Brian's Thoughts on Movies

                                                                    “On my good days I can almost pass for a normal person but on my bad days I feel like I can’t find myself”   --Julianne Moore in Still Alice Julianne Moore is with very few exceptions, consistently the most interesting person in any film that she appears in.   I remember first noticing her as Annabella Sciorra’s best friend in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.   Her character, Marlene, a hard driving realtor, is introduced by her husband saying “She’s on the phone”, when he arrives for a dinner party and Marlene is in the car on a car phone, which made a pretty funny line in 1992, when car phones (but not cell phones) were available.   Immediately I could tell that he would not dare to suggest that she get off the phone before she is ready. In 1993 Moore had a very memorable, but also small, in Short Cuts, as a woman who makes an interesting confession to her husband while ironing and naked from the waist

Vanilla Sky, made in 2001, directed by Cameron Crowe and starring Tom Cruise, is a remake of the Spanish thriller Open Your Eyes or Abre los Ojos and its American remake directed Cameron Crowe, one of my favorite directors, and starring Tom Cruise.   For this entry I would like to look at both films, highlighting their similarities and some of the unique aspects of both.  As always I will be discussing the films in detail.  Some film fans despise remakes, especially American remakes of European thrillers arguing that the American versions have bigger budgets but lose some of the intimacy of the original film. A famous example was the film The Vanishing, a film about a young man searching for his lost girlfriend.  I saw the American remake starring Kiefer Sutherland first and I felt it was intriguing through the ending seemed a bit implausible.  The Dutch original, ended about 15 minutes earlier and was much darker.  Oddly both were directed by the same man, George Sluizer, a