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Jan. 4th, 2004 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmWhen Eyes Wide Shut came out in the theaters, I had really wanted to see it, eventhough I've never been a big Kubrick fan. I find him intelligent and tiring and have never really taken much pleasure in watching his films (and I can take pleasure in a lot of really grim stuff).
Someone on a mailing list I was on, raved about it though, and while we never quite got along (a story long, boring and involving both a man and our conceptions of how people "should" be), she was somewhat insightful as to my way of being, and said it really reminded her of an idea I'd been talking about recently, in terms of the nature of relationships (which if I recall without getting too much into it, those relationships where you can never tell if you're doing it AGAIN because you're learning how to be together or learning to be apart).
But as life is, I still never got around to watching the film. Seeing it last night was puzzling, and alien. I thought it was simplistic, trite and poorly crafted. I thought the orgy scene, or rather the ritual leading up to it was one of the most stunningly beautiful and powerful things I've ever seen on film, and then I'd take a breath and something weak or giggle-worthy would happen. Over and over and over again.
My main question at the end of this film other than "Why? why?!?!?" is "Can someone get me Nicole Kidman's tailor? Because her breasts are slightly smaller than mine, but she wears them very very well."
Things that are wrong with Eyes Wide Shut:
1. The pacing. The film could have been ponderously slow without being agony, if things had had a point.
2. The character arc. Things happen to Tom Cruise's character, and yet Nicole Kidman's changes, and it comes across as very dishonest as regards some of the films key ideas.
3. The script is a ponderous, clunky piece of crap, most notably at the end in which something that shouldn't be the point of the entire film, but more a blip on the radar of it, is spelled out loud and clear by Nicole Kidman's character, because we, as the audience, must be stupid.
4. The acting. There are some great acting moments in this, but there are also a lot of terrible ones. Cruise and Kidman both seem very aware of the camera in the big initial drunken fight scene. Cruise often sounds like he's giving line readings. The supporting performances mostly suck.
5. The direction. I blame a lot of my previous point on this. If the actors were unable to forget they were working with Kubrick, it was his job to dispell this. And if they were able to forget, it was his job to let them. A lot of the bad acting moments seem to be direct products of "more more!" or over rehearsal.
6. The casting. I should possibly lump this in with number 4, but this really drove me up the wall in one very specific place, and to a given extent I am not sure if that has to do with the film I would have made, or really, just that it was crappy casting. I hated the women in the orgy scene, every last one of them. And I hated them because the ritual of the environment was very powerful and one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen on film, and they didn't live up to it, in their physical movement. I thought they needed to seem solemn, or powerful or glazed and subsumed to the moment. Instead I found their walks to be ordinary and knowing about their physical form, the same walks they must use in every other film or project they are involved with. There was no character in these women, and I HATED IT.
7. The film's New York was badly conceived and executed in the extreme.
8. The film had no idea what it was trying to say. It opens the film by showing us why women are terrifying, and then spends the rest of the film making them be trivial fixed points in the landscape of a man's life. Every woman in that film could have been terrifying and powerful in some fashion, but in the end it turns out that not even Kidman's character (who really is at the beginng, where we get this sense that women terrify men because we can multitask) is -- afterall, just was just drunk and confused and prissy.
9. This is the type of film that tries to convince us that if we hate it, it's because we're stupid and don't get it. Well, for a film that hit me over the head repeatedly with a two-by-four, it's still an incoherent mess, and that is not a shortcoming in the damn viewer.
Someone on a mailing list I was on, raved about it though, and while we never quite got along (a story long, boring and involving both a man and our conceptions of how people "should" be), she was somewhat insightful as to my way of being, and said it really reminded her of an idea I'd been talking about recently, in terms of the nature of relationships (which if I recall without getting too much into it, those relationships where you can never tell if you're doing it AGAIN because you're learning how to be together or learning to be apart).
But as life is, I still never got around to watching the film. Seeing it last night was puzzling, and alien. I thought it was simplistic, trite and poorly crafted. I thought the orgy scene, or rather the ritual leading up to it was one of the most stunningly beautiful and powerful things I've ever seen on film, and then I'd take a breath and something weak or giggle-worthy would happen. Over and over and over again.
My main question at the end of this film other than "Why? why?!?!?" is "Can someone get me Nicole Kidman's tailor? Because her breasts are slightly smaller than mine, but she wears them very very well."
Things that are wrong with Eyes Wide Shut:
1. The pacing. The film could have been ponderously slow without being agony, if things had had a point.
2. The character arc. Things happen to Tom Cruise's character, and yet Nicole Kidman's changes, and it comes across as very dishonest as regards some of the films key ideas.
3. The script is a ponderous, clunky piece of crap, most notably at the end in which something that shouldn't be the point of the entire film, but more a blip on the radar of it, is spelled out loud and clear by Nicole Kidman's character, because we, as the audience, must be stupid.
4. The acting. There are some great acting moments in this, but there are also a lot of terrible ones. Cruise and Kidman both seem very aware of the camera in the big initial drunken fight scene. Cruise often sounds like he's giving line readings. The supporting performances mostly suck.
5. The direction. I blame a lot of my previous point on this. If the actors were unable to forget they were working with Kubrick, it was his job to dispell this. And if they were able to forget, it was his job to let them. A lot of the bad acting moments seem to be direct products of "more more!" or over rehearsal.
6. The casting. I should possibly lump this in with number 4, but this really drove me up the wall in one very specific place, and to a given extent I am not sure if that has to do with the film I would have made, or really, just that it was crappy casting. I hated the women in the orgy scene, every last one of them. And I hated them because the ritual of the environment was very powerful and one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen on film, and they didn't live up to it, in their physical movement. I thought they needed to seem solemn, or powerful or glazed and subsumed to the moment. Instead I found their walks to be ordinary and knowing about their physical form, the same walks they must use in every other film or project they are involved with. There was no character in these women, and I HATED IT.
7. The film's New York was badly conceived and executed in the extreme.
8. The film had no idea what it was trying to say. It opens the film by showing us why women are terrifying, and then spends the rest of the film making them be trivial fixed points in the landscape of a man's life. Every woman in that film could have been terrifying and powerful in some fashion, but in the end it turns out that not even Kidman's character (who really is at the beginng, where we get this sense that women terrify men because we can multitask) is -- afterall, just was just drunk and confused and prissy.
9. This is the type of film that tries to convince us that if we hate it, it's because we're stupid and don't get it. Well, for a film that hit me over the head repeatedly with a two-by-four, it's still an incoherent mess, and that is not a shortcoming in the damn viewer.
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no subject
Date: 2004-01-04 10:47 am (UTC)It might have improved if he had actually been able to finish editing it. I mean both by not dying, and by actually doing it. I heard the process was not going well when he passed on.
Perhaps believing it was his last film gave him more and different pressures.
In any case, thank you for your journal. I have been enjoying it.
Ekatarina
(no subject)
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Date: 2004-01-04 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-04 01:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2004-01-04 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-04 05:24 pm (UTC)I agree with you.
Date: 2004-01-05 07:13 am (UTC)Saw Cold Mountain yesterday. It was good - but I don't know that I would say great. Jude Law was oddly fascinating in this film. Renee Zelweger did a passable job with her North Carolina accent. The setting was gorgeous.
Susan
no subject
Date: 2004-01-06 01:51 am (UTC)"I like that Tom Cruise, but the movie was very odd, and what a silly ending. The nudity didn't offend me, though, or the sex."
I thought of you when we were talking about it, so.. :)