Hacker Cinema
Eyes Wide Shut
1999 · Film · 159 min
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
After Dr. Bill Harford's wife, Alice, admits to having sexual fantasies about a man she met, Bill becomes obsessed with having a sexual encounter. He discovers an underground sexual group and attends one of their meetings -- and quickly discovers that he is in over his head.
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44 comments on Hacker News
Blockbuster was a corporate, soulless chain sent into the world to destroy the wonderful experience of mom-and-pop and small chain video rental stores. They were the Walmart of entertainment. They knew small stores couldn't afford many copies of blockbuster hits so when you visited Blockbuster they would have an entire wall dedicated to one single hit movie. Their selection was garbage.
The weekly visit to the local video store was one of the highlights of my youth. I could browse for hours. I remember the first Blockbuster that opened near me. It had zero atmosphere or charisma. I guess if you just want to watch a movie, that's the way to go. and that's why Netflix killed them.
About 10 years ago I was driving through remote Texas and stopped at a gas station that had, to my utter surprise, a video rental section. VHS tapes, not DVDs. And there was a young family browsing! It made me so happy to see.
The shift to digital for movies and music stripped away something real from the experience. Better picture and sound? Sure. At the cost of atmosphere and fun. I recently watched a 4K remastered Aliens (1986). There were maybe 3 short scenes where I said 'wow, the detail is amazing'. The entire rest of the film was me thinking how they had stripped the atmosphere from the film experience. The blue hue was gone. The murky, exoplanet looked fake.
Close Encounters (1977) on 4K is a different experience. It looks great, but there are scenes that play totally different in 4K. What once was a dark shadow moving against the starry sky is now very clearly a spaceship. The shadow was better. At the end, the aliens were clearly kids in crappy costumes. But on VHS they were child-sized aliens standing in front of a bright light, leaving much to the imagination. Outside of those who saw it in the theater during it's original run, everyone since has had the same experience, pretty much. The 4K version changes that. And don't get me started on the massive changes to color grading in Eyes Wide Shut and Trainspotting. Or how they jacked up the color and brightness on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) so it better matched the cartoonish, and inferior, sequels.
Thanks! Here's the full list: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 8½, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, All That Heaven Allows, Apocalypse Now, Ashes and Diamonds, A Woman Under the Influence, Barry Lyndon, Bicycle Thieves, Breathless, Casablanca, Céline and Julie Go Boating, Chinatown, Chinese Roulette, Citizen Kane, City Lights, City of Pirates, Contempt, Daisies, Damnation, Dishonored, Earth, Electra My Love, El Topo, Eraserhead, Eyes Wide Shut, Film Socialisme, Fitzcarraldo, Fuego en Castilla, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Holy Motors, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, In a Year with 13 Moons, India Song, Inland Empire, Irma Vep, Koyaanisqatsi, La Dolce Vita, La Jetée, Late Spring, L'Eau de la Seine, Le Voyage dans la Lune, Lolita, Los Olvidados, Lost Highway, Lucifer Rising, Man with a Movie Camera, Metropolis, Mirror, Mulholland Drive, Night Music, Ordet, Orpheus, Persona, Pickpocket, Playtime, Psycho, Rebecca, Rosemary's Baby, Rumble Fish, Scarface, Seven Samurai, Sherlock Jr., Singin' in the Rain, Stalker, Sunset Boulevard, Taste of Cherry, Taxi Driver, Testament of Orpheus, The 400 Blows, The Blood of a Poet, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Color of Pomegranates, The Green Ray, The Holy Mountain, The Isle, The Lady from Shanghai, The Night of the Hunter, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Seventh Seal, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Tree of Life, The Turin Horse, Time of the Gypsies, Tokyo Story, Touch of Evil, Trans-Europ-Express, Ugetsu, Un Chien Andalou, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Vampyr, Videodrome, Wavelength, Werckmeister Harmonies, Wild Strawberries, Moonlight Sonata, Stellar, The Haunted House Biased toward European art cinema, experimental work, and directors who broke conventional narrative rules.
You are barking up the wrong tree since I don't rate "Eyes Wide Shut" high. Just used it as an example of a polarizing Kubrick movie.
> a bunch of juniors were fired the day before Christmas because the founder heard them discussing the latest movies they watched and decided that they had bad opinions and shouldn’t work at his company since he’d be embarrassed if his peers heard their tastes.
Just out of curiosity, was it something despicable like them liking Marvel movies? Or more akin to disagreeing whether Eyes Wide Shut could be considered a good Kubrick movie?
Zizek's analysis on the object-desire substitutions in films (including Eyes Wide Shut, but also notably other classics) is more eloquent. This blog post reads like bad, talentless undergrad attempt at theory; nothing new is said, predicates are boring, conclusions are lazy and superficial.
It goes on my list of 'dreamlike' movies, they don't always fully add up consciously but you can feel your unconscious going into overdrive while watching them (or maybe there is a surface plot that mostly adds up, like EWS, but there is clearly something going on at a least one other level). The viewing experience is often downright hypnotic for me.
A few off the top of my head, this is a very personal list and I can't even claim that all these movies are 'good' in any particular sense. Just that they put me into this state: * basically anything in lynch's cannon. I'm not always the biggest fan of his stuff, but sometimes they hit me hard. * Cronenberg's Videodrome and it's spiritual sequel Existenz * Donnie Darko & Southland Tales (objectively just an awful movie) * Prince of Darkness * Enter the Void (not for the faint of heart) * Paprika * Solaris (the original mostly, there are some qualities in the remake) * Stalker * Dark City * Sorry to Bother You * The Fountain * 8 1/2 * The Ninth Gate * and certainly Eyes Wide Shut
I watched this just the other day (as a joke Christmas film) after having not seen it for about 10-12 years. It's waaaay better than I remember and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Definitely hits a bit different after Epstein.
The Very Bad Wizards podcast on it is interesting/fun too. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/very-bad-orgies-kubricks-eyes-wide-shut/id557975157?i=1000570507256
> I recall Kubrick being bothered by the heavy censorship and editing by the UK film board, I wonder if we will ever get to see those removed scenes, what, and why they were removed etc.
I don't believe Kubrick had particular problems with the British Board of Film Censors.
The BBFC never censored A Clockwork Orange, for example. They passed it without cuts, though they had seen a pre-print of the first completed half of the movie as was the custom, and had been concerned that it might not get certification. The censor commended the final movie.
Kubrick personally pulled it from distribution in the UK, after they had passed it and it had a limited release.
https://www.bbfc.co.uk/education/case-studies/clockwork-orange
The BBFC do not and did not edit films. They are not a government body. They did once call themselves censors (the words of the acronym changed in the 80s), but the point of the BBFC was that the film industry was censoring its own work proactively, and maintaining their own certifications, to avoid government doing it. Similar to what the MPA(A) did.
They still sometimes suggest edits that would keep a film within a particular certification.
In the case of Eyes Wide Shut, it wasn't the BBFC that made any decisions to edit and cut that film; Warner Bros themselves did, based on the US classification they were aiming for.
> Kubrick died within a week of the film release, perhaps he knew too much, perhaps not.
Or perhaps, after a stressful filming, editing and production schedule, a 70 year old man had a heart attack in his sleep.
Kubrick’s results were all over the map. He made maybe three great films:
Dr. Strangelove
Full Metal Jacket
A Clockwork Orange
A bunch of not bad films:
2001
Lolita
Barry Lyndon
The Shining
Spartacus
One real turd of a film:
Eyes Wide Shut
And a bunch of forgettable filler:
All the other films he made.
Compare this to the Anti-Kubrick, Clint Eastwood, who made:
Unforgiven
Mystic River
Million Dollar Baby
Letters From Iwo Jima
Gran Torino
And a bunch of okay films:
Pretty much everything else
And it’s pretty obvious that you don’t need to be an abusive taskmaster like Kubrick to make great art.
It’s literally a plot point of countless dystopian books and movies.
Either of OpenAI or WorldCoin would be a terrifying nightmare even without Altman and OpenPhilanthropy and the SEC investigation and what-the-hell-ever scared Ilya so bad he 180’d from a single phone call and Yud whipping the public and Congress into a frenzy talking about Terminator in two years.
I don’t care how badly someone wants to be accepted into YC or whatever: this is the wrong side of history.
“We are below them, we are above them, we are around them, we run through everything they do.” - Satya Nadella, Eyes Wide Shut
> his other films took quite an interest in perfecting the settings.
