Cortechba Overrated

Rijndri Load of rubbish!!

Reptileenbu Did you people see the same film I saw?

Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Fadi Shbat A routine party is the beginning of a chilling trip for Cesar. One girl is after him, he goes after another, and before he knows it, very disturbing things are afoot. Open Your Eyes, the second film from 25-year-old Alejandro Amenabar, combines romance with a bit of horror, a heavy dose of psychological thriller, and a splotch of sci-fi into an unusual treat. Rather than satisfied, it leaves you slightly on edge.Cesar (Eduardo Noriega) is a handsome devil, all boyish charm with a very shy act to cover his self-assuredness. Indeed, he's reputed to never sleep with the same woman twice, so naturally when Nuria (Najwa Nimri) tries to bend that rule Cesar declines not so politely. Instead he hides behind Sofia (Penelope Cruz), the girl his best friend, Pelayo, came to the party with.Lucky not only with beauty, Cesar is also quite rich. He has three cars, but Pelayo (Fele Martinez) complains that Cesar only uses the cheap old VW bug to pick him up on the way to racquetball. Is this fact a humorous note, or does it point to a serious character flaw in Cesar? Later, at the party, he ends up monopolizing Sofia's attention, to Pelayo's disgust. When Sofia tells Cesar that if he were a loyal friend he would not try to sleep with her, Cesar replies that he is indeed a loyal friend, and therefore wants to have an affair with Sofia but be sure to prevent Pelayo from finding out about it. Rebuffed, Cesar regroups to try Sofia another day, and as he leaves her apartment he begins the ride of his life.Though the plot to Open Your Eyes is dense, to say much more would reveal too much already. On the other hand, the layers of reality that director Amenabar peels away are numerous, and no piece of the puzzle is the whole answer. Delectably unpredictable, the film casts Cesar as a spoiled rich kid and then makes us pity him, as he's accused of a crime he has no knowledge of and suffers grave disfigurement in an accident. Stuck in a cell, wearing a mask over his grotesque face, Cesar's only clues are the dreams he keeps having, and boy does he hated-reams! The first half hour is riveting, with an interesting romantic setup giving way to a most bizarre world of shame and denial. In the cell, a psychologist tries to coax information out of Cesar that could help in his trial for murder. From that point on the film is fairly hit-and-miss, though there are many more hits than misses, to be sure.The film's main strengths reside in unaffected acting and sparkling direction. All the leads, from the increasingly desperate psychologist, to Noriega, Cruz and Martinez, are very comfortable even within the strange world the director has placed them in. They do their best to respond as ordinary people to extraordinary situations, as the script pushes them farther and farther. The direction, particularly the cinematography, is solid throughout, with several splendid shots taking advantage of shadows and unusual points of view which always serve a narrative purpose.Clearly the major triumph of the film is in blending the mundane with the bizarre, and the truly bizarre, with such seamless transitions. In fact, this blending becomes a focal point of the plot itself, as it analyzes a cadre of colossal questions such as how we could really tell a dream from reality, or how we might know whether other people really exist. These are weighty questions and the film cannot be faulted for achieving no answers. Rather, it treats them as invisible boundaries the characters bump into, and emphasizes them enough so that the viewer may think about them on their own.Unfortunately, not all the strangeness is wholly original. Slightly reminiscent of The Game and Dark City, and made at the same time as these, Open Your Eyes also evokes standard thriller tricks, such as the scary mirror that changes what it shows each time you look. Though the visual direction maintains our interest, the plot lags at such times; the danger of showing incomprehensible things is that the audience may feel no connection to them. Invoking notions from deja-VI to cryogenics to very subtle commentary on guilt and the unconscious, however, the movie has enough freshness and focus in its own right to work as a cohesive whole.Perhaps the greatest shortcoming, ironically, is in the more mundane setup. Does the audience really care that a spoiled rich kid becomes unattractive and therefore may not be able to steal his best friend's girlfriend? At times, but at others the concept appears a ludicrous source of conflict. The movie is strongest in suggesting how bizarre the world is, or can become, and in this guise it's certainly worth watching. The conclusion poses an interesting choice for a character which, given the pace of technology, may become a real choice within a few centuries. Unlike most movies in its genre, the recent smash The Matrix included, Open Your Eyes finally works because it treats its questions about the world not as a springboard to standard film but as questions worth turning over in their own right.

