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Eyes Wide Shut

Eyes Wide Shut

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good
Review: Although I thought the movie collapsed toward the end, that most of it was so solid, I am recommending it. This movie gets as diverse opinions as THE THIN RED LINE (if you liked this, then you might like that...to those who thought this was slow, you'd probably find that slow). On Roger Ebert's show, both he and Martin Scorcese voted EYES WIDE SHUT as one of the best ten movies of the 90's! I'll take Martin Scorcese's opinion over any of those one star reviews below, any day!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Good movie to watch, but don't buy the DVD
Review: It is really too bad that Warner Bros. chose to release this movie in the R Rated version, rather than the uncut version we heard so much about on the news in 1999. What an insult to Stanley Kubrick's last movie. Not only did they not even include "deleted Scenes" as in the Stigmata DVD, they also releases it in full screen! VCR technology on a DVD folks!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Poss. the best movie ever made
Review: I think a lot of people don't like this movie because they either havn't been in enough of a relationship to relate to it, or it is just too real and people don't like to see their own private fears on the screen in front of them. As for myself and many others, I believe that this is by far the BEST movie Kubrick ever did and possibly the greatest movie ever made; not just for the technique of it, but also for the reality and the recognition that many of its viewers can share.

As for the R-rated version in the States, I think that since Stanley can't say for himself, it is best to release it the way it was intended for USA theaters. It would have been nice to have both versions on the same disc (to please everyone), but I do applaud (as much as I hate to admit) WB for staying with what Stanley had to do. Kubrick's not the one to change things because he has to, he makes something the way he wants it for where it has to be (they should have left the crew member in, though).

For those of you who refuse to buy this movie because of the digital people that were left inserted, GET OVER IT! It IS the way Stanley wanted it. Maybe not the best way, (and yes, the unrated version is a lot more powerful) but this is all we have right now and this movie is too good to pass up because your feelings got hurt.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Bloated, distended, and lurid as an over-sated royal corpse.
Review: Even the superfluity of formal nicety can't redeem this pretentious movie by one of cinema's most over-rated directors. What of it is being celebrated as psycho-sexual insight is simply platitudinous. Kubricks's despotic and fatuous self-assurance is oppressively evident in its merciless length, its arbitrarily long pauses in the midst of vacuous speech, its gratutiously voyeuristic nudity, and in the directorially enforced blandness (and, on occasion, freakishness) of the acting.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Sadly Misunderstood
Review: One of the most beautiful and interesting films of the 1990's is sadly unappreciated by the general public. It is an extremely artistic film so people who like mainstream blockbuster films need not apply but for those of us who appreciate movies for the art they are should love this film. It is truly a shame that many people can not look past the sex and see the film for what it really is: a pure work of art. A movie in the purest sense of the word.

The directing blew me away. The skill and grace in which the movie was shot was beyond great. It was perfection. The tradmark Kubrick corridor shots were among the best and the red that appeared throught out the film gave it a sexy and sinful feel that was amazing. It was well acted by Mr. Cruise and Mrs, Kidman but I felt that Sydney Pollack gave one of the best performances in the picture.

This truly great film was sadly denied any oscar nominations probably due to its controversy. Now that it is on Dvd and video, I hope that more people will have the chance to see it and love it as I did. Martin Scorsese made a good choice when he put this film as his fourth favourite of the 1990's. Go rent or buy this.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Long, Pretty, and Irrelevant
Review: Even when it was published in the 1920's, Arthur Schnitzler's A DREAM STORY was a period piece, set in turn-of-the-century Vienna, in the days before, to quote E. B. White, "serious writers got sex down on the carpet for the count." In short, at a time when a polite, wealthy married woman's confession that she fantasized about making love with a complete stranger might throw her relationship into real turmoil. It was also a period in which a Jewish doctor had to tread with the utmost care through life, lest his fragile assimilation into gentile be threatened (and if anything can threaten tenous assimilation, it's sexual impulses). And it was a period in which bored Catholic aristocrats, out for a little dirty fun, might very well hold orgies which set out to blashpheme the church of which they were indifferent members.

