Eyes Wide Shut

I probably should have had some reasonable sexual encounters in my life before seeing this film

are the CGI onlookers still present in versions sold in the US now?

They were up until the 2007 release, which is what i just watched.

hey guess what, for a lot of hotel desk clerks that gay stereotype is true.

btw there is a bar/showplace in NYC now called Club Cumming which he has a stake in

that still above makes it clear why SK originally considered Steve Martin to play Dr Bill

It would never have occurred to me that this was the case:

“In some of the scenes, the backgrounds were rear-projection plates,” the cinematographer reveals. “Generally, when Tom’s facing the camera, the backgrounds are rear-projected; anything that shows him from a side view was done on the streets of London. We had the plates shot in New York by a second unit [that included cinematographers Patrick Turley, Malik Sayeed and Arthur Jafa]. Once the plates were sent to us, we had them force-developed and balanced to the necessary levels. We’d then go onto our street sets and shoot Tom walking on a treadmill. After setting the treadmill to a certain speed, we’d put some lighting effects on him to simulate the glow from the various storefronts that were passing by in the plates. We spent a few weeks on those shots.”

Alan Cumming scene is great.

The whole thing definitely had the feel of being shot on sets. The couple of b-roll shots (maybe a freeway exit or such?) felt really out of place. The rest of it feels kind of like an 80s video.

you can tell if you're looking out for it. it's one of my favorite things about the movie xp

I probably should have had some reasonable sexual encounters in my life before seeing this film

― mh, Monday, June 25, 2018 9:41 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

yeah that's otm for me

there aren't many reasonable encounters in this film! mostly at the mechanical orgy.

Cumming said they shot his scene for a week, and that Kubrick laughed a lot.

if you know downtown Manhattan well, and that Cruise was never on those streets because Kubrick wasn't, you could surmise that something like that projection process was done.

The rest of it feels kind of like an 80s video.

yes. specifically this one that has the same plot as EWS.

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

i'm always posting about this ha.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfHB6etnELE

I admire this movie and how it was made a lot more than I like it. Probably my least favourite Kubrick

Was just with a friend the other day who has been to Sir Ivan's Hamptons Castle on several occasions, including one of the big orgy nights. Fascinating stories.

Go on...

You make my eyes
You make my eyes wide shut
You make my eyes
You make my eyes wide shut

Woah-oh-OH
Woah-OH-oh

is this movie good yet

To my eternal regret, I've only ever attended one of their minor orgy nights.

okay now I refuse to believe EWS wasn't Schnitzler's plot filtered through a Laura Branigan video

right?

That LB's video was directed by William Friedkin and Crusing is also basically about a civil servant's journey into nyc sexual underworld while not getting any bodily-fluid action

orgies are for savages irrc

that's great info, tonga. is cruising any good?

well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR7y7g8h1y4

its a neurotic, confused giallo. pacino seems weirdly lost

I rewatch this every couple of years. I'm not sure how much it has to say--If I were married, maybe it would seem more profound to me. The good thing is, you can also look past all that and just enjoy it as bizarre, good-looking junk. One annoying tic that I really noticed this time is the way 37% of Tom Cruise's lines amount to him repeating what's just been said to him. ("Come inside with me. I just live over there." "Come inside with you?") Weirdness everywhere. When Cruise drops into Nick Nightengale's club for the first time, the waiter asks him if he wants a drink; Cruise asks for a beer, and the waiter goes off to get him a beer. There's no mention of what kind of beer--evidently this particular club only carries one generic beer. And the newspaper headline on the model's overdose: "Ex-beauty queen in hotel drugs overdose." Is that even remotely grammatical?

Cruise asks for a beer, and the waiter goes off to get him a beer. There's no mention of what kind of beer--evidently this particular club only carries one generic beer.

This is pretty common though no? Feel like there’s a studious avoidance of brand names in film and tv, which I rarely notice except when characters say, “I’ll have a beer” and the server of courses understands immediately.

xp Hmmm... headlines tend to go for brevity rather than strict grammar. And people rarely ask for a specific type of beer in films and TV, so I'm not sure there's much to read into those. I do really like this film a lot though

I've watched it three times waiting for its profundities to reveal themselves, so I've said the hell with it and enjoy it as chic junk.

