Eyes Wide Shut

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

I wish that were the case! Like, "Eyes Wide Shut" is the world's most expensive PSA for venereal disease.

I thought it was excellent, but then again I saw it on the big screen when it came out. It loses quite a bit on the small screen. Which is excuse enough to save up for a home theater!

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

i actually love this scene! (or remember loving this scene at the time). I think because it's the most Lynchian scene!

My wife and I saw this movie on our honeymoon on a hot day in Hawaii. Actually, we saw a third of it before the projector broker. Then we kind of looked at each other, shrugged, and went out to dinner instead.

perhaps it's a film about how marriage attracts the mutually tasteless

A man thinks he can open the door to infidelity and intrigue, but ends up opening the wrong door and just about gets himself killed due to his hubris

hubris doobee doo.

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

Yeah, easily one of the greatest of all Kubrick scenes.

she is great in that scene

I would have liked this movie a lot more had practically anyone but Tom Cruise played the lead male role

which apparently I said in a slightly different way 11 years ago, lol

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.

...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.

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.

― ryan, Sunday, June 24, 2012 (Yesterday)

^ OTM. What's fascinating to me is not what the film means, but how it creates the tantalizing sense of meaning seemingly offered but then withheld. Very similar to what I like about both David Lynch and Blue Oyster Cult. The audience goes through the same experience as Cruise's protagonist, but is ultimately left in doubt, which subverts the seemingly comforting happy ending.

BOC?

I think he meant Blue Velvet, lol

I figured. You can't even blame that on autocorrect or predicative text!

no, i really did blue oyster cult, silly as that may sound. it's a big leap, i know, but i talked on one of the BOC threads about the appeal in their music of the occult secret that is promised but never fully revealed.

did mean blue oyster cult

...

okay then, lol

what withholding of meaning? Married people need to fuck. The End.

what i was trying to get at about BOC, in mortifyingly purple prose:

Where most popular art is concerned, the "intricate detail on the skull" draws you toward the doorway, but the curtains part rather easily, and what you find on the other side is a kind of fantastical ordinariness, the sublime rendered mundane. BÖC's great trick is that they never fully usher you through the doorway. Instead, they leave you to peer in from the threshhold so that you're always an awed initiate, always the seeker reaching towards the chamber but never the adept arriving there.

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Sunday, February 19, 2012 3:03 PM (4 months ago)

^ really need to go back and edit that kind of shit before i post it

I like that post!

Married people need to fuck. The End.

that's kinda the "joke" that pulls the curtain back down, imo. cut to black, etc.

not to say that i disagree! but that sorta belies the 2 and a half hours we just spent watching Dr. Bill's odyssey in a very intriguing way.

watching that movie it was kind of hard to believe they were a married couple and i guess they did, too. i kind of want to see this movie with katie holmes or mimi rogers in it by comparison.

why on earth would you remove the one big positive of this movie and replace it with Katie Holmes

would it be a fair trade if harvey keitel were reinstated?

yeah katie holmes would make that unwatchable

I keep meaning to rewatch on DVD since they put out the European version here, without the digital 'Austin Powers' masking of the nudity.

mike myers in the lead would be interesting. he could probably do "I'm in over my head" more convincingly than cruise.

i should really see this again

wasn't steve martin originally who kubrick wanted for the lead? way back in the 80s iirc?

what was the deal with keitel? why do I remember something about someone cumming in kidman's hair? maybe that was my own dream.

it's apparently a myth, but a myth with explanatory power, like the anecdote about kubrick called up stephen king asking if he believed in god.

This is showing in DC this summer for a Kubrick retrospective. Can't wait to see it on the big screen

havin a hard time not seeing bateman every time cruise pulls the charming face in this:

http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa295/slugbert/gamerecognizegame.jpg

masks!!!

Obviously they are very different films, but I kept getting these weird "Eyes Wide Shut" vibes when I was watching Argento's "Inferno" the other day. Something about the set design, and Keith Emerson's piano score, and the general mood. Admittedly, it's been a while since I've seen "EWS."

Brief thoughts of Kidman:

People thought that making the film was the beginning of the end of my marriage -- but I don't really think it was. Tom and I were close then, and it was very much the three of us. Onscreen, the husband and wife are at odds, and Stanley wanted to use our marriage as a supposed reality. That was Stanley: He used the movie as provocation, pretending it was our sex life. Which we weren't oblivious to, but obviously it wasn't us. We both decided to dedicate ourselves to a great filmmaker and artist.

Stanley had to coax me into some of the sexuality in the film in the beginning, but we shot things that were a lot more extreme that didn't end up in the movie. I did feel safe -- I never felt it was exploitive or unintelligent. He was very different with women than he was with men. He has daughters, so he was very paternal with me.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/nicole-kidman-stanley-kubricks-lens-382186

Paternalism resulted in her best performance ever.

we shot things that were a lot more extreme that didn't end up in the movie

o_O

I liked Slavoj Zizek's take, that a major theme of the film was that fantasy is destroyed the moment it's realized.

And all that's left after that is Christmas shopping.

fantasy is destroyed the moment that... OH JESUS THIS ISN'T WHAT I WANTED AT ALL

eyes wide shut uh http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0096.html

great essay, especially for the phrase "the groans of critical blueballs"

anyone else see Room 237 yet/ are ppl talking on another thread abt it?

The Shining