But none of this seemed to have occurred to Stanley Kubrick as he set out to adapt Schnitzler's novella. Thus Schnitzler's tale of Ault Wien is plunked down into the middle of moder-day Manhattan, with a pair of terribly gentile stars in the lead. The orgy is still there, still terribly formal and masked and striving to be blasphemous, but deprived of a cultural context, it just seems silly.

Which is a pity, because the basic theme of the novel, how sexual impulses can disrupt our lives to the point of destroying them sometimes, isn't at all dated. It's just that Kubrick never really tried to devise a modern version of this story-just dressed Schnitzler's residents of a dying Austro-Hungarian empire in modern clothes and moved them into a New York apartment.

As for New York, it's curiously absent from this film as well. Even the New York of Mayor Guiliani, with its cleaner streets and lower crime rate, isn't as placid and tidy as Kubrick's backlot version.

It's rather odd to say much about the acting in a Kubrick film, since there usually isn't much, but there are performances here, and pretty good ones. Tom Cruise is effortlessly appealing, and in the scene where he breaks down over the dead body of a suicided call-girl, he could break your heart. Nicole Kidman's role is rather skimpy, but she makes you feel the woman's confusion and sadness, and despite the fact that Kubrick shoots her like a blow-up sex doll at times, she maintains her dignity and humanity. As always, Sydney Pollack is easily appealing as a tycoon who's a patient of Cruise and a regular orgy attendee.

Kubrick's direction is a little better than usual. In private, he was notorious for driving no faster than 30 miles an hour down the road, and this film moves at a similar pace. And drivers who go to slowly are as likely to get ticketed as those who go too fast. Not so movie directors. And to linger, for minutes at a time, over scenes where little is said and little of that is interesting, strikes me as grounds for having you license suspended. Or at least for going back to traffic school . . .

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Stanley Kubrick probably wouldn't have cared but...
Review: ...here's one picture that's truly Oscar-worthy. Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Kidman was what acting was all about in that scene where she was stoned), Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Production Design. Too bad, the Academy had its narrow minds shut.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Mystifying, Yes, but Good?
Review: All the controversy below suggests that this movie (like a lot of art, good or bad) is a Rorschach test for the viewer. What he gets from it depends on what he brings, whether that's patience, knowledge, insight, or just wishful projection. A viewer below believes that the "explanation scene" at the end is no explanation at all, but a chilling scene of Satanic dissembling on the part of Sydney Pollack, who reveals his true colors through the color of his pool table (red) and in other ways that many of us aren't "subtle" enough to grasp. Maybe. But it should be mentioned that Kubrick did not want to include this scene: it was written by Frederic Raphael, who believed that after two and a half hours of "mystification," the average movie-goer might be ready to strangle Kubrick with his own loose-ends. (Raphael further demonstrated his exquisite judgment by releasing an unseemly memoir about Kubrick to coincide with the film's release). Other viewers have been at pains to show how very deeply they have delved into this film and its many buried meanings. They treat it as a puzzle to be decoded, and some of their solutions are very clever, if not brilliant. It's fine for a film to have hidden depths, but think how much better if it's a passable movie on the surface (like David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," Stephen Frears' "The Grifters," or many other films by Kubrick himself). EWS does not have the look or the shape of an art film, so it's not unreasonable to hold it to the standards of the kind of film it resembles, and was advertized as: a mystery-thriller. And unfortunately it has no thrills, and its only mystery is a depressing one (Why, Stanley, why! ). Films are like people: if they are ridiculous and insulting on the face, I don't feel the need to look very deep.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: one of the last well made movie of the old century
Review: In the dream that eyes wide shut is, one could only hope for a happy ending,the story is this. A man gets angry at his wife's story of adulterism , so from there on he goes on a sexual odyssey, is he looking for answer toward humans sexual inpulses?, who knows , but hey if you are in the mood for a movie with a different view of life then , you could do worst , but let me advise you , the answers foe the questions that a rise during the film are very difficult to find.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: ABSOLUTELY PITIFUL!
Review: this complete waste of celluloid was nothing more than a wat-too-long episode of "red shoe diaries"! please! why is it every time an artist dies, we're supposed to think of his or her posthumos works as "sooo amazing"! this is the kind of movie that people THINK is so "mind-bending" and "powerful", but when you get down to it, is nothing more than mindless hype.


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