Vanilla sky monet movie#

And why did they use “vanilla sky” instead of any number of other images that could have stood in for the same thing? Well, Crowe seemed to feel something personal about that image (it was apparently also a possible title for Almost Famous) and based the whole movie around it.īut when we think of “personal” films, we usually think of small films by outsiders and iconoclasts: moral victories against the big dumb studios that hate to take a chance on anything cool or surprising. Even the very title: Monet’s “vanilla skies” are mentioned in the movie, but the image contains meaning only insofar as the movie defines it. Music cues include Joan Osborne’s “One of Us” and Todd Rundgren’s “Can We Still Be Friends?”, which are neither obvious choices, nor necessarily popular choices, but they’re just two of many pop culture references that are taken as read-of course you associate the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan with a cool image of love, of course you associate Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird with fatherly affection.

Penelope Cruz asks Cruise if he’d rather listen to Vicki Carr or Jeff Buckley, and we the audience are supposed to understand that this, at least in miniature, is what makes him love her. There are, allegedly, actual childhood photos of Tom Cruise integrated into the film to stand in for his character’s childhood. “Oh, you didn’t get it? Well, it does a highly developed critical superbrain like mine to truly appreciate a film that has Kurt Russell and Jason Lee in supporting roles!” But I think it’s frustrating in that it’s a highly idiosyncratic and seemingly personal movie. Which I don’t mean in some kind of condescending Rick and Morty-fan way. Ebert and Roeper both liked it, but according to Rotten Tomatoes, about 55% of critics didn’t, and I think that’s because it’s a movie that frustrated a lot of people. Yet it’s a movie we don’t talk about much today. It opened at #1 at the box office on its debut on December 14, 2001, and it finished with $100 million domestic and another $100 million overseas.

This film wasn’t a phenomenon at the time of its release, but it was kind of A Big Deal. But I suspect Gougagna and Cameron and I are probably outliers. ( This pseudo-review contains spoilers for Vanilla Sky, so uh…watch out, man.)įor the longest time, I thought I might be the only one outside of Cameron Crowe who actually owns this movie on DVD, but then I found out our own Gougagna does as well, so there are at least three copies floating around out there.

Vanilla sky monet