The Goliath Gymnasium?

This unusual and somewhat nightmarish American treatise on the prison-house feeling of 'cosmopolitan vanities' taken to the extreme --- murder, betrayal, personal corruption, and disfigurement --- makes you think about the differences in film-making since the days of Orson Welles, how films have changed psychologically after the release of the psychosis-hypnosis Hitchcock films, which forever changed the way Americans looked at dreamscapes and 'claustrophobic realism.'

I like comparing Vanilla Sky to Roman Polanski's creepy but clever Death and the Maiden, and it has the feel of a 'gypsy gymnasium.'

This film is the diametric opposite of Ron Howard's mathematics-sanitarium film A Beautiful Mind.


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Charles Foster Kane grew up to become the megalomaniac American venture capitalist and evil tycoon Kingpin. He had a gorgeous wife and two beautiful children who attended Yale University. However, Kane made a deal with the Devil and he had to pay. The Devil intended to 'collect' on the arrangement by ensuring that Kane would always refer to himself as the ominous 'Kingpin.' It seemed easy enough.

Three years went by, and Kane still had all of his business associates (including the bosses of the crime syndicates he considered 'allies') call him The Kingpin. When Kane was on his death-bed, his wife approached him and whispered, "Let me call you Charles just once before you die," but Kane/Kingpin gave a gloomy grin and replied, "I've made a deal with Satan my dear which obligates me to convey my love through this 'monster-mask' I wear --- the mas of The Kingpin." As Kingpin lay on his bed dying, he thought to himself, "I gave away my funny-bone."

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Death and the Maiden (Film):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_the_Maiden_(film)



A Beautiful Mind (Film):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Beautiful_Mind_(film)