Eyes Wide Shut

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)

regarding the movie feeling "slight," or never seeming to amount to much...I've come around to the idea this was intentional in some way...and the whole pollack scene at the end is so brilliant in the ways that it both posits some ultimate conspiratorial meaning to the whole thing and then draws the curtain down on any possibility of finding out what that is. "life goes on...until it doesn't." I think the movie is less a psychoanalytic allegory than it is about the impossibility of ever finding your way out into something like allegorical meaning, like the way the dreams slip away as you begin to wake up.

I also think James Hillman's "Dreams and the Underworld" is a really good text to read alongside this movie!

That Pollack scene is what I find unsatisfying about the film. The actors' rhythms are off, the scene awkwardly edited, and it goes on for too long.

I like Sydney Pollack as an actor, but he's basically himself no matter the character--he seems to have parachuted in from Tootsie. I can envision Harvey Keitel in that role.

About 90 percent of the posts in this revive have been infuriating, but it was all worth it for Morbs to admit The Shining isn't junk.

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/AltruisticElatedAtlanticblackgoby-size_restricted.gif

this film is much more purposefully funny than people give it credit for
― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius)

^^^

“I’m a doctor” *flashes ID like a cop*

I don't think the film's humor was totally overlooked, considering its legacy may ultimately be ornate masked orgies as comedy punchline. Fidelio! But really the movie should have been funnier, weirder and/or more suspenseful, something that left you scratching your head in a good way. And Cruise and Kidman are terribly miscast.

i dunno, i think Kidman's punchline to the entire movie suggests they're perfectly (if stunt) cast

Alice Harford: I do love you and you know there is something very important we need to do as soon as possible.
Dr. Bill Harford: What's that?
Alice Harford: Fuck the NRA

That would have left people scratching their head for sure!

FIDELIO

Succumbing to the trolls here, but I don’t understand how anyone could not find something to love here especially in light of all the trash that’s put out weekly. Tough crowd

There's a lot to love, or at least appreciate. Just not the movie itself, imo.

This film was far from universally praised when it came it out.

http://newrepublic.com/article/131189/kubrick-sadness
http://slate.com/culture/1999/07/the-naked-and-the-dead.html
http://www.salon.com/1999/07/16/eyes/
http://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/12/12/eyes-wide-shut-1999-review-by-andrew-sarris/

Was there some point between then and now where treating it as something less than great art became "trolling"?

most of kubrick's films post-strangelove received mixed reviews when they were first released, though, didn't they? 2001's early reviews were notoriously bad and clockwork orange struck a lot of critics as a morally repellent movie. i was reading some of the original reviews of the shining a while back and "kubrick is slumming" seemed to be the general consensus.

i remember reading that salon review of EWS when it came out. charles taylor has always seemed like such an insufferable crank to me -- i don't think i've ever read a piece of his, even a rave about something i liked, that didn't make me cringe at some point.

a lot of it, I think, is the chasm between what people expected from Kubrick at a given time, and what they got.

(xpost) Don't disagree with any of that--he was a polarizing filmmaker. So, re the "trolling" comment above (sorry, I hate the word and the concept, and I have to use the quotation marks), I don't know why, 20 years later, anything would change with Eyes Wide Shut. Some people love it, some don't--there's no ulterior motive in expressing reservations about it.