Vanilla Sky

In case you find her beautiful: the photos on the net are nothing compared to how sparkling and irresistable Penelope Cruz appears in Vanilla Sky. How could anyone not fall in love with this girl?
It remains a very strange movie. I saw it again this evening, and began to understand it a bit better than the previous time, when I was utterly bewildered. Again a movie about reality and illusion (like eXistenZ, about which I wrote last month), and again that basic question "who is the dreamer, and where is he?" Essentially this is all about the confrontation with death: it begins and ends with the same line: "wake up!" (not by any chance, I think, the same words that start Neo's adventure in The Matrix). And when we see Tom Cruise jumping off a skyscraper at the very end, we're not sure what that means: waking up from the dream to reality, or from the dream that is reality? What is the psychological baseline? Or is the whole point that there is none? Jumping from the building like that means confronting what psychonauts refer to as "ego death". Very very scary...
What does it mean that so many recent movies are based upon this same theme?