But "drugs overdose"? Who calls a drug overdose a drugs overdose? I've never heard that before...Okay, I guess the beer thing makes sense in terms of avoiding product placement.

I think it's just an issue of expediency in films. No one asks for beer or whiskey by name, just like one says goodbye before they hang up the phone. Though it would be funny if every movie that featured a character asking for a beer involves asking what's on draft, hemming and hawing for a couple of minutes, and then eventually just asking the bartender for a Budweiser or whatever.

But yeah, it's also an issue of brands and rights. My wife works in advertising, and whenever we watch any movie or TV show she always comments on what brands are visible and what brands are not visible. She does work for a couple of beer brands in particular, and always notices when a TV bar is branded with, say, Miller products. Miller, for example, is the official beer brand of the FX Network, iirc, so any show you see on FX will likely feature Miller beer. We watched an episode of Russian Doll last night and she was surprised the show was Netflix and not FX, for all the Miller products.

"Drugs overdose' ... is that a British thing, like "maths?"

xpost should say "no one says goodbye"

The scene where Kidman gets high and they argue--great scene--maybe that has important things to say about men and woman, although the observations seem pretty standard. It's most profound observation (I'm going to be really male here, sorry) might be the dynamic Cruise brings up: you're determined to have any argument here, right, and you're going to find any old pretext to have one?

(I meant the oddity of the waiter not asking Cruise what kind of beer, not Cruise simply asking for a beer--that's normal.)

"an argument"

I think "a beer" and "drugs overdose" is perfectly in line with the simulacrum of reality the movie intentionally tries to present. Much has been said about how the movie presents a New York City that is "like" NYC, but somehow off, or genericized

yep, EWS fails the realism test. How un-Kubrickian.

The stagebound NYC is Schnitzler's Vienna in drag.

"junk" is a ludicrous noun to associate with Kubrick. I feel he was slumming with The Shining, but I wouldn't even use that word there.

You're splitting hairs here. You've criticized Eyes Wide Shut and The Shining more than anyone here (I actually like both films, so saying I'm not-liking parts of one of them in the wrong way is weird). Treating Kubrick like a sainted artist incapable of prurient junk is much more ludicrous to me.

He was capable of lumbering, flawed films. Not junk.

And for what it's worth, I'm not someone who's hung up on realism--the beer and the headline jumped out at me as weird, but EWS's weirdness is, for me, it's primary appeal. Kubrick could sometimes get hung up on realism, though; isn't Barry Lyndon, like Heaven's Gate, infamous for the director's maniacal insistence on getting every last historical detail right?

The commitment to decor and other surface detail intensifies the otherwordliness (see Balzac).

EWS completely pulls me in every time and scares me deeply. Dream logic obviously fake sets blah blah yeah, but that only gets you so far- there’s something about this movie that actually does make me feel like descending into a nightmare only to be jolted awake by that final “Fuck.”

“Drugs overdose” always scanned as Brit English to me.

https://d9hhrg4mnvzow.cloudfront.net/more.thestage.co.uk/archive/9eb55960-eno-drugs-shock_07m04i07m04h000000.PNG

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1755000/images/_1757529_now150.jpg

https://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/yellowadsplash.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/8jYvqiy.jpg

yes "drugs overdose" v standard British

Point taken--just not something I knew.

The scariest moment in the film for me--or at least the creepiest--is that Cheney-like guy who passes the note to Cruise when he comes back the morning after (with the memorable way he suddenly turns away from the gate after Cruise takes the note).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI0-u-1FYjY

re uncanny britishisms note that the rolls there has a right-hand drive, and that the note is written in the diction of, like, charles augustus milverton

no doubt these are meaningless artifacts of production before they're anything else but they also happen to work well in a movie about tom cruise having a nightmare about the class system

The Rolls is not a right hand drive. You can see there is a driver in silhouette with a cap who turns around to reverse the car.