Jackson Booth-Millard I must have forgotten that the absolutely terrible Cameron Crowe/Tom Cruise film Vanilla Sky was a remake of this, the original Spanish film, and it is funny that the actress reprised her role as well, but anyway, I was hoping this original version would deserve it's place in the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book. Basically in Madrid, twenty five year old wealthy playboy César (Eduardo Noriega) used to be a good looking young man attractive to women, but now he wears a prosthetic mask due to his hideously disfigured face, he is talking to psychiatrist Antonio (Chete Lera) and telling his story of how he came to be the way he is, in the hope to find some kind of closure. Flashbacks see that at his birthday party he met and flirted with the girlfriend of his best friend Pelayo (Fele Martínez), the beautiful Sofía (Penélope Cruz), he later takes her home, but they do not sleep together, and the next morning his obsessive ex-lover Nuria (Najwa Nimri) spots him leaving her house. Nuria offers César a ride back to her apartment for sex, but on the way she instead intentionally crashes the car to commit suicide, he however survives with the horrible disfigurements that cosmetic surgery cannot solve, Sofía is no longer able to look at him and goes back to Pelayo. Following his disfigurement César has a series of disorienting experiences, including falling asleep drunk in the middle of the street, and when he wakes up he finds that everything is changing for the better, Sofía is claiming now to love him, and surgeons are in fact able to restore his face and good looks, but he finds, when making love to Sofía, she changes into Nuria, he smothers her in panic with a pillow, but everyone claims that the woman he has done it to is in fact named Sofía. He is sent to prison, and while in there bits and pieces of his past come in the form of dreams, he finds out that after he was disfigured he went to Life Extension, a company specialising in cryonics, to preserve a longer, more peaceful and realistic seeming virtual reality of life, in dreams, and returning to their headquarters he finds out they specialise in "artificial perception", where he relives the past when being reborn in the future. When César was drunk on the street, he had in fact committed suicide, and this is the moment he entered cryonic suspension, everything after has been a dream, spliced together with reality and replacing his real memories. The end sees him wanting to wake himself up and be resurrected in the real world, he is convinced the drunken street moment was just a vision created by the company, psychiatrist Antonio tries to convince him he is in the real world, but in the end César leaps off the company's building, hoping he will finally open his eyes and end the fantasy. Also starring Gérard Barray as Duvernois and Jorge De Juan as Encargado L.E. This is a really thought provoking film, I paid absolute attention to everything that was going on because of how fascinating the concept of trying to escape reality and enter a better alternative fantasy was played out, the relationship between Noriega and Cruz is great, the makeup to disfigure Noriega's face is terrific, the murder mystery and twists along the way are clever, and you can recognise the mixes of Eyes without a Face and Vertigo, it is a fantastic psychological thriller. Very good!

IrohaUta Abre los ojos (Open your eyes), 1997, which most people might know better in its American remake Vanilla Sky (with Tom Cruise and Penélope Cruz) by Cameron Crowe. I'm glad I haven't seen the remake when I had the chance some years ago - my mother's been a huge fan of Tom though gladly her interest declined with his Scientology and Katie deliriums - cause it would have spoiled this very nice movie.The story ? Handsome and rich guy César (Eduardo Noriega) leads an epicurean life of one-night stands until one of them, Nuria, wants - not just a little crave for chicken at 2 in the morning - no she really wants him for more than one night. Of course, our womanizer doesn't give a damn and while trying to escape from her at his party, he comes to meet the beautiful Sofia (Penélope Cruz) and.. obviously she turns the Don Juan into a lovestruck Prince Charming. It would have ended there and you had the classical New-York - ahem Madrid - based romantic comedy. You can stop here if you don't want to be spoiled.But, here comes Nuria again. She offers him a lift in her car, and tired Don Juan accepts. He doesn't freak out when his driver swallows a bunch of pills and begin to talk about happiness. He does when she drives faster and faster. Caramba, we're out of the road. She dies. He lives. His handsome face looks more like the Elephant man's now. But it's not the worst. The flash forwards sequences of our protagonist show that he is now in an asylum, accused of murder.I'm not saying more. Only that the movie is one of these thrillers that keep you breathless.

djbabu_30 A fantasy story told in flashbacks by Cesar (E. Noriega) a handsome but self absorbed young, rich man. He is spending his days having fun and enjoying one night stands. The last one was with Nuria, a girl who's obsessed with Cesar. During a birthday party thrown for him, Cesar meets Sofia (P. Cruz). He's intrigued by the girl and spends the night at her apartment. In the morning, as he's going out from Sofias flat, he can see that jealous Nuria (N.Nimri) is waiting for him. She convinces him to go with her for a ride. he realize a bit too late, the jealous girl is trying to kill him and commit a suicide by driving the car off the cliff. The accident kills her and leaves Cesar disfigured.From that moment his life is a crazy roller-coaster of dreams mixed with reality. Cesar's accused of murder, and with a help of a psychiatrist he slowly starts to discover truth about his life. A complicated thriller with even more complicated ending.