April 5^th Minutes

Aidan Fiddy

Movie Viewed- Open Your Eyes

Open Your Eyes- Remade in Hollywood as Vanilla Sky

Picked up assignment questions:

1.)   Plot a timeline for the way the story is revealed. (When are we in the present? When in the past? When are we in the hero’s mind? When in reality?)

2.)   Open Your Eyes borrows from many genres of film. What genres do you see represented here.

3.)   How does the director work within our expectations for a fantasy film? A science fiction film? A romance? A mystery

4.)   How does the director thwart our expectations?

5.)   What is the film about?

PLOT: Open Your Eyes is about a man named Cesar who is telling a story of his past to a psychiatrist. Cesar was a young, good-looking, wealthy, womanizer who lives in Spain. His best friend, Pelayo, was jealous of Cesar, because he was not very successful with girls. Then one night when Cesar was having a party to celebrate his birthday, Pelayo brought a beautiful girl named Sofia. When Cesar met her, he began to talk to her and began to have feelings for her. Pelayo ends up leaving the party early because he is drunk, so Cesar walks Sofia home. They end up just sitting and talking with each other at Sofia’s apartment until the early morning. Cesar leaves he apartment with a giant smile on his face because he is in love with this girl name Sofia, even though they only met the night before. As he is leaving her apartment though one of the woman he was using named Nuria pulls up in her car and asks him to get in. At first he refuses, but then she insists and he finally agrees. As they are driving down the roads of Madrid you begin to see that she has jealousy between Cesar and Sofia and ends up driving the car off the road out of rage. The car hits a stonewall and then the next thing you know Cesar wakes up in his bed with a deformed face. Due to the crash he sustains permanent facial deformations while Nuria was killed in the crash. Cesar insists to all the doctors that there must be way to fix his face as he tells them money is not an issue. The only thing they have for him is a rubber mask to hide his hideous face. Cesar eventually gets the courage to go see Sophia and he asks if she will go out with him. She agrees out of pity and meets him at a bar. Instead of coming along though, she brings Pelayo with her because she is scared. Cesar gets drunk at the bar and all three of them leave together. Sofia insists that she will walk home alone and Pelayo leaves Cesar too. Cesar starts to get jealous because he believes that Pelayo and Sofia have gotten together. He eventually passes out on the sidewalk near to Sofia’s apartment. He wakes up to Sofia shaking her, and she tells him that she is in love with him. You then see them walk through the park and he brings up a sense of Dejesus. Cesar then gets word that his face can be fixed and he goes into surgery and gets his old looks back. Everything in his life seems to becoming back to normal when he starts to have awful dreams. He dreams that his face is deformed again and he begins to go insane. It gets to the point where he begins to see Nuria as Sofia, which really upsets him. He even kills Sofia, because he thinks so strongly that she is Nuria. It then comes to the present as he is in a looked up room being analyzed by the shrink asking him the questions, in order to determine if he is insane or not. Cesar doesn’t understand what had happened and believes someone was out to set him up. But, then he begins to see things, which bring back his memories. He sees a commercial for a cryogenic lab called “Life Extensions” which brought back some memories. He convinces the doctor to take him to the L.E. headquarters in Madrid to check it out. While there he realizes that he has been there before. A recurring dream he has been having was really an old memory of being at L.E. in the past. Cesar then realizes he is dreaming as he runs out of the building. Everyone disappears from his dream except for his shrink as he looks around the empty streets of Madrid. He looks up and sees a man on the roof of the L.E. building and he decides to go up there. Once up there he begins to talk with the man on the roof and the man who works for L.E. explains what has happened. He tells Cesar that the night he has been frozen and was given new memories, which wiped out part of his “actual” life. The night that he passed out near Sofia’s place, he actually woke up the next day and never saw her again. His face was never fixed and he kept to himself, until the day he found out about “Life Extensions.” He went to their office and signed a contract saying that as soon as he dies, he will be frozen and given memories to forget about anything bad that happened. He is then told that he went home and killed himself that night and has been frozen for 150 years. Everything that happened to Cesar after that night at the bar was all a dream made up of what he was thinking about. Then when the dream became a nightmare that too was because of Cesar questioning reality. Cesar was then given the option of starting a whole new life through new memories or them pulling the plug and killing him for good. Cesar decides to pull the plug because he is sick of not knowing what is reality and what is not. Then the film ends.