Kubrick took quite an interest in perfecting all aspects of his films.
https://collider.com/stanley-kubrick-the-shining-scene-guinness-world-record/:
“Stanley Kubrick movies are notorious for having multiple takes. One instance is in Eyes Wide Shut, when Tom Cruise's Dr. Bill Hartford walks through a door. He just walks through a door. That's it. 95 times Cruise walked through the same door. It is not surprising, then, to know that the Guinness World Record for "Most Retakes for One Scene With Dialogue" belongs to Kubrick's The Shining with a whopping 148 takes.”
One of the actors in that scene was a kid.
Another example is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lyndon#Cinematography):
“After "tinker[ing] with different combinations of lenses and film stock," the production obtained three super-fast 50mm lenses (Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f/0.7) developed by Zeiss for use by NASA in the Apollo Moon landings, which Kubrick had discovered. These super-fast lenses "with their huge aperture (the film actually features the lowest f-stop in film history) and fixed focal length" were problematic to mount, and were extensively modified into three versions by Cinema Products Corp. for Kubrick to gain a wider angle of view, with input from optics expert Richard Vetter of Todd-AO. The rear element of the lens had to be 2.5 mm away from the film plane, requiring special modification to the rotating camera shutter. This allowed Kubrick and Alcott to shoot scenes lit in candlelight to an average lighting volume of only three candela, "recreating the huddle and glow of a pre-electrical age."”
Reminds me of when Stanely Kubrick had an assistant take hundreds of pictures of doors in London to find the perfect shot of a hooker in a doorway:
https://old.reddit.com/r/StanleyKubrick/comments/vhlcha/a_question_about_doors/id7zgy4/
Although Eyes Wide Shut was still filmed mostly on a studio set in London where they recreated Greenwich Village, his other films took quite an interest in perfecting the settings.
Curated list of favorite underrated movies:
#1 pick for HN Crowd: The Man From Earth // must see, especially if you like philosophical movies (don't recommend the sequel by the way)
Runner's Up:
Being There // absolute classic and must see for every person, at least once
Peaceful Warrior
The Lion In Winter // one of the best dramas ever made, and unbeatable cast with young Anthony Hopkins
Predestination // incredible drama about time travel paradoxes
The Interview // Hugo Weaving
Vitus // amazing story about a piano prodigy who fakes losing his talents to have a normal life
The Perverts Guide to Cinema // documentary, Slavoj Zizek's tour de force psychoanalysis of cinema as an art form; addressing the philosophical and psychological question of whether cinema (and other art forms) fulfil your desires, or rather teach/train you both to desire (and what you should desire), thus the sensationalistic and polemical invocation of it as "perverted"
Le Professionnel (French film, not to be confused with the one with Natalie Portman)
Revolver // Guy Ritchie's quote "It took me three years to write this film whereas Snatch took me three months". It is a masterwork metaphor about the ego, ego death, consciousness, meditation, spirituality, and the nature of reality. Recommend reading an interpretation of the film either before or after viewing to better appreciate what is happening in the story as it is most metaphorical.
Rest of the List: The Big Kahuna, Tao of Steve, Crazy Stupid Love, Megamind, Eyes Wide Shut, Dead Poet's Society, Before Sunset, Gambit, Five Minutes of Heaven, Temple Grandin, Croupier, The Good Guy, 3 Idiots, Limitless, Drive, Whiplash
While I agree with Spielberg's realization that modifying his prior work was a mistake, there's something I would like to be able to do with movies as a consumer that I wish streaming services offered.
Hollywood seems obsessed with three things: Guns, sex and objectifying women.
While not every movie has guns, the sex and objectification is pretty much everywhere. Perfectly good movies have utterly unnecessary sex scenes that make them impossible to watch with kids. In some cases this is also uncomfortable in family gathering settings.
Two examples that come to mind (there are thousands):
Die Hard. He opens an office door, only to expose a couple having sex. Of course, the woman is fully exposed, while the guy is not.
Lucky Number Slevin. The main character walks into his apartment only to find his girlfriends on all fours on the bed having sex with a guy. Again, full sexual exploitation of the woman, of course.
The Last Kingdom (series): Once again, sex everywhere. No value whatsoever to the story. It's a great series. Unwatchable with kids and in other settings.
Battlestar Galactica (the one with James Olmos): Excellent series. Sex everywhere. No nudity that I can remember, yet scenes of oral sex and other forms of sex without showing full body nudes. Fucking unbelievably unnecessary.
Outlander (series): Might as well be labelled porn. It's a sex-fest. Humping in any way possible at any possible time and even male-to-male rape. Nothing whatsoever to add to the story, which would have been amazing without all that shit in there.
