Eyes Wide Shut

Rating:
Summary: A painfully bad movie
Review: This is a painfully bad movie.

I can't even describe it.

The scenes are forced, the story silly.

Rating:
Summary: Execution is Everything
Review: The characteristics labeled of most Stanley Kubrick films hold true for his final film Eyes Wide Shut - bizarre, uncomfortable, haunting, and either brilliant or dreadful, it all depends. Eyes Wide Shut has a poignant musical score that forbids you to remove yourself from the action, and bold cinematography and camera movement that makes the most mundane scenes absolutely breathtaking. For his final film, Kubrick rounded up the most fitting actors for the job; treated each shot purposefully and individually; and still managed to produce a film that did justice to his entire career - a film that has inspired a lesser but devoted following and divided critics worldwide.
Eyes Wide Shut follows Dr. Bill Harford - the main character of the movie, but hardly a dynamic one; he acts more as a guide than a real character - into different dimensions of New York life. Prompted by the confession of his wife that she nearly cheated on him a year ago, Bill wanders into a jazz club, an elitist orgy, and a prostitute's apartment, eventually returning to the solace of his own home.
Throughout Bill's adventures, the gripping musical score enhances the already suspenseful action and prevents any sort of dull sedation in the audience. The chilling, single piano notes simultaneously mimic the pace of a beating heart and the tingling of a spine.
Kubrick's profound understanding of color and composition are stunningly revealed in the film. Ordinary home interiors are brought to life by the dramatic contrast of deep blue windows and bright Christmas trees. In the scene where Dr. Bill and Ziegler discuss the previous night's peculiar occurrences, the library in which they are talking is saturated by the blood red pool table, the green overhanging lamps, and once again, the blue windows. When Dr. Bill moves around the pool table in the beginning of the scene, he becomes centered perfectly in one of the windows, much like Alice Harford, his wife, is framed in the bedroom scene when she confesses her past desires.
Perhaps lacking the unforgettable performance of Jack Nicolson in The Shining or the appalling behavior in A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut could be shrugged off as just another weird Kubrick movie. But the presentation of his material, even if the material itself isn't as memorable, is so picturesque and professional that one cannot help but admire the film for its fantastic execution.

p.s.-I'd just like to say that people have become so used to the fast lane and everything on the go that when directors attempt to slow things down and focus, people get all antsy about it. Well sorry, not everything moves at 100 miles an hour, and if they did you wouldn't see anything.

Rating:
Summary: Overhyped CENSORED final film from Kubrick - much ado about
Review: The movie is slow, plodding, glacial, superficial and dull.
The celebrated "orgy" scene is cold and clinical at best.
Cruise and Kidman are both quite wooden/flat in their roles.
It just all goes on and on and on ad nauseum - with no point.
Final note: WHY WHY WHY is it the only America is forced to watch a CENSORED version of Kubrick's final film? If the director's original intent was to show explicit SEX during the film's central set piece, WHY can't WE as Americans who are blessed with "FREE SPEECH" be allowed make up our own minds?
This is why the MPAA is totally OUT OF TOUCH with today's culture and sensiblities - they should definitely re-release this on DVD so at least we can finally see the "naughty bits"!

Rating:
Summary: I see parallels with the Odyssey
Review: I've read all the reviews, and have found Roger Ebert's very interesting.
But I see parallels to the greek tragedy of Ulysses as told in the Odyssey.

To me, this is a cautionary tale of the nightmarish scenarios possible when people fail to just go home. To be where they belong and to realize what they don't belong doing.

Ulysses on an unnecessary raid at the end of the Trojan war blinds the eye of Polyphemus king of the Cyclopes, infuriating the god Neptune, who refuses to permit Ulysses to return home to Ithaca. And so begins the Odyssey of Ulysses.

When you watch Tom Cruise's character in this movie spend two nights wandering in the sexual underworld of New York City, you watch a Sexual Odyssey emerge like a daydream about possibilites missed, the opportunity to jump off avoided and responsibilites shunned. You realize at any moment here he can head home and face up to his realities, but he plunges deeper into a nightmarish dream. Or is it?

After visiting one of his patients, Dr. Bill Harford can just go home to his wife and family and face the facts that his wife shared with him (while high from marijuana) a sexual fantasy she had experienced a year earlier. But he can't. He seems haunted by her revelations. And jealous. And perhaps motivated by her revelations to experiment.

Thus begins his Odyssey.