Eyes Wide Shut

Was it? Not the the Oscars is *the* measure but it is *a* measure, and it was only nominated for best adapted screenplay (which it lost).

i was a kid and even i was aware that it was much admired and anticipated.

yep

This interview around the time of Full Metal Jacket addresses the question of Kubrick and critical acclaim:

Initial reviews of most of your films are sometimes inexplicably hostile. Then there’s a reevaluation. Critics seem to like you better in retrospect.

That’s true. The first reviews of 2001 were insulting, let alone bad. An important Los Angeles critic faulted Paths of Glory because the actors didn’t speak with French accents. When Dr. Strangelove came out, a New York paper ran a review under the head Moscow could not buy more harm to America. Something like that. But critical opinion on my films has always been salvaged by what I would call subsequent critical opinion. Which is why I think audiences are more reliable than critics, at least initially. Audiences tend not to bring all that critical baggage with them to each film.

And I really think that a few critics come to my films expecting to see the last film. They’re waiting to see something that never happens. I imagine it must be something like standing in the batter’s box waiting for a fast ball, and the pitcher throws a change-up. The batter swings and misses. He thinks, “Shit, he threw me the wrong pitch.” I think this accounts for some of the initial hostility.

https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/the-rolling-stone-interview-stanley-kubrick-in-1987-90904/

I totally agree that many (all?) of his films have grown or at least changed in estimation over the years. Or at least are frequently reassessed. That's something else.

I wasn't that much of a kid, old enough to remember when it came out, and I mostly remember Full Metal received as yet another Vietnam film (Hamburger Hill, Platoon, etc.) and that it was not considered one of Kubrick's best movies, tbh. Can't speak to its anticipation the way I can to that of EWS which of course followed decades of radio silence (as opposed to Full Metal, which followed only 6 or 7 years off), and arrived as a Big Deal.

I recall Full Metal Jacket being a big deal, but 1) still pre-internet, so a big deal then wasn't as big a big deal as now, and, as you point out, 2) it landed in the middle of a bunch of Vietnam films all at once. Triggered by what, I don't know--it was the second Vietnam cluster after Deer Hunter/Coming Home/Apocalypse Now, only this one involved twice as many films. (The best of which, for me, had the bad luck to be released last: Casualties of War.)

Same year as Born on the 4th of July iirc. And yeah, talk about a film (Casualties) that's been reassessed.

When I compared PTA to Kubrick, I was also--maybe mostly--thinking about stature. I think Anderson, among English-language directors, is the guy whose films are most anticipated right now and most automatic for acclaim, end-of-year lists, etc.

― clemenza, Tuesday, February 12, 2019 10:30 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah this is where I see the similarity, also in how it takes a few years for PTA's films to be reevaluated - The Master & Inherent Vice specifically, which I remember left a lot of people scratching their heads. Though I suppose that's where the comparison ends, everything prior was well received and Phantom Thread pulled almost everyone that was alienated by the past two or three films back in. He's also taking less time now than he was post-PDL.

Abigail Good (the Mysterious Woman): They took this space which is now a really beautiful hotel in St. Pancras. A very grand building with a big staircase. It was all very surreal because we were doing these weird ceremonial movements for months. We would meet and rehearse and come up with ideas. And every day, Leon would record it and come back with feedback from Stanley.

Julienne Davis (Mandy): Stanley said, “It’s not gonna be any of this,” and he made a thrusting gesture. Instead, he said it would be more a kind of modern dance with the inference of sex.

Russell Trigg (dancer): Yolande’s practice involves lots of contact work and improvisation, so that guided the rehearsal. It’s a deliberate kind of movement. She was trying to get a more kind of sensual approach to it. One time, I was working with somebody else, and we had to move along a wall and against each other. There was another scene on beds or sofas. The pressure and resistance of bodies against bodies, bodies against tables or walls or other kinds of props.

Yolande Snaith (choreographer): I’m not sure that Stanley knew entirely what he wanted. It felt like a sort of research period, with me playing around with ideas and presenting them to him, and him looking at them and feeding back. Jocelyn Pook was a composer I knew, [who had a piece called] “Backwards Priests.” I was using that in the rehearsal studio because it felt very appropriate. When Stanley was looking at the tapes of rehearsal, he asked, “What is that music?”

Jocelyn Pook (composer): Stanley said, “I’ve heard this piece from your album. I’d love to hear more stuff.” I remember a car came within a few hours to collect the little cassette I made. And the next day, the car returned to pick me up, and I went to see him in Pinewood studio. He was really excited about some music he was listening to, and he talked me through the section he wanted me to work on. Of course, it was a very intimidating situation to be in, because I hadn’t ever scored a film before. At the beginning, he just asked me to try some ideas for the masked-ball scene and the orgy scene. I was asked later to do the rest of the original music.

Leon Vitali: We were taking so long that sometimes the leases ran out on where we could rehearse. I was having trouble holding on to some of the girls I’d found because they had other obligations and jobs. And then we had to find some more because we realized we didn’t have enough. It was all very Stanley.