The Queens Gambit (series). Fantastic series about chess. My kids are really into chess. Fuck if we are going to watch it with them. No nudity, yet drugs and sex are featured. The character is fictitious, which means there was no need for any of it. The producers just wanted to include sex and drugs. This one can't be fixed. I am not going to watch a show with my kids that implies taking drugs can make you smarter in any way.
There are tons of movies and shows with similar problems. Movies that are excellent and yet the producers feel it is necessary to insert a stupid sex scene that adds absolutely nothing to the story and is of no value whatsoever other than to show boobs bouncing and feature women as sexual objects.
Notice I did not say anything about movies like Fifty Shades or Gray, Wall Street or Eyes Wide Shut. Those are movies where the story justifies some of what they feature. There could be an argument related to female objectification, that's about it.
I am not a puritan, by any means. I just think this is stupid, wrong, unnecessary, detrimental and destructive to women. Having a daughter changes your perspective on what's out there in popular culture. Great movies and series are being ruined all the time by inserting sex where it is unnecessary, and it is usually at the expense of women.
Getting back to the first paragraph. I wish there was a setting on streaming services to be able to watch these movies with those scenes cut out or replaced by alternative scenes shot and chosen by the creators.
In the case of Die Hard, the couple could be kissing, taking a nap, playing chess...anything. The point is they were distracted and did not react to the emergency. In the case of Slevin, the sex scene could either be completely cut out or replaced with something different.
That, to me, would be a feature very much worth having. Hollywood's obsession with sex and the objectification of women is a problem that does not seem to receive the attention it should.
Is "Eyes Wide Shut" a Christmas movie?
Never watch "Eyes Wide Shut" in the American cut! Also, never watch it on a plane. Otherwise it's a great movie :)
Eyes Wide Shut is a very good movie about class in America as well.
>Eyes Wide Shut?
Tangent about this:
There was a very interesting Roger Ebert review of Eyes Wide Shut that addressed some of the criticism of Tom Cruise's acting in that film. Cruise had been described as "wooden" and Ebert came to his defense. Kubrick - who is on record as being a perfectionist who believes that actors are best when they're meat puppets for the director - made Cruise go through 97 takes of walking through a door. Either that's just sadism on part of the director's ego (and there may be something to that, Kubrick is notorious for playing psychological games with actors to get the performance he wants - or Kubrick working to get exactly what he wants on the screen.
Eyes Wide Shut? Collateral? Magnolia? He can certainly play characters outside the big action hero. He just gets paid a shitload of money to keep making shit big budget action movies and he's a high level cult leader who has an ego the size of a planet.
He could do well in a little indie movie that pushes his range but his life and personality prevents that way more than his range as an actor.
I think I've probably watched 1000+ movies. I've tapered off as I got older (I'm in my 40s now) but at least one movie every 5 days seems like a low bar I would regularly hit.
What the author says is true, I tend to see common patterns and can often predict who's a secret villain by the first act or have a general idea of how the movie will end. At the same time, these clues are what make a movie compelling and provide subtle clues where the movie is going, so shouldn't be discounted as "tropes" or cheap. George RR Martin talks about ignoring fans who have correctly predicted what will later be revealed at the end, saying that instead of retconning or changing course, it's best to keep on and not be influenced by the (correct) predictions. The groundwork is laid and the foreshadowing gives active readers an excuse to engage with the material.
I can also say that many movies overuse tropes (time travel in sci-fi for example) but often, even with movies that are mediocre or bad, there's a gem of an idea. Sometimes it's a premise, sometimes is a character interaction, what have you, but that's what, in my opinion, people who get into this state should be looking for. It's a version of "strongmaning" an argument, but instead applying it to the movie you're watching.
Also, sometimes the pleasure is in seeing how the movie plays out, even if you know the ending beforehand. I've seen quite a few movies multiple times and often enjoy them more on subsequent viewings.
I'm pretty skeptical of the author touching on "Godfather", "Eyes Wide Shut" and "The Hangover" as it sounds like their taste is pretty immature. They touch on this with the mention of "Lost in Translation" being unrelatable but delving deeper, it might be that they like those movies for other more superficial reasons that might not be so predominant later on in their life. I'm also pretty critical of "not being surprised anymore". This means that they're either so cynical and jaded or they're not looking hard enough for movies. It's rare but surprises do happen and the lack of surprise on the author's part points, in my opinion, to an unjustified superiority complex.
