Eyes Wide Shut

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.

agh the zoom in on the note

i love this movie

i was thinking of watching this tonight! if i get my work done early enough

may just watch sopranos instead though

it's 5am. I need to see this film again soon. it's only been a year or something..

if Cruise had ordered a Michelob Ultra, many theses would've been written about What It Meant

Rewatched EWS just before the revive (the blu was cheap).

I still love the gleaming backgrounds and camera work, and still like seeing Cruise repeatedly emasculated. There's some attempted Heart of Glass hypnosis going on during Kidman's baked monologue, and it doesn't work any better for me here. This viewing I noticed just how many monetary transactions are detailed during Dr. Harford's evening odyssey, and found myself keeping a mental tally.

Shining aside, most Kubrick tackles "bigger" issues than the sexual jealousy that underpins this. Sure, the Bilderberg conspiracy orgy comments on social class, but this theme isn't really central. EWS is all escalating symbolic castrations, maybe cosmic correction, maybe karma for Dr. Harford's contemplated infidelity.

I've read Kubrick attempted to adapt Traumnovelle before Barry Lyndon. The perplexing thing for me is that for a passion project, it all seems pretty slight.

One thing I remember enjoying was trying to match the colours used to the wealth and status of the people depicted - from red, wealthy, through to violet, poor. It doesn’t really hold up but it’s fun.

Coming up to TWENTY YEARS in July, my god.

this film is much more purposefully funny than people give it credit for

I don't think it's "about" sexual jealousy at all. love, death, pain, identity, the whole damn thing.

yeah he really had a lot of fun playing with the Cruise/Kidman public persona & even rumors about his sexuality

sanpaku otm though I disagree that it's slight, I think going down a rabbit hole from garden variety male insecurity w/r/t fidelity --> parties and a type of society or club that Kubrick definitely knew about, where the common thread is sexual rituals that seem completely sexless or sterile and dispassionate.... is pretty nuts. totally disorienting and scary. its connection to or lack thereof to actual secret society stuff is irrelevant, it's just one of the best dream/nightmare movies ever. you can look at the orgy as a thinly veiled whoever reference, or a variant on the "I'm naked and I have to give a speech in class" dream. and like a dream, it's full of loose ends and concludes suddenly, unresolved.

it's a dumb movie, but I'll keep watching!

flappy otm and I agree that the meta casting angle shouldn't be overlooked or underappreciated

it’s why he’s Bill Harford - “bill” for money, and a portmanteau of Harrison-Ford

haven't watched the film since it first came out, haven't really had the desire to watch it again. at the time thought it was really thin gruel. the stunt casting really emphasizes the degree to which i do not like the lead characters. the whole thing came off to me as a boring and tedious slog with no emotional stakes. but also i'm not really motivated by sexual desire or sexual jealousy so the movie was never going to connect with me.

tbqh I think Warners let Kubrick know he needed big stars for this, just as for Barry Lyndon they TOLD him it had to be Ryan O'Neal or Robert Redford.

I think I have only seen this movie in its entirety once, but I recall it being possibly the weirdest and most surreal approach to the most boring and mundane of material. I have no doubt he needed Cruise and Kidman to get the thing made, but then I thought, why this movie? Why did he want to tell this story? Because there's really not much there, and what's there is kind of facile, iirc.

To be more generous, maybe the movie is ahead of its time? Maybe the movie Kubrick wanted to make couldn't be made then? I could totally imagine if he were alive him making a better version of it today, or another filmmaker making a much more effective version of it today.

i like the idea of the clash of form and content, but frankly lynch's "dune" is a far more interesting failure on those grounds (though dune is at least a legitimately good story).

y’all are wrong and should see it again

i mean the relative thinness of the plot seems almost beside the point to me

amazing y'all don't complain about the most idiotic plot Kubrick ever used, but then you've always been the caretaker

I know I've mentioned before that Traumnovelle was made for German TV in 1969 (it's on YouTube)