YS: I think his vision of the orgy scene over the course of the time we worked on it became much more of a literal orgy. There was a problem because the models would have to be paid a lot more to do that, and some of them didn’t want to do it.

AG: Leon came back one day with pictures from the Kama Sutra and said, “Stanley would like you to draw inspiration from these images,” at which point we were all sort of like, “Okay, that’s not really what we signed up for.” But we knew each other very well at this point, so taking on more of a sexual nature was not so shocking.

https://www.vulture.com/2019/06/eyes-wide-shut-orgy-scene-oral-history.html

Yolande Snaith is an anagram for Handy Toenails.

Opened 20 years ago today.

I will now observe the occasion by watching Swing Time.

Lol

Nick Nightingale sounds like an Astaire character

I will observe not knowing what date Swing Time opened by not watching Swing Time.

Thought this bump was going to be related to the Laura Branigan thread.

haha

so happy to have played a part in making that a thing.

From a 2002 profile of Jeffrey Epstein:

All the speculation and mystery has proved fertile ground for some alternative Jeffrey Epstein stories – the most bizarre of which has him playing the piano (he is classically trained) for high rollers in a Manhattan piano bar in the mid-eighties.

This is great:

https://www.vulture.com/2019/06/eyes-wide-shut-orgy-scene-oral-history.html

as posted on July 1

I wasn't trying to dis EWS, I rewatched it last year

Ah cool

What happened to Todd Field? He's made a whopping two films, both with tons of attention and award nominations, but Little Children was back in 2006 and nothing since then. Even his acting has been next to nothing.

There were too many Todds at the time--Haynes, Solondz, Holland--so one of them had to go.

I still think this is an extraordinary film

The most.

todd Holland?

Directed most of the Larry Sanders episodes.

What a weird oral history. These two things jumped out at me:

One of the problems was that they had to be totally natural. No Botox, no breast enhancements, anything like that. I made it very clear to everybody who came and their agents.

And that was because Stanley wanted this very particular body type, a sort of Barbie-doll type.

So everyone had to be "totally natural," but Kubrick wanted "Barbie-doll" types? OK. That whole scene is so dumb, and would have been better had it been more surreal or whatever word they kept throwing around. Like, I dunno, the sequence at the end of Gaspar Noe's "Love" or something. Because what hurts that whole scene in EWS is that, from memory, it is so cheesy Red Shoes Diaries or whatever. So ... mission accomplished? And failed?

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.
― Josh in Chicago, Monday, June 25, 2012 12:23 AM (seven years ago)

perhaps it's a film about how marriage attracts the mutually tasteless
― Ward Fowler, Monday, June 25, 2012 3:12 AM (seven years ago)

It still plays beautifully.

Eh, you know what? Fuck all y'all.

I'll never marry, which makes sense because I don't understand the appeal of this movie even after three viewings.

It's tantamount to understanding the appeal of ILX after 16 years tbh.

borad 7 is where the bad silly and boring orgies take place

Tantamount Pictures Presents

ILX Wide Shut

By far his scariest movie

Thought this bump was going to be related to the Laura Branigan thread.

I saw this 4 times in the theater in 99. The last time (this was back when movies would play for a while) was probably in late summer in the Angelika in downtown Houston with just me and an elderly couple. I wonder what they made of it.

In Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Tom Cruise gives us a complete, devastatingly accurate catalog of the crumbling defensive postures that a nude or semi-nude man can take while trying to retain a tone of "level-headed" condescension during a boudoir argument with their partner or spouse. pic.twitter.com/VQ3DBvYorz

— ℑ 𝔇𝔬𝔫'𝔱 𝔅𝔩𝔞𝔪𝔢 𝔜𝔬𝔲 (@NickPinkerton) September 7, 2019

rethinking some of the plot elements now that we've revived the thread yet again

I'm not sure Dr. Bill's sexual jealousy is as much about the fear of his wife's infidelity as much as it is a realization he's incapable of imagining his own sexual fantasy scenarios. Alice's is both visceral and straightforward. He stumbles into this effete circle of elites who have concocted an elaborate ritual that has the trappings of eroticism but ends in what Morbs correctly described as mechanical, non-erotic sex

there's a sideline in the current HBO series Succession about people who are born moneyed being unable to participate in, or at least find joy in, a myriad of human experiences -- but they try to compensate by spending lots of money or going off script

if they could just buy an ice cream cone and have it mean something

buying an ice cream company and feeling a half second of ennui

I assume this movie is just on a loop at Morbz' house

Give up your inquiries which are completely useless, and consider
these words a second warning. We hope, for your own good, that
this will be sufficient.

the irritation in "which are completely useless" is palpable

orgies plausibly run by Trump

Shakey, it's at best my 6th-favorite Kubrick film, ya doof

*bangs staff*

this would make a great double feature with Three Days of the Condor

Interesting that it seems to have had some critical rehab in these last few years

https://filmschoolrejects.com/best-movies-1990s/9/

it's been several years since I've seen it, but does EWS ever get compared to Vanilla Sky (itself an adaptation of a 1997 film called open Your Eyes)?