Eyes Wide Shut

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.

Most people who like it have reservations, me included. Tom Cruise crying is never a good thing.

I know I'm not the first person to say this, but the best joke in the film goes back to Bogart in The Big Sleep: the way everyone who comes into contact with Cruise wants to climb all over him.

well I've never understood why exactly, but he was considered sexy in '99

This movie is better than your lives.

Well, a lot of things are better than your lives, let's be honest.

You may be betraying more than you intend there.

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

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius)

otm, he took so much time between movies and made relatively few. and it's obviously easier and less disorienting to go through an artist's body of work when it's finished.

Janet Maslin got it right when EWS came out. I'll see if it's still on youtube, Charlie Rose had a panel of critics on to talk about it.

I posted this mind-boggling shot-by-shot analysis of EWS on the general Kubrick thread, it's well worth a read (but very long):

http://idyllopuspress.com/idyllopus/film/ews_toc.htm

One of the most disturbing things it mentions is that in the toy shop at the very end, the daughter appears to be led away by three men who were earlier seen at the party.

JD: I read that Charles Taylor review and found the tone and the objections he raised pretty straightforward. I don't know about his reviews in general--I used to read him now and again, but it's been a while.

sometimes I feel like this film has more of a Lynch feel than a Kubrick feel

Are people really unaware of the generic movie trope of characters just ordering "a beer" or "a whiskey" or whatever? I literally can't think of a single movie aside from Blue Velvet where a character orders a beer by name.

The Deer Hunter--Rolling Rock! There are probably others, but now that I think about it, you're right.

I trust that somewhere there's a senior thesis comparing Bill Harford to Cruise's other sex-obsessed (sort of) character in 1999, Magnolia's Frank T.J. Mackey.

I've never seen Vanilla Sky, but for some reason I thought that would be a similar character.

I don't think so, from what I remember...Ships passing in the night: Kubrick's last film, P.T. Anderson's third. If you had to single out one director today who's closer to Kubrick than any other, I think it'd be Anderson. Not a perfect fit, but I can't think of a better match.

Christopher Nolan is jumping up and down in his seat with his hand raised

ugh, NEXT

I agree that PTA is the closest analogue to Kubrick today (at least in America).

Not US, but I'd argue for Jonathan Glazer as being closest to inheriting the Kubrick mantle. Similar framing, camera movement, themes, hollow characters, use of music. Less so in Glazer's debut Sexy Beast than in his Kidman feature Birth and in Under the Skin. As Kubrick had planned for decades, Glazer is presently filming a Holocaust film.

Nolan is another formalist, but working more in time/editing clockwork than in meticulous production design. He has none of Kubrick's cynicism, and relies heavily on screenwriting kludges that Kubrick would find risible. PTA genuinely seems to love his characters and his films are suffused with humanity. In some ways he's an anti-Kubrick.