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.

A Beautiful Mind (2001) - Ron Howard

I feel like this movie belongs in a box set with The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything.

Russell Crowe stars in this Best Picture winning movie about the American Nobel laureate and mathematician John Nash. He’s no Gladiator, but he’s nice enough.

The best part about the movie is that they think they can casually age Russell Crowe from 20 years old to 66 in a two hour movie.

Not to mention his Noah costar and on-screen wife, Jennifer Connelly! And if you’re wondering why this is included in a Wikipedia article called “List of films featuring whitewashed roles,” Alicia Nash is El Salvadorian. Noah is in this list too, obviously.

Anyway, I’m getting distracted. A Beautiful Mind tells the story of John Nash, who in 1948 began his doctorate program at Princeton, where he received the John S. Kennedy fellowship. Determined to discover something wholly original, Nash skips all his classes.

But he ends up writing a paper on equilibrium that wins him the respect of his colleagues and the commendation of his superiors.

Also his fun and crazy roommate, Charles.

Soon, Nash begins a career as a mathematician, where he sometimes helps the government with covert operations to crack codes from the Soviet Union.

And he meets his wife! He wins her over despite being incredibly socially awkward.

But as the movie reminds us, Nash is one of the best pattern recognition experts in the world.

He woos her with this party trick where he can find any shape he wants amongst the stars. I looked up at the stars that night and counted three… so… triangle.

But just when you think this rich, straight, white man has it all, the movie reveals a twist! And even though they were on the verge of losing me because almost everything in the first hour goes exactly as Nash plans, I found it to be really heartbreaking.

I won’t give it away, but the rest of the movie finds Nash desperately trying to hold on to that passion for numbers and discovery that made him endearing in the early part of the film. Disgraced, he tries to return to Princeton, and eventually finds a loving community amongst the 80s and 90s students (the 70s ones were so mean to him). And then he wins a Nobel Prize!

The movie is ultimately a story about love, how important it is and what it can do to transform people who are lost. A Beautiful Mind tackles mental illness in a way that is sort of refreshing for its time.

Plus the movie is incredibly prominent in our pop culture consciousness. Whenever you see a room filled with papers covering every surface with an attempt to reach a singular conclusion, that’s A Beautiful Mind reference.

A Beautiful Mind went on to win 4 Oscars, including a whopping two for Ron Howard… who directed How the Grinch Stole Christmas the year before.

Halloween 2015 #6: The Birds (1963) - Alfred Hitchcock

Now how could I have a Halloween movie-cation without a film by the Master of Suspense?

Based on the short story by Daphne du Maurier, The Birds is Hitchcock’s first film after Psycho (1960). In the small, Northern California town of Bodega Bay, a mysterious force causes birds to be unusually violent towards humans.

The first attack doesn’t happen until 25 minutes until the movie, but the setup is absolutely amazing. Wealthy socialite Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) meets a self-righteous lawyer, Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), in a bird shop in San Francisco. He casually mentions wanting to buy lovebirds for his kid-sister’s birthday, but leaves when the store doesn’t have any. Melanie uses the power of her thirst to track him down to the small town of Bodega Bay and flirtatiously breaks into Mitch’s house to plant the lovebirds.

My reaction exactly. And who wouldn’t do that for Rod Taylor? P.S. He’s Australian. 

But since Melanie Daniels is basically the 1963 equivalent of Paris Hilton, repeatedly mentioned in the tabloids for her less-than-ladylike antics, Mitch’s mother does NOT approve.

Which makes Melanie even thirstier, to be honest.

Anyway, Mitch convinces Melanie to come to his sister Cathy’s birthday the next day, where the real horror begins.

A group of seagulls violently attack the children, and things only escalate from there. For some reason the town is super unwilling to believe that the birds are working in groups to attack humans, even after a third attack leaves a man dead with his eyes totally pecked out, and a fourth attack takes place at the elementary school.

This is probably the best scene. One, because crows are scary as hell, and two, because the special effects make it so that you are forced to watch a bunch of child actors cry while fending off what appear to be artificial crows. 

The action subsides in probably what is the most boring scene in the film, where Melanie, Mitch, and several townspeople including an ornithologist debate the validity of the “attacks.” After maybe ten minutes of discussion, the biggest and most violent attack takes place.

There are explosions, there’s death, there’s Tippi Hedren in a phone booth. What’s so great about this scene is that we get the vantage point of someone who is safe yet right in the middle of the action. Melanie hides in the nearest phone booth as she is forced to watch people die all around her. 

It’s very gruesome. She can’t even look away! It’s all around her.

But this isn’t even the climax. Melanie, along with Mitch and his sister and mother, hide out in Mitch’s house for one last final attack. There’s so much suspense in knowing that the birds are going to attack but not knowing when. My heart raced the entire last 20 minutes or so. 

Also Melanie and Mitch do that fun thing where two straight white people hate each other yet they fall in love due to some kind of trauma involving animal attacks. You know? 52 years before Jurassic World came out?

She can’t mean that! He’s a man and she’s a woman! They’ll fall in love, just you wait. 

But joking aside, the movie is awesome. The one thing that left me creeped out was learning that Hitchcock developed an obsession with Tippi Hedren where he essentially ruined her career after she rejected his advances. They would only make one other movie together, Marine (1964), and after that she didn’t work for years because he refused to let her out of her contract. Sad stuff.

The Birds was nominated for an Oscar for Best Visual Effects, and currently has a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes.