Eyes Wide Shut (1999) - Stanley Kubrick

“A bored couple’s confessions open up a world of sexual obsession and debauchery. Be careful what you wish for.”Netflix. What? How did you make this movie sound like a Vince Vaughn movie and a DCOM at the same time…

I’ve seen 6 of Stanley Kubrick’s films. 2001 Space Odyssey was the first. The Shining is my favorite. A Clockwork Orange is the one I understand the least. Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket are in the middle somewhere. This one I would rank on the more accessible side… that is if I even understood what it was about.

Pretty much my only knowledge of Eyes Wide Shut was that it was crazy rich people being crazy, at least that was the understanding I got from a short Happy Endings reference in Season 3 Episode 23.

Nailed it. In the film, Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) is married to Alice, played by Cruise’s real life second wife, Nicole Kidman.

The first night of the film, the couple goes to a fancy Christmas party for fancy people, and both are tempted to be unfaithful. The second night, they smoke weed together and go into some deep talk about their relationship. Bill puts his foot in his mouth like 40 times, mansplaining the world to her.

In what I took as an act of revenge for oversimplifying female sexuality as well as putting her on a pedestal, Alice reveals a dark secret about their past.

Her story is the catalyst for Bill to go on a crazy adventure. There seems to be some mix of “I love my wife how could she do this to me” and “I’m gonna show her” at play. The whole movie is asking the viewer to question dualities in love and sex, as Alice makes very clear that she can have strong feelings of love for Bill as well as a carnal desire to cheat in the same moment. The long, slow scenes give some great drama to the weird crazy spiral of Bill’s night.

I don’t want to give away the fun details, but Bill’s desperation for some new experience, or some way to get revenge on his wife, leads him to a place he never could have dreamed existed.

I feel like I must be a little desensitized to batshit crazy sex scenes, but I definitely nodded along with this part in a “yeah this is exactly what I assume rich people are doing with their time” sort of way.

Bill gets in big trouble for not belonging to the society of sex-crazed 1 percenters. But his curiosity about the party does not go away, which gets him into even more trouble.

Look out for flamboyant Alan Cumming hotel concierge.

I think what’s really interesting is that while the focus of the movie is the weird, mysterious party, it is essentially a story about Bill and Alice’s relationship and what drives them to either distance themselves or come closer together. A confession by Alice triggers this rift, and Bill has to go searching for some kind of understanding of how to face the future of their relationship. I took it as his erotic adventures are sort of his journey towards forgiving his wife, but obviously it’s also a lot more complex than that. The Christmas setting also works to add an off-putting tone to the film, things are happy and jolly but they are also foreboding. There are a lot of references to rainbows as well, and the pull to finding what is at the “end of the rainbow.”

The film was censored in the United States (as it is on my self-proclaimed family friendly blog), and led to a sort of disappointing box office run. With a successful international reception, however, it is Kubrick’s highest grossing film, at $162 million.

Kubrick passed away four days after showing the final cut to Warner Bros, and there has been some controversy as to whether he was proud of the film or not, with most parties, including his daughter, stating that he was very happy with the finished product. Also some people believe the film is based on true events and those elite people depicted in the film offed him… dun dun dun.

It feels different than Kubrick’s other films, but I believe it has that same calculated cinematography, intricate symbolism, and suspenseful pacing that remind us what a great filmmaker Kubrick has always been.

Halloween 2015 #2: Children of the Corn (1984) - Fritz Kiersch

Finally someone made a horror movie about the scariest thing there is… children!

In this frightful 80s horror movie based on a short story by Stephen King, a religious cult forms among the children of a fictional town in Nebraska called Gatlin. The cult worships a god known as “He Who Walks Behind the Rows” who says that anyone above the age of 19 must be sacrificed in order to secure a bountiful corn harvest.

But I’m above the age of 19! This movie should be required viewing for anyone who is celebrating their 19th birthday, I think that would be fun.

The movie centers on a young couple, Burt and Vicky, who are passing through Nebraska when they accidentally mow down one of the cult’s dissidents with their car. They try to stop for gas but an old man tells them that the pumps are empty, so they drive into town instead. So… just like in the opening of 1974′s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?

Anyway. Here’s Isaac, the cult leader. He is the prophet who speaks to “He Who Walks Behind the Rows.” Burt and Vicky eventually find the two children who are not partying it up Jimmy Neutron-style in Gatlin, Job and Sarah. The reason Isaac keeps Sarah around is because she is a seer, she draws pictures that are sort of prophecies that usually just include stick figure children stabbing stick figure adults. 

Also the actor who plays Isaac, John Franklin, went on to play Cousin Itt in the 90s remakes of The Addams Family.’

Vicky is soon taken hostage by Malachai, Isaac’s righthand man. Religious zealotry and gore ensues! The movie reminded me of Carrie in that Stephen King really seems to have a thing for people who take Christianity too far, but this one I think offered a much more positive message in terms of how one could follow the Bible without becoming a murderous psychopath. Also there are obvious metaphors involving the connection between sexuality and impurity, as most slasher movies make clear, sexual promiscuity leads to death!

