Eyes Wide Shut

Rating:
Summary: Why waste your breathe on the ones who will never understand
Review: I am here to say that if you do not like this movie you have successfully been brainwashed by the establishment and should be corralled into a slaughterhouse and killed like the human cattle you are.

This movie is the closest thing to life as possible, without blood actually oozing from the screen. Watching this movie is like staring into the portal of a parallel dimension, a glimpse into the dark soul of man. This movie is like the quatrains of Nostradamus, the answer is for the initiated...for the illumined...

Rating:
Summary: Kubrick does Freud...
Review: ...who, in his classic work, "Civilization and Its Discontents" asserted that repression of the unconscious is the foundation of what we consider "civilization" and a necessary evil. Not all that breathtaking or revolutionary of an idea by itself---in fact, it's something that most conservative folk would basically agree with, though instead of "repression of the unconscious" they'd probably say "morality" or some other nonsense. But it's the same basic idea: the basement is infinitely dark and scary, and you may want to go down and look around once in a while, but it's nowhere you'd like to stay for long.

Part of the genius of Stanley Kubrick is his ability to take fairly commonplace things and elevate/magnify them into something much bigger and more interesting things than they normally are. He does this hear with the two mediocre lead actors (Kidman and Cruise), and also with Freud's little truism above.

Cruise is a handsome man, with lots of charisma, and has made a career of playing the seemingly carefree, cocksure alpha male---and his range is fairly limited to that. Kidman here plays a woman at once ordinary and very sexual beneath the surface---even though she is a fairly attractive woman (often reminded me of a young Meg Ryan) "sexy" would normally be quite a stretch.

Yet both actors pull it off: Cruise shows flashes of genuine anguish, and Kidman (with the help of lots of tasteful yet sensuous nudity, most notably of her remarkable derriere) does project something other than the prim-and-proper-little-girl persona she usually dons for most of her other films. And the film itself often does feel like a dreamy descent into the subconscious and much of its contents: fear, lust, jealousym, obsessiveness, sexual confusion, mistrust, etc.

As long as you don't focus on "what's going to happen next?" and just soak in the magic of each NOW frame, you learn to appreciate the richness of the present moment.

This movie DOES seem slower than most of Kubrick's films, but if you keep the allegory in mind, you start to enjoy the sheer visual mastery that's in almost every frame of any Kubrick film, the atmospherics, and of course the music, which was superbly integrated into the film. I'd hesitate to say that this is Kubrick's best, but still pretty darn good by industry standards.

Rating:
Summary: Love,sex and trust in a violent world
Review: = Love, sex and trust in a violent world
Reviewer: A viewer from Athens Greece
Tom and Nicole play a typical upper middle class couple with child, in New York. They have a world granted them, and everything is in place, until they start asking questions--blame it on the pot-smoking, if you must...
Nicole is offended by Tom's certainties on sexuality and femininity, and challenges him, by speaking up to him of her sexual fantasies; as plainly as people do at the beginning of erotic awareness, when everything is innocent and inconsequential. This is received by Tom as an unexpected shake up of hitherto unquestionable concepts of marriage loyalty, from within the walls of the family citadel. The vision of his wife's imaginary adultery haunts him recurrently.
To test his will for pleasure and his controls, Tom sets on a journey in "the other" New York, in the sex market, to which he had been impervious; now he sees and responds to the sexual give and take around him. Curiosity, his primary motive, leads to painful astonishment. He discovers there a masked, yet nudist secret society, that lives for sex and violence. In this environment, he quickly sticks out as an onlooker, not really involved. He is expelled, and warned to pretend that he never knew what is going on around him.
Tom is well bred, he is a man of duty, honourable, and tends to dare when threatened, up to the point when this is no longer economical, for a man in his position and with his commitments. Then he is offered the alternative that his experience was all a dream, a misunderstanding among gentlemen, or a play among friends.
But even when he can not dare further, he is hardly restricted from asking questions and contemplating his strategy--as a man, and then as a loving husband, a woman's man.
Women love him, and women save him from lethal dangers in the jungle he has discovered to be living in.
As the world he lives in, Tom is ruled by men and saved by women. But he is innocent for his ignorance. His women, the patients he has loyally attended to as a doctor, as by his Hippocratic oath, his wife whom he loves, the girls he picks up, to whom he is kind, even if he craves not for, all the women who happen to his take, by the rules of this society, let him know, but spare him the burden of guilt.
I think that in this film Kubrick speaks for the women.
The music is a very pointed comment. Beginning with that glorious waltz, that exemplifies the contentment of a successful bourgeois life, yet hints to something lost and nostalgic, (a piece of music that, in its time, undermined the Soviet contentment...) passes on to something more animalistic, like a New York street encounter with possible brawl, at high beat, and culminates in a disquieting un-music and backwards speech, a dark cult angels' tongue.