A final point: The author touches on it but then abandons it. TV is the new media. TV has the ability to delve much deeper into plot arcs and character development. We're living in a golden age of television where there are some shows that rival and surpass the best movies out there in terms breadth, scope and depth. There will always be a place for movies but I think at this point it's the difference between a short story and a novel. There's only so much you can pack in a two hour limit (or 6 hours if you're part of a trilogy) whereas the 12-24+ hour limit for TV allows you the space to explore in more depth.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKnXmNHubfs
I could not disagree more with the author. I think their argument should be debated on the merits, but it bears mentioning that the author is still in their twenties, and has only seen ~74 movies a year since 2010. That's ... not a lot of movies, by cinema snob standards (or even by prolific Netflix viewer standards).
1. One simply does not run out of great movies to watch after 700 movies, even if all 700 have been great. You have to be way, way more in to movies than that for that to happen. When your go-to examples of great movies are Eyes Wide Shut and Pulp Fiction (two great movies to be sure, but they have over 300k ratings each on IMDb), the problem is obvious: your selections are too mainstream. You can definitely run out of blockbusters that are also great movies very quickly. This author didn't name a single movie I haven't seen, and I'm nowhere close to having seen enough to join the cinema snob club.
2. "Every couple of days I curl up on the couch at 10pm, scroll through Amazon Prime video..." Yes. This is the problem. Their source for movies is an aggregator that makes money primarily through getting you to stay subscribed while reducing the cost of content acquisition as much as possible. Most of what's on Amazon prime is trash, low budget attempts at blockbusters, with a handful of rotating blockbuster films to grab your attention on the front page. Meanwhile, The Criterion Collection has released over a thousand films on DVD and Blu-ray. Get your media from better sources!
Note that I'm not blaming the author for this specifically. The media landscape sucks right now. Everything is fragmented and if you only have access to one or two sources it's easy to see how you could get the idea that prestige TV is where all the serious work goes nowadays.
3. "Most Stories are the Same. Kurt Vonnegut once said that there are only six types of story." Doesn't this claim go precisely against the claim made earlier in the article that the books you read just get better and better as you read more?
4. I can't agree that David Lynch is a hack. I'd say this goes beyond a question of taste into a factually incorrect account of a director who is obviously very capable and knows what he's trying to do. Some movies are going to require more work to appreciate than others. Ironically, the essay itself complains about movies being too accessible! Likewise, Lost in Translation is not unrelatable simply because the main character is older than you are.
5. The idea that we can't make good comedies any more is laughable culture-war nonsense. The idea that adult comedy must utilize irreverence is silly, to begin with. The Favourite (2018), Druk (2020), Amélie, The Lobster, Turist (2014), etc etc are all good comedies that aren't unduly irreverent. It's also strange to see Superbad and The Hangover given as examples of comedy done right in an article about a supposed dearth of good movies.
Even if you want out-and-out comedies (instead of my suggested serious movies with comedic tones), there were plenty of those last decade too. I liked The Nice Guys, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Knives Out, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, and so on. Several of these are rather irreverent, I'd say. I guess if you're looking for more Hangover, they made Part III in 2013, less than a decade ago, and Jackass 4 is coming out later this year! I don't see what there is to complain about. (In the vein of low-brow comedy, there are some movies like Psycho Goreman and Mandy that are much more interesting than a lot of mainstream fare.)
6. Burnout is a thing. Maybe trying to write a review for every single movie you see can lead to enjoying them less, if you're not the kind of person who's wired to do that.
I remember reading once about Bunuel having a small room with couch and a giant Miro painting in his apartment. Bunuel would take a drink and sit on that couch and look at that Miro for a couple hours, his mind doing the work. It is common to read in XIXth century literature (Dostoevsky comes to mind) how even characters portrayed as somewhat shallow would spend an hour or two in front of some famous (as in 'in vogue') Old Master's painting, constructing the internal dialogue with the creator.
The piece in this text about passive consumption of media being bad for the... soul(?) reads like something from a person who failed to perform the mental work necessary to perceive "passive consumption" as something active, inspiring and enriching.
After seeing Superbad or Deadpool (that in the context of cinema possess the cultural significance of screensavers) used as a reference with a mention of Eyes Wide Shut as a peak viewership effort, it is really upsetting to see piece this get traction on Hackernews.
