Vanilla Sky may be based on an existing property (Alejandro Amenabar's Open Your Eyes), but the hallmarks of this 2001 remake are pure Cameron Crowe. It's a film that's less noticeably personal than the director's other efforts, but close inspection reveals there's an auteur's fingerprints all over this thing. If you've seen Crowe's other films, you'll know his sympathy lies with the underdog rather than with more traditionally heroic figures. In Crowe's previous movie Almost Famous, for example, William Miller - a placeholder for Crowe himself - is the smarter-than-your-average suburban kid who envies the guys that have it all; but the film sees William eventually coming out on top, as he's rewarded for being an inherently moral, decent and ultimately smarter figure. Though Vanilla Sky is based on someone else's film, it still manages to fit in with Crowe's own ideology: it champions the talented underdog while managing to teach the more popular, more accomplished golden boy a lesson. In Vanilla Sky, the everyman stand-in for Crowe is Jason Lee's Brian Shelby, the genius writer who feels that life is constantly screwing him over, and who at one point complains to the effortlessly successful and desired David, "You will never know the pain of the guy who goes home alone". Vanilla Sky, then, seems to want to vindicate Brian and give a lesson in humility to David, by stripping away all the things that make him the envy of everyone around him. It's Cameron Crowe's own fantasy: the film doesn't really sympathise with the vain David, who is described throughout as a spoiled rich kid (hardly an endorsement) - he's the object of Crowe's revenge, and a figure Crowe has all his directorial career considered to be worthy of a kind of punishment.
Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the dashing young princes. Follow Brogan on twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion: @BroganMorris1
