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.

Fall 2014 #9: Rain Man (1988) - Barry Levinson

Okay, four reviews in one day, not so bad. Rain Man was a weird film to have on the list, because it’s one of the ones that gets a lot of pop culture references, and yet I still had no idea what it was about. But now I’ll get those references for the rest of my life!

Thank you, Tom. Okay so Rain Man is a film about a guy named Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise), a sleezy sort of businessman who is the process of importing four Lamborghinis into the US for resale. Unfortunately, there’s a problem at the border with the EPA on account of the cars emissions statuses, and Charlie took out a loan to pay for the cars, and the buyers have already paid for them, so it’s kind of a financial mess. While all of this is going down, Charlie finds out that his estranged father has died.

Charlie quickly learns that his father is leaving his $3 million estate to a brother that Charlie didn’t even know he had, Raymond Babbitt. Raymond lives in a mental institution, and Charlie takes (kidnaps?) him to try to figure out how to get his $3 million.

Charlie is annoying, ruthless, and incapable of understanding Raymond’s situation. He reminded me a lot of Matthew McConaughey’s character from Dallas Buyers Club, which kind of made me wonder if this was a cheesy movie about an unlikeable middle-aged white guy learning to accept someone who was different from him. Well it is actually exactly that.

Raymond is insistent on sticking to his routines from the mental institution, which makes it impossible for Charlie to get him on a plane, drive on the highway, or even make him miss Jeopardy. Charlie does soon learn, however, that while Raymond has a high-functioning form of autism, he is also a mathematical genius.

Their fraternal bond grows deeper as they continue their cross-country drive from the mental institution in Ohio to Los Angeles, where Charlie needs to get to figure out his Lamborghini situation. But not without a few bumps.

Interestingly, the film is credited as both creating misconceptions about autism (that all people with autism have some kind of genius) as well as spreading awareness of the mental illness. The film includes a scene where Raymond effortlessly counts cards in Vegas, which has been parodied multiple times in pop culture, including The Hangover.

The film is also credited for creating the rumor that counting cards is illegal. It’s not!

Well, the feel-good film went on to become the highest grossing movie of 1988, winning Oscars for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Actor for Dustin Hoffman. And yet, it’s not in the AFI Top 100 or the IMDb Top 250.

Also since there aren’t that many gifs of Dustin Hoffman from Rain Man, here’s one from a much more exciting film, Steven Spielberg’s Hook.