Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Writing credits Stanley Kubrick
Tom Cruise.... Dr. William 'Bill' Harford
Nicole Kidman.... Alice Harford
Madison Eginton.... Helena Harford
Sydney Pollack.... Victor Ziegler
Todd Field.... Nick Nightingale
Leelee Sobieski.... Milich's Daughter
Sex is bad. It's so bad that even imagining having any would be disastrous. Tom Cruise hits the streets after his wife tells him of a fantasy she had of another man. How dare she?!
Everywhere he goes, he is denied. A teen nympho, a hooker, even an orgy end in a complete bust for him. And this is Tom Cruise we're talking about. If he can't have sex at an orgy, he must be floating through a nightmare.
This film has one fatal flaw. It's boring. Terribly boring. The pauses are agonizing. The scene where they are waiting for the guard at the gate while the piano hits one note over and over is torture. Any merit this film has is drowned out by the sheer nothingness of the action.
I still love the trailer for this film. The Chris Issak song was great over mysterious, sexy pictures of Cruise and Kidman. It was sold as a sex thriller. I guess it wouldn't have made too much money if it was sold as the impotent dream movie.
SCORE: 2 out of 4 Cruises dreaming of impotency
"eyes wide shut" is a load of old ludicrous pretentious highbrow eletist snob oriented hogwash of the lowest order, ("plan 9 from outer space" was a hundred times better), which brings me, dr. gore, to another subject that i`d like to hear your opinion on, lately i`m beginning to feel ever more idiotic if i watch a film that hasn`t got any special effects in it, it dosen`t matter how supposedly brilliant the acting or the story is, if theres no monsters, robots, aliens, ghosts, or something else thats imaginitive i find myself becoming bored by the proceedings very quickly. It just seems obvious to me that special effects represent the future of film making and everything else belongs in the past. And yes, nicole kidman is a hot chick, well she was 20 years ago.
ReplyDelete"Eyes Wide Shut" was a big disappointment. I was looking forward to this one for awhile. Kubrick has always been good for interesting movies but this one was a bust.
ReplyDeleteAs far as special effects making the movie, would they save movies you otherwise would have hated? If a spaceship had landed in Cruise's impotent dream and attacked with some rabid monsters on leashes, would it have made for a better movie? Come to think of it, it probably would have. But I don't think special effects are necessary to have a good time in the dark, (watching movies). Although our expectations for bigger, faster, more, more, more seem to go up every year. I could have used some more Kidman sex scenes in this one but that probably wouldn't have helped much. It would have been a good special effect though.