than a true contribution to the genre.