Eyes Wide Shut

the good doctor

http://i31.tinypic.com/2cxeyr6.jpg
This shot is the one that gets me

I like the theory about the coloured baubles. They're everywhere: "Don't you want to go where the rainbow ends?" Also, Bill goes to Ziegler's pool room near the end, where he says he's 'just knocking a few balls around' - i.e. Ziegler just messes people up for his own amusement.

I just remembered - I've played on that pool table! It's now in a hotel in Birmingham.

wow!

eye-balls

tis the season for this movie

http://www.black-scale.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/ews-2.jpg

i totally love EWS

― omar little, Wednesday, July 2, 2008 1:34 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

Pancakes Hackman otm.

Rewatched this again last night after seeing this thread. Dr. Bill fails to get this infidelity thing because he's approaching the whole thing as a question of control -- either comes off as a smarmy jerk (two girls at the party, the hooker) or thinks he's got some sort of upper hand until he gets smacked down (hooker roommate drops the "she has AIDS" bomb, he thinks he can wander around the masquerade orgy but then gets penalized, gets called away at the party to clean up someone else's mess instead of flirting).

Kidman's character is great because she's not necessarily breaking this whole "men active, women passive" thing, but showing that there's just as much power in her approach. She comes off as flirty but not smarmy with the Hungarian at the party, and she's the the one who draws the lines in the whole interaction. So she's actually more involved with defining these lines, whereas Cruise's character just kind of goes along when he's offered sexual situations.

Also, how great is it that Dr. Bill has all this amazingly messed-up stuff happening all around and all he can mentally return to is the idea of this guy with his wife?

i find that totally realistic. like, that's what i would be thinking about.

This was on TV last night, I saw 20 minutes of it. It was terrible.

fascinating

i saw this on a tv station that heavily edits everything it shows. i also saw evil dead ii on this station. i feel like maybe i should like rent it or something.

evil dead ii i mean; this looked p rubbish

best kubrick movie

i can't watch kubrick movies; they make me seasick

Trick to Kubrick is you really have to watch them so many times you forget about the actors and plot and focus on the details in the background.

I think there could have been a great movie here with two leads that actually had chemistry. Cruise actually has some good moments, but none of them are in a scene involving Kidman.

some great moments; I enjoy it more than it deserves. Cruise is pretty great it in.

lol yeah pretty much agree with Matt, iow

been kinda obsessed with this movie lately, partly because after all this time and dozens of viewings, im not entirely sure what it's "about," and that's certainly not for the movie lacking the sense that it's about something. (if that makes sense)

more and more i think a lot of takes on the "fantasy" elements of the movie, while obviously not far off, don't really account for what seems to be a very weird subtext about power, or maybe the rituals of power or how its constituted, and that maybe what happened is that Cruise somehow peeks beneath the curtain (maybe led there by his own fantasizing) and saw something he wasn't supposed to see. something about that orgy scene, and especially his unmasking and the "sacrifice" it sets in motion, seems very primal, for lack of a better word.

anyway, it's just a weird, totally beautiful and ultimately elusive movie.

sometimes i think this is kubrick's best looking movie. the use of lighting is so striking

a very weird subtext about power, or maybe the rituals of power or how its constituted, and that maybe what happened is that Cruise somehow peeks beneath the curtain (maybe led there by his own fantasizing) and saw something he wasn't supposed to see. something about that orgy scene, and especially his unmasking and the "sacrifice" it sets in motion, seems very primal, for lack of a better word.

this is exactly what the film suggests, but if it's a puzzle, there seen to be several key pieces missing. you get this suggestion of a relationship between desire, fantasy, wealth and power, but it never congeals, remains a dream. the "primal" quality you note winds up being little more than the propulsion engine that draws us through the labyrinth, and it dissipates entirely once we emerge on the other side. fascinating, but also quite frustrating. the paranoiac in me has always wondered whether or not it's really the film kubrick was trying to make...

and, yeah, i agree that it's one of kubrick's best-looking films, if not the best.

i especially like that the amazing final scene with Sydney Pollack is basically "you didn't see what you thought you saw." There's this massive draw back or dissembling that seems to be going on, and then yeah Kidman says we need to fuck and poof--wherever things seem to be leading is left off, unactualized.

Pollack's puppetmaster character almost made me think it was suggestive that Kubrick cast another director in that role...

and his fascinating final line "Life goes on, until it doesn't. But you know that, Bill." Right before Bill goes home and turns off (!) the Christmas tree lights.

good point. half the movie is lit by christmas lights.