Coming across this text after a randomly encountered masterpiece that is "Riders of Justice" is hilarious and a bit sad.
You're focusing on a very specific niche. Sci-fi and adventure were rarely the interest of good film makers, so few sci-fi or adventure films were made.
But that does not reflect on the larger film industry of the 80s and 90s, which was producing many more incredible movies which stood the test of time. 1999 alone gave us Fight Club, The Talented Mr Ripley, Being John Malkovich, American Beauty, The Iron Giant, Eyes Wide Shut, The Matrix, The Sixth Sense, The Green Mile.
There has always been a lot of schlock cinema being produced, but right now it is dominating much more than in the last few decades.
Movies in the 90s and early 2000's were much better than the garbage we get today.
From T2, to Jurassic Park, to the Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Pulp Fiction, Eyes Wide Shut, Fight Club, Cruel Intentions, Mean Girls, 5th Element, Independence Day, etc.. etc..
Something happened after 2007-2008, perhaps it was the shift to digital, where filmmakers started relying more and more on special effects, and less on good acting and storytelling.
The first Iron Man and Avengers were great, but then the formula got very repetitive. None of the DC movies were good, Fast and the Furious are the same story on repeat, both comedies and romantic movies became dumber/more simplistic etc.. etc..
Movies became more like a circus show of forgettable digital effects and less about a good story that teaches something or leaves an impression.
I think streaming might be part of the problem (just lots of churn of a large quantity of low quality movies), but also the box industry started revolving too much around few large franchises, and everything else became a low budget niche.
I think there were still few good movies (Interstellar, Gone Girl, Midsommar, and Parasite), but still much fewer than the previous generation (91-2007), which I think it was a golden time for the movies.
I disagree there are fundamental differences. The reason Apple is blocking game streaming apps is because games could contain content that violates the standards of the app store.
An easy violation is nudity, there is an app for Playboy, but there is zero nudity in it. However, I can get the full, uncensored Playboy magazine in the Nook app. I can watch movies with nudity in Netflix or Amazon Video. I can even buy or rent movies FROM APPLE with nudity in the iTunes store, like Eyes Wide Shut, Walk Hard, Boogie Nights (which is about porn!), and Barbarella, all right from my iPad or iPhone.
So why can I see nudity if I buy it directly from Apple in a movie, but not an app?
I can download the Twitch app and watch streams of video games, but I can't download an app to let me PLAY the very same games?
There is no difference, it is simply Apple capriciousness.
> But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. And Hollywood have always been criticized for being vapid entertainment, empty spectacle etc.
Not to this degree. The last good year for movies was 1999. This is the list of major releases that year:
The Matrix
Fight Club
The Sixth Sense
Toy Story 2
The Green Mile
American Beauty
Being John Malkovic
Office Space
The Iron Giant
Magnolia
Austin Powers
American Pie
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Eyes Wide Shut
Dogma
Galaxy Quest
The Insider
Notting Hill
Man on the Moon
Analyze This
Detroit Rock City
Mystery Men
Bicentennial Man
This is not even the entire list, just the ones I enjoyed and I'm bothering to type.
You can't look at that list and honestly say nothing has changed, because it's just not true. The energy and creativity has clearly moved somewhere else, to TV and streaming services.
This year alone there's two FANTASTIC shows, Chernobyl and Stranger Things S3 that definitely deserve praise.
It wont apply to everyone. For people who enjoy most movies that come out, for example the superhero series and wizards and warrior series, this wont apply because your taste is easy to meet (the majority of consumers).
However, if you arent satisfied by these films but want something that provides more in terms of story, originality, verisimilitude, revelation, or some other of a lot of possibilities, youll look out at the hige catalog of films that have been produced and find only dozens that are really something you enjoy. Theyre hard to make, and so theres only a few directors who have made them. When you watch eyes wide shut, you know you cant get ot elsewhere.
Kubrick films often have amazing optical illusions of the "once you see it, you can't unsee it" form. In EWS, it's the mask on the pillow. Watch the film enough and you'll suddenly realize what Bill really sees when he walks in that room: he sees his wife sleeping with another man (the mask is the other man). Somehow the way the wife and the mask are positioned, you can "see" the entire outline of the other man, even though he's nothing but a mask. And now, you'll never see Eyes Wide Shut as the same movie ever again :)
I would agree that his films very much suit themselves to the silver screen, and watching them, e.g. on a laptop or computer-monitor sized screen is certainly not going to do it justice.