Rating:
Summary: Nicole Kidman is mine..got that?
Review: Nicole Kidman & Tom Cruise are the Harfords...a young couple with their own desires...not only for each other, but for other people. Alice (Kidman) tells her husband about a sexual fantasy she once had a long time ago. That provokes William (Cruise) to fulfill his sexual fantasy by entering the sexual underground by almost sleeping with a hooker and visiting a sex cult for the night. However, its beats me why a man who has a wife as PIPING HOT & SEXY as Nicole Kidman would go look somewhere else to sexual pleasure. I sure wouldn't. I'd stay home. A very erotic story with lots of twists.

Rating:
Summary: A Secret Kept Too Well
Review: EYES WIDE SHUT contains considerable nudity, several fairly explicit scenes, and one sexual situation after another. But any one who approaches EYES WIDE SHUT with the idea that it will be sexually arousing is in for an extremely rude awakening. EYES WIDE SHUT is not a sexy film, and (Hollywood marketing men aside) no one in their right mind would describe it as such.

The story is intriguing. Upscale New York doctor Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) fall into a drug-laced conversation--and goaded by Bill's rather archaic ideas about female sexuality, Alice reveals that she has had a powerful sexual fantasy about a man she once saw in a hotel. Powerful though the fantasy was, the facts of the matter are much more prosaic: she never spoke to him, never had sex with him, and never saw him again. But the authority with which she describes the fantasy, and the realization that women in general and his wife in particular are capable of contemplating such behavior, sends Bill into an emotional spin. Unable to shake the image of his wife having sex with another man, he prowls the city--and wanders more by accident than design into one sexual situation after another. Accosted by a patient, taunted by drunk men on the street who think he is gay, and even picked up by a prostitute, Bill eventually stumbles into the film's centerpeice: a secret society that gathers for cold-blooded and ritualistic fornication. And once he trespasses upon the society, he suddenly finds that death and destruction follow his every move.

There are clearly several metaphors at work in the film. EYES WIDE SHUT essentially presents sex as something that boils under the surface with a ferocity of which we are generally unaware--and then by stages ties sexuality to emotional risk, disease, perversion, cruelty, and ultimately death. It is also flatly Strindbergian in its vision of women, presenting them and their sexuality as irrational elements that must be subdued and reduced to the mechanical lest they lead to absolute destruction. And it is no accident that the story is set at Christmas with its story of a male God born of a virgin woman.

But these are only the most obvious of the film's layers. What confuses--and often enrages--viewers is the fact that Kubrick leaves a tremendous amount of wiggle room when it comes to both the story and what it means. There is no clear-cut summation re anything: everything is presented in the most ambivilent manner possible and we are left to draw our own conclusions. And this is as true of the plot as it is of whatever intepretation you attach to it; it winds back upon itself, ultimately frustrating any clear-cut response. One might say that with EYES WIDE SHUT Kubrick tantalizes us with a secret that he keeps entirely too well. I like the film, but people tend to have extremely divided reactions to it, and for that reason I recommend that you rent the film and decide for yourself before making a purchase.

In theatrical release, EYES WIDE SHUT was presented in a widescreen ratio; on both VHS and DVD release, however, it is presented in the ratio of a standard television screen. Liner notes indicate that Kubrick intended the film to be seen in that ratio--but even if that is true it is a pity that there is not a widescreen option, for the visual statement of the widescreen theatrical release was somewhat more powerful. If you are trying to decide between DVD and VHS and both price and DVD bonus materials are factors in your choice, you should know that there is no significant difference between the two.

--GFT (Amazon Reviewer)--

Rating:
Summary: A haunting and surreal masterpiece from Kubrick
Review: Since Eyes Wide Shut was a high-profile movie released in the summer of 1999 and starring two major stars, it was inevitable that the film was going to incite the interest of casual moviegoers. Casual moviegoers attracted by the presence of Cruise and Kidman and unaware of what the term "Kubrick film" means and most likely also unaware of who Stanley Kubrick is. These casual moviegoers were probably successfully alienated by the film after the first hour at least. Many people would label Eyes Wide Shut a disappointment, perhaps expecting a Tom Cruise star vehicle. What they got was a long, slow-moving, complex, atmospheric, psychological, dream-like story. Certainly not typical summer movie fare. Eyes Wide Shut was probably the most bizarre film released in the summer of 1999, certainly out of place among such movies as Wild Wild West, The Mummy and The Phantom Menace.

Eyes Wide Shut is a big budget art-house movie. This is a film that most people will probably not enjoy. Warner Brothers no doubt realized this and probably knew that the film would lose money, but Kubrick being such a major director they let him do what he wanted. Because of the star power of Cruise and Kidman, the high-profile summer release and pre-release hype, Eyes Wide Shut was bound to be a grossly misunderstood film, and indeed it was. The film really only manages to find its audience among Kubrick fans. Fortunately, though, there are many, many Kubrick fans. So, if you know what you're getting into, if you like slow-moving thematically complex films and if you understand how Kubrick worked, then Eyes Wide Shut is a film that you will probably enjoy.

Inspired by a 1926 German novella, Eyes Wide Shut is a sexual odyssey, a surreal psychological journey. It's a film where not everything is clear and obvious, so there is room for debate over some of the more ambiguous areas. Even if you neglect to derive any meaning from it, the film still stuns as an atmospheric, moody piece. The film's mystique is its greatest asset. There is an eerie air of mystery and uncertainty that abounds. The masked party scene, the "focal-point" of the film if you will, is an unforgettable scene that is both awe-inspiring and spooky. Masterfully shot by Kubrick, this sequence ranks right up there with the greatest moments of his greatest films of the past. It's pure Kubrick. Eerie and foreboding, yet beautiful and graceful at the same time. It's a surreal, dream-like sequence which makes us question if it's really happening, or if Tom Cruise's character is merely dreaming. No other scene in the film is an intensely fascinating as the masked-party scene, but the story still maintains interest. The film becomes highly suspenseful at that point as it seems that the masked party patrons really are dangerous. [...]

Eyes Wide Shut is beautifully filmed from beginning to end. Kubrick's usual steadicam tracking shots are frequent, the lighting is vivid with scenes bathed in orange and blue, and the production design is outstanding. New York City streets were recreated on soundstages in England, but you'd never know. Certainly worth noting is the music, whether it's the beautiful opening waltz or the suspenseful one-note cue heard later in the film. Kubrick has always used music to masterful effect, and Eyes Wide Shut is no exception.

The film is 100 percent Kubrick and fans should certainly not be disappointed. It's a masterful triumph of atmosphere and mood, a brilliant, complex journey that few filmmakers could have pulled off. Eyes Wide Shut was Kubrick's last film, but it is definitely worthy of his legacy. It is, in my opinion, his finest film since A Clockwork Orange. A masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: Kubrick at his overrated best
Review: The late director Stanley Kubrick was an unqualified visual genius. Few film makers neither rivaled nor equaled his ability to fill an entire movie screen with information pertinent to the narrative structure of a film.

Like Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Fritz Lang, the mature Steven Spielberg, the young Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese and Akira Kurosawa, Kubrick uses the elements of lighting, depth of field, action, composition, design, staging and sound to create motion pictures that breathe as living organisms, completely transcendent to the manufactured world of a blackened movie theatre. He will be sorely missed.

That said, Stanley Kubrick is also quite possibly also the most grossly overrated, pretentious and narcissistic filmmaker of the modern era. While his most famous pictures, "2001" and "A Clockwork Orange", are filled with magnificent technical advances and stunning visuals, they lack the humor, the insight and the pessimistic optimism (he loves paradoxes in his films) of his real masterpieces "The Killing", "Paths of Glory", "Lolita", "Dr. Strangelove" and the sadly overlooked "Barry Lyndon".
Which finally leads us to the much anticipated "Eyes Wide Shut" .

For anyone who has been in a bomb shelter since the Cuban Missile Crisis, Shut features the real life husband and wife team of Nichole Kidman and Tom Cruise as a couple who share way too much in the way of intimate secrets.

Driven by nothing more than a jealous fantasy, Cruise undertakes a journey into the sexual underworld of New York's cultural elite. The film unfolds very much like a nightmarish adult version of The Wizard of Oz (one character even taunts Cruise to come with her "Over the Rainbow.") Kidman's hilarious closing line is a crude rewriting of "There is no place like home."

Crouching in the middle of the film like an ominous gargoyle-like specter is one of the most disturbing sequences ever filmed. Straight out of Heironymous Bosch and filled with hideously masked writhing bodies, cryptic chanting, cloaked figures and demonic organ music, Kubrick makes Cruise's descent into perceived decadence complete. It is one of the most vivid portraits of Hell on Earth ever filmed. That sequence chills and haunts me to the bone still.

Besides the "hell" sequence, the film does contain much to reccomend it. Kidman's performance is Oscar worthy in it's quite torment and grace. She is an actor of that most rare combination: talent, beauty and endless range. Hers is a career that will last.

The production design stunningly recreates New York on a London Sound Stage.

And of course at the center of it all is the film magician Kubrick, who does create a film of stunning visual power. It just isn't particularly entertaining or enlightening.

Which leads me to the final questions about the film. What is the point of it all? Is it a calculated warning to anyone thinking of wandering away from home and hearth? Are we the viewer supposed to identify with Cruise who is attracted by the promise of sensual delights, but leaves stunned by the growing evil? Or is it an excuse to film as Kubrick himself once said " A first class nudie film."? Who knows? Who cares?

Although deliberate ambiguity can serve as an effective device- one that can inspire hours of meaningful debate, it all to often represents in Kubrick's world, a muddled point of view. Such is the case with "Eyes Wide Shut".

Rating:
Summary: Eyes Wide Shut - Questions, questions? Layers upon layers!
Review: If you want your stories all neatly wrapped and conventionally complete this is not the film for you, but if you enjoy stories with layers of meaning then this offering will stimulate thought and tease your immagination. This is a film that can be seen as a morality tale on the sanctity of marriage or you can take the approach that Kubrick's dreamy handling of the plot may be simply an overlay on reality, then the story comes vibrantly alive because this is a tale that could not be told without an XXX rating if Kubrick had shown us what was really on his mind.

Kubrick's last gift to us is a perplexing tale of the conflict between marital fidelity and the smorgasbord of casual sex. The conflict begins with Alice's revelation that she has fantasized about giving herself sexually to a total stranger. Is her admission just a fit of pique at Bill's flirtation with a threesome at the party, or is there a deeper darker secret that she wants to explore with him? She gives every evidence that she would have liked to accept the charming stranger's proposition at the party. Half drunk she flirts madly with him, dances with utter seduction, and suspects that Bill is in some dalliance with two girls who have led him away. But at last she sardonically and tauntingly refuses the stranger's proposition because she is "married". Bill on the other hand is saved from an indiscretion not by his own will but by an accident demanding his attention as a physician elsewhere.

That night Bill, haunted by images of wife in another man's arms, falls into a surreal odessey of sexual temptations but none are consummated because of interventions from others, not because he wanted to remain faithful to Alice, and curiously we are constantly perplexed by whether or not Alice has really been faithful to him. We know from what she has told him that she is as attracted to casual sex as he is, her description of her "dream orgy" tallies so closely with the orgy at the mansion that we wonder if this is a confession that she has participated in the orgies herself. Was she once behind one of those masks at the orgy, and is the mask that Bill wore to the orgy, (and that he now finds in bed with her) a confession that she has participated in the orgies herself? Have they both been wearing masks to conceal their true natures from each other? And now that the masks are off will they be ever faithful to each other, or will they now indulge in Alice's last descriptive verb with their eyes wide open?

What are we to make of that enigmatic opening shot of Kidman stepping out of her dress and kicking it angrily aside? Was she just trying on different gowns for the evening ahead, had she just returned from a tryst with a lover (or an orgy), or was Kubrick simply priming us for her sensual self and the eroticism ahead? In any case "Eyes Wide Shut" (great title) takes its place with Lyne's "Lolita" and Malle's "Damage" as masterworks of sexual obsession, and we can be sure that Kubrick's choice of Cruise and Kidman was predicated on their marriage to each other. What other actors would be more perfectly suited to the exploration of this drama? How interesting that Kidman was so at ease with her role and Cruise so awkward with his. And how telling that their marriage collapsed after it was filmed.

If you find complexity compelling this is a DVD you will want to own because you will watch it again and again. However you view it this film rates at least four stars even if Kubrick never finished it.

Rating:
Summary: Overboard
Review: Stanley Kubrick's controversial film of sexuality definitely went overboard on the nudity, and on the sexuality. The story really didn't have much to it. Not that it wasn't interesting, it was just a simple plot that ended up having a lot of twists. It fit in with Kubrick's style in many ways. Don't let the previews or advertisements fool you. This is not at all a movie about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in bed for two hours and forty minutes. There are actually only one or two scenes between them at all. There is an overwhelming amount of nudity and akwardness in Eyes Wide Shut, which definitely makes for an unforgettable movie. I wouldn't promote the film, nor would I recommend it to any of my friends. Not that it was stupid, but it was definitely too much. This is obviously not a kid film. I am rather surprised that it didn't earn an NC-17 rating. Its R rating reflects pervasive sexual content and nudity, language and some drug use. Eyes Wide Shut was a rather uncomfortable film to say the least. Kubrick went overboard.

Rating:
Summary: Simply Haunting
Review: This was the first Kubrick's film I have ever watched, and ever since I have become a great admirer of the great late director.

Many people I have talked to expecting to see a epic about nude-fest orgy party. They came out spitting on the poster. I waited until it came out on DVD to see what the fuss was all about, rented it, rented it again, and purchased it.

The story did not matter to me, though it did creep into my mind and stayed months after. What stroke me was the rich imagery, and the precise framing of every single second of the film. The music, the production, even the performances Kubrick squeezed out of Cruise and Kidman just left me utterly stunned. I admit the film is flawed, and it does feel hallow at times, and the orgy party is indeed disturbing as intended. But I will be forever grateful that "Eyes Wide Shut" opened my eyes to see a true master at work.