VANILLA SKY (2001) — Ice, Ice, maybe.

Cinema of Cruelty (Movies for Masochists)

On this week’s annotated deep dive, The Cultists present Cameron Crowe’s “indie” millennial LowFi-SciFi flick ‘Vanilla Sky’ (2001). The self described American “pop song” remake of the 1997 Spanish film, Open Your Eyes, VS was and remains a film of lukewarm division. Part of that reception has to do with early expectations. Made on a budget of 68 million, staring Tom Cruise, and marketed as a love story, the film that audiences got instead — an unapologetically unreliable plot of paranoia and bio-rapture dreams of immortality, where Cruise is either maimed or masked for 75% of the film — was not exactly what most watchers were anticipating. But when you check all those expectations, lay back, and let the film happen (depending on which of the many interpretations you subscribe to), the movie actually has some interesting things to say. Particularly when taken alongside the original as part of a larger, cyclical whole.

Episode topics include: the production and filming history; the musical inclinations of Cameron Crowe and/vs Nancy Wilson; comparisons to Amenabar’s original 1997 film, Abre Los Ojos; the subtle but blatant homages sprinkled throughout (from Kurt Russell mimicking Greggory Peck to Cruz and Cruise having distinctly French New Wave sex); the film’s original and alternative endings; the foundation of Alcor and the rise of bio-rapture philosophy; and why the most fun interpretation of this film boils down to a warning about the ways in which futurists might succeed in creating their own inescapable secular hell.

Episode Safeword: “awake”