I was fortunate enough to catch many of his films during the Toronto International Film Festival during an exhibit. 'Eyes Wide Shut' was particularly fantastic.
Tbh, Stanley Kubrick is vastly overrated. Yes every one of his movies has great cinemotography, and is technically excellent, but many of his movies are not excellent as movies. Eyes Wide Shut, full metal jacket, and the shining are not 10/10 movies, and David Fincher, Harmony Korine, Charlie Kaifman have all created movies better than all those movies listed. The problem with Stanley Lubrick is because he has a style that is very attractive to viewers, and his movies are very accesible also, he gets massively overrated by a lot of casual film watchers, which is fine so are a lot of directors, but his hype has leaked even to actual film critics with years of experience. It also doesn't help that movies like Room 237 come out that jack of Stanley Kubrick and draw meaning out of things that had no meaning. Sad that people glorify Kubrick but don't even know who Charlir Kaufman or Harmony Korine are, even though both directors have created movies that are just as good as a lot of Kubricks films.
All of the movies by him that I’ve watched are brilliant.
Dr Strangelove is my favourite movie. The Shining is excellent, A clockwork orange, Barry Lyndon, 2001, Eyes Wide Shut ...
He was also a fantastic photographer.
I couldn't help but think of Eyes Wide Shut when reading this. For those who have seen the film, the leading character, a physician who lives in Upper East Side in Manhattan, easily fits the bill (npi) of being a 9.9%er. But as Kubrick makes it clear, he is merely a well paid servant of the true hidden aristocracy, and very much preoccupied with matters that are of no concern to the aristocratic class.
I agree with the other commentators' critique of OP here. The 9.9%ers are the new Social 'Thin Blue Line' [1].
Here's the recruitment advert in case you are interested :) https://youtu.be/LHtNFZ6K0pE
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line
Here's the poster for "Eyes wide shut" mentioned in the article: http://polishpostershop.com/plakat/leszek-zebrowski/oczy-szeroko-zamkniete.html And here's a nice gallery: https://wellmedicated.com/50-incredible-film-posters-from-poland/
And of course, there are outliers. Stanley Kubrick did both insane amounts of planning _and_ an insane number of shots. Eyes Wide Shut, at 2 hours, 39 minutes, took 400 days of filming (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120663/trivia). I guess that gets you over the 100:1 ratio.
On the sitcom front, there is Fawlty Towers, where they six spent weeks writing and up to 25 hours of editing on each _episode_ (http://www.tv.com/shows/fawlty-towers/)
Fun typeface fact: Stanley Kubrick's favourite was Futura Extra Bold, it was used on the posters for Eyes Wide Shut and 2001
Source: (http://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/mar/27/features.weekend)
The Nike logo is also from the Futura family (https://www.quora.com/What-font-is-used-for-the-Nike-logo)
"Eyes Wide Shut" is probably Kubrick's most underrated movie. I still don't think I appreciate it fully, but it was the movie that really started me on appreciating Kubrick's movies, his visual languages, &c.
You understand Kubrick slowly. For me, the movie Eyes Wide Shut was very hard to grasp when it was released just before his death. I didn't like the movie, it was slow-moving and didn't tell any story to me. Ten years after a very painful divorce and lots of jealousy, I managed for some reason to watch the movie once more. I finally understood what's it all about. I finally really liked it.
Just give him time. Grow as a human, get older, live your life. And then at some point of your life, watch his movies again. There's a good chance you'll get them.
> You seem to dislike the shallowness you feel around you, so don't be shallow. Nothing you wrote says anything about you,
OK, let me try; I really like computers back in the day when you typed in a terminal screen 1:Print "Hello World" or the first HTML page with the CSS or figuring out for the first time how object-oriented programming class inheritance working, or referencing and dereferencing C pointers or DirectX buffer-swap or socket multicasting, or reading a really profound novel for English class for that matter or catching a late night movie with sexy scenes and heavy themes that you can't put your finger when you're young but the excitement of lust and wanderlust lingers on ("Eyes Wide Shut"),
When real life happened was told by parents directly and peers implicitly to "pursue" passion and "be serious" at the same time lest you be judged, so I got a job feeling independent, hell even making six-figures for the first time, feeling a million bucks but initial euphoria eventually gave away to daily grind, fixing tickets after tickets to the tyranny of "agile," "daily standup," and "JIRA burndown chart/project tracker"; more importantly, I want to learn and dig further and further down into stack, get into Linux kernel, hardware circuit design, cryptography, Bioinformatics not to have some BS on my LinkedIn and collect trinkets, but have that rush of hacking at it, like a shot of cocaine straight into the brain blood-barrier; instead, I'm here cranking out tickets for an A/B test on how to make a button to have a single round bevel or double round bevel and seeing which one will boost 0.01% on the user conversion rate to add a product to a shopping cart or to keep user "as engaged" when I could hardly care less about social media, e-commerce and iOS apps about a product or infographics that I don't need but is shoved to my face; I feel cheated and robbed at the lies that the startup industry pumps out for "meaningful work," more importantly, I sacrificed my love for learning academic-oriented computing for a meaningless momentary compensation and the trendiness of startupdom because I watched some stupid video on Steve Jobs or Peter Thiel on some late lonely night and it filled up my emptiness in college,
Socially, was an awkward computer nerd and on the bottom of the sexual and social totem-pole in college. But had a few friends whom I can have late night conversations with, who listened to me, whom understood when I say something in Chinglish (English-Cinese combined) and understand instantly what it's like to grow up Chinese in suburban Maryland and going to a Chinese evangelical christian church in the late 90's, and debating what porn clip we saw on porn sites back then, whether it's sanitary or gay for the guys involved for the porn girl in a blowbang to suck one cock and then go off to suck on another cock and also discuss different movies, The Smashing Pumpkins, "Catcher in the Rye," "On the Road," the alienation and the exhilaration of being on the road or constantly searching and wandering and the explicit sexual yearnings,
So in my mid-twenties, got finally frustrated due to hormones and that fear of missing out and that parental pressure to "settle down". So I got an downtown apartment and stocked it up with IKEA furniture like Edward Norton did in "Fight Club," shopped at H&M and Brooks Brothers for "snug-fit" jeans, befriended and went out with a carefully curated group of "young professionals but yet boheme" and eventually went on dates that led to a steady girlfriend. At first I felt like a million bucks, felt like I finally made it with "meaningful such yuppie weekend activities" as rock-climbing, hiking and carousing with friends and SO but eventually gave to the daily grind of the socializations, to the pettiness of who's who in office politics, whose next great startup idea to apply to what accelerator and what band to see in which cool fresh new venue that's just opened in the city but that's just the same as the one that we just sat at discussing it, the decor, names and hair are different but the characters all the same, that obligatory feeling that I don't want to but I should,
I want to have a feeling of mastery, follow through with something tangible and tactile with my hands, like building a nice outdoors deck with a nice varnish finish, learn how to take a Eric-Clapton-esque solo with all of the chromatic tones and sixteenth notes at a blues jam, to pull off a cross-over and a spin-move to evade the first and second defender in a rec-league basketball and finish at the hoop. Instead I trivialized my personal goals as unrealistic and impractical and instead gave into the social pressure of "practical nest-building and social networking". Learned only later that all my "friends" in trendy yuppie network were more in love with the idea of themselves being involved in a trendy yuppie network than the other people (especially moi). I don't feel like a man, or specifically a human being with any agency, but was re-assured by everyone else that "[I was]. Because [I] had my own apartment and had a great job, a great social network." I rushed to relationships and friends to fill a void of personal inadequacy but found associating or possessing other people that I liked the idea of did not change me and if anything else made me more insecure and co-dependent on them.
"Eyes Wide Shut" is a masterpiece but also a very difficult film to understand. Even at its very slow pace it is too much to understand in one viewing. I paticularly love all the incidents that tangential to the main plot: the drug overdose, encounter with a streetwalker, and costume shop daughter's perversions. Great stuff.
Well, you're not actually describing a 'hacker' - you're describing an entrepeneur. But, yes, he was a lot more technically invested than a lot of other auteurs. I recommend the documentary 'Stanley Kubrick: a life in pictures' to anybody interested in living life on their own terms. Very inspiring.
Oh, and I find 'Eyes Wide Shut' to be a woefully mistunderstood and underated gem. I'd rate it second to 'Barry Lyndon' in the Kubrick oeuvr. A lot of his other films (Shining, 2001, Clockwork) I found to be technically marvelous but mishandled in terms of storytelling.
It's true that on the surface, this schism seems absurd. However