Vanilla Sky finds him in deeper, gorgeously surrealistic swirls of sub-conscious featuring Cruise and Cruz in centre stage, for the majority just making puppy eyes at each other and talking in.
. All countries.
United States. United Kingdom. Canada. Australia. Germany.
France. Spain. Italy. Argentina. Austria.
Belgium. Brazil. Bulgaria. Chile.
China. Colombia. Czech Republic.
Denmark. Finland. Greece. Holland.
Hong Kong. Hungary. Iceland. Indonesia. Ireland. Israel. India.
Japan. Malaysia. Mexico. New Zealand. Norway. Philippines. Poland.
Portugal. Romania. Russia.
Singapore. South Africa. South Korea. Sweden.
Switzerland. Taiwan. Thailand. Turkey. Ukraine. United Arab Emirates.
Two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer John Toll reteamed with Crowe for Vanilla Sky,having just completed. Toll has saidthat he shot the film almost entirely in a'reality-based' style, so that the audience would not be able to tell, any better than David Aames,what was real and what was fantasy. This accounts for the mostly naturalistic color palette,although, on a second viewing, one will begin to notice subtle shifts that make sense in thecontext of the overall narrative.According to a reliable source, Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray has been derived from amaster of recent vintage supplied by Paramount, on which Warner has done some additionalcleanup. The result is somewhat difficult to evaluate. It has a film-like texture, without obviousevidence of artificial sharpening or noise reduction, and the colors appear life-like and natural.However, for a project shot on 35mm film in 2001, the image is notably soft and lacking in finedetail, and it is hard to believe that this is simply a byproduct of the original photographicprocess. This is not to suggest that Vanilla Sky should pop off the screen, but I wonder how DPToll would evaluate this image.There are any number of reasons why a Blu-ray image may be less than optimally detailed. Onepossible cause is the use of a source element that is several generations removed from theoriginal camera negative; another is high frequency filtering to facilitate compression.
The latteris certainly a possibility here, where the average bitrate is 22.45 Mbps in a film with numerousscenes of action and complex imagery. Now, it is certainly possible, especially given the longdelay in preparing Vanilla Sky for Blu-ray, that the compression was carefully massaged toensure that bandwidth was conserved wherever possible and allocated where necessary. Noartifacts were evident. It's unfortunate that the new extras in 1080p could not have been placedon a second disc, thereby leaving more bits for the feature, but that would have necessitated ahigher cost, and too many pre-orders had already been placed at Amazon's bargain price of $8.99(or less) during the fourteen-month delay while the new extras were prepared.