Abre los ojos /Open Your Eyes - (Alejandro Amenábar;1997;Spain/France/Italy)
An imprisoned man tells a psychiatrist how he fell in love and became disfigured in an ex-lover's car crash which led to him committing a horrible crime.
Vanilla Sky brought three different things to this. Longer pacing, a lot of pop-culture references, and an attempt to take a gritty film and make it very polished. I have to be honest in saying that I enjoy the remake more, naturally. However it is not superior to the original. This film was a lot more dark, and what it succeeds the most in, is making the audience feel horribly isolated. At times I felt like this was the loneliest film I ever saw. Vanilla Sky never reached that, aside my basic emotions of sadness out of care of the protagonist. I was compelled to give this three stars due to the quicker pacing, which made the ending a little less memorable to me, but I can't help thinking about this film in terms of a masterpiece. It touches so many levels, and many times I felt like I heavily related to the film in terms of dreams, and how they can either hurt us, or leave us with an empty desire that makes us dislike waking up. I definitely need to see this again. The Sea Inside felt relatively generic to me, but I can't believe it was directed by the same man.