My theory has always been that the baubled lights in every scene (party lights, christmas lights) are little baubles of germs and AIDS and the clap that show the threat of nonmonogamy, so that when they turn off the Christmas lights in their home at the end, they're commiting themselves to a good clean monogamous marriage.

― Eazy, Wednesday, July 2, 2008 1:22 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark

pollack's so good in this. i love his last scene where he's laying things out for cruise - where he's kinda pulling back the curtain on all the weirdness cruise experienced that night, as if to reassure him, but you're further unsettled by his urgency to get that reassurance across. and i love the blue pre-dawn light flooding into his pool room from outside

im still not entirely sure why Kubrick chose to set the movie during christmas, perhaps for no other reason than to institute this colored lights scheme.

and this has obviously been pointed out many times, but i find it interesting how the movie is divided into two parts with the orgy/ceremony in the middle as a kind of hinge. before it seems like Eros holds sway, and after Thanatos (or at least every erotic possibility seems poisonous or dangerous, as when he literally leans in to kiss the corpse of the dead girl who saved him). at the very least that seems like a starting point to make sense of how it's structured.

my friend describes the visual aesthetic of this film as GLARE

im still not entirely sure why Kubrick chose to set the movie during christmas, perhaps for no other reason than to institute this colored lights scheme.

yeah, that's one of the things that really eats at me in trying to figure out what the film's about. christmas = what, exactly? death & resurrection, the pretty surface of things, consumerism, home & family? none of the interpretations i try to attach to it make much sense. like it seems as though EWS is "supposed" in some sense to culminate in cruise's sacrifice, his death...but it doesn't. it's a transformational journey through a sexual underworld that provokes no transformation other than a realization that home is relatively safe and, hey, everybody has lustful thoughts every now and then.

i saw this movie in 1999 and didn't think much of it.

rewatched it two nights ago and I think its AMAZING!! A completely cheap erotic thriller, pretty much--aka my favorite kind of movie.

It's the Ben-Hur of erotic thrillers.

Druid orgy = chariot race.

"cheap erotic thriller" via Schnitzler

it's still a great film about marriage. and I agree it is one of kubrick's best looking films.

Well, it's a surreal looking film, that's for sure. It's as if the Archers' soundstage fantasies were adopted into a paranoid erotic thriller that's neither erotic nor thrilling but is frequently laugh out loud silly, or at least chuckle-inducing, from the score to the orgy to Sydney Pollack, who I think is sort of hilarious in any role. I guess I wish this movie were funnier on purpose. Like, it's the world's most expensive looking cheap erotic thriller. Was Kubrick simply taking the piss?

no, I think it's frequently profound and on the level.

that scene with kidman and cruise stoned in pants and talking veeeery slooowly is brutal though.

cracking movie. the critical kicking it got baffled the life out of me.

dunno if you've all seen this btw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjmFQfQH2QM

All the slow talking is a way of making a dream rhythm (first party scene, too).

So it's a profound mediation on ... marriage? Marriage is scary? Infidelity is a walking nightmare? Eh. I'm not convinced of any depths, let alone profundities.

One of the ironies of this film is that by casting Cruise and Kidman, Kubrick picked two actors with absolutely no chemistry.

Marriage as sublimation, knowledge (or lack thereof) of the Other's desire (and the terrifying potential of that), the seduction of fantasy, the obscure relationship of Power to these mechanisms, etc.

Really a masterpiece for me.

Huh. I mean, I can see those things, but it's hardly some oblique meditation. I always thought the flick was way too on the nose.

Yeah those thing are all more or less part of the text rather than subtext. But as I tried to say in a few posts upthread I def get the sense that it's about something else that it deliberately pulls back from, like pulling a curtain back only for it to snap back into place before you can make out what you saw. That's the source of my fascination anyway--the way it's constructed in such an elusive manner.

What makes Kubrick Kubrick, rather than Schumacher, is the way in which he embodies those ideas in color, geometry, rhythm, etc., in ways that gives the film (and all of his films) their own internal vocabulary.

Like you hear reports that Kubrick deliberately sought to make the dialogue as banal as possible--and I think that sort of thing creates a weird stiltedness, a haziness that never quite conceals into people saying exactly what they mean.

Oh, there's no question it's a Kubrick Film.

My theory has always been that the baubled lights in every scene (party lights, christmas lights) are little baubles of germs and AIDS and the clap that show the threat of nonmonogamy, so that when they turn off the Christmas lights in their home at the end, they're commiting themselves to a good clean monogamous marriage.

― Eazy, Wednesday, July 2, 2008 1:22 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark

cool post