Look out for A+ 80s digital effects, as well as long speeches about the wrongfulness of cherry-picking from the Bible.

Also fun to note, Linda Hamilton, who plays Vicky, went on to star in another 80s classic that was released just six months later.

Come with me if you don’t want children to stab you to death with farm equipment!

The movie received generally negative reviews, and it actually raised a lot of questions while I watched it. If the “death to all procreators” mantra is followed strictly, the population of the town population would dwindle until the youngest member of the cult reached the age of 19. Would that sole member have to sacrifice themselves in order to ensure a good harvest? Also do they eat nothing but corn?

Children of the Corn made $14.6 million of an $800,000 budget and inspired 8 sequels.

Summer 2014 #2: Dr. Strangelove - Stanley Kubrick (1964)

I’m really powering through all these big directors this year! At the beginning of last summer, I had never seen a Kubrick film. Then I saw A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and 2001: A Space Odyssey in a span of six months. Out of the four I have now seen, this is probably the one most name-dropped in film classes, which I credit to its relative obscurity and period-specific themes, making it a target for film majors to pretentiously throw out in conversation.

The full title, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” is long but indicative of what the film is actually about. It’s less about Dr. Strangelove, the character featured in the gif above, and more about the nuclear apocalypse brought on to end the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the USA. 

At the time, these fears of nuclear warfare had penetrated almost every aspect of American society. Kubrick recognized this panic and satirizes it with a simple, dark comedy about a group of US government members who have top-secret knowledge that basically alerts them to the fact that life as they know it has come to an end. 

A US military officer has ordered an extensive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union without the president’s permission, and about 90% of the film takes place in the War Room while the president and his advisors figure out how to stop it from happening. Most of the comedy comes from General Turgidson, who argues with the president on just about everything.

Also interesting to note, the actor who played Dr. Strangelove, Peter Sellers, forced Kubrick to let him play three characters, including the President and Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. He believed that the success of Kubrick’s previous film, Lolita, was due to his portrayal of multiple characters, and the studio backed him, despite Kubrick’s disagreement with that theory. Watching the film, I would never have noticed this, because they all have vastly different accents and costumes.

The film deals a lot with the hysteria of the Cold War, which proves that comedy is a genuine way to deal with some of the more troubling moments of our world’s history. The ironies of the diplomatic relations are exposed, as Kubrick shows the Russian diplomat being unhelpful and generally sneaky when in the US War Room. The president’s selfishness comes to light, and makes the viewer question what would have actually happened if these events took place when they could have.

In the end, the film takes a strange turn, when dark comedy turns to male fantasy, and a hypothetical think-piece turns into an absurdist comedy. I can’t say I disliked the ending, but it’s definitely not the kind of film you see once and say “Oh that made sense." 

I can however, credit the film for being funny. It ranks as #43 on the IMDb Top 250, and 39 on the AFI Top 100. I don’t think it’s as powerful as The Shining, it’s more of the very slow classic film that suddenly becomes really strange and random at the end kind of film, like 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Day 15: January 17th, 2014: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - Stanley Kubrick

I am upset that I am a day late with this last review, but I still saw it on the right date. The 15th and last film on my list (I have some more classics I want to see this week but I’m already back at school) is actually the third Stanley Kubrick film I’ve seen in the past 6 months. I saw A Clockwork Orange in July, The Shining in December, and now this!

The film is different from the other two in so many ways, but I found it more interesting to spot the similarities. For instance, it resembled A Clockwork Orange in that there was a moment maybe 30 to 45 minutes in the film where you go “Oh… so THIS is the plot.” And it reminded me of The Shining because there were massive amounts of time without dialogue. Both of those things are hard to pull off without losing the audience’s attention, so 2001 makes up for it with incredible visual imagery and insane special effects.

Half the time I was thinking “Isn’t this 1968? How do they do that?” It takes a conscious effort to be impressed by the visual effects in the film, because I have to remind myself just how old this movie is. 45 years before Gravity (2013), 9 years before Star Wars (1977), Stanley Kubrick is doing things no one thought possible in film. And that’s how I kept my interest, because the plot is about as slow as you can imagine.

There is no dialogue for the first and last 20 minutes of the film. The above gif is from the first section of the film, where a group of early hominids deal with the struggles of not having iPhones. Then a black monolith appears one day, and it has an impact of the evolution of the group. Flash forward a few million years, to 2000, and a group of astronauts are getting ready to go to the moon to visit another black monolith that was discovered.

The rest of the film focuses on two astronauts and their supercomputer, HAL 9000, on a mission to Jupiter. They aren’t told much about their mission, and things kind of just go crazy from there.

I was a bit more bored than I thought I’d be, but I blame that on the evolution of movies to fill every second with mesmerizing images so that our tiny attention spans don’t wander. When I put the film into the perspective of its time, what I see is a masterpiece with high critical praise and a groundbreaking use of special effects.

2001: A Space Odyssey is #110 on the IMDb Top 250, but way up at #15 for the AFI 100 Movies. It won one Oscar, for Best Visual Effects, which actually is Stanley Kubrick’s only Oscar.

That concludes my 15th movie review in “15” days. I got through my entire winter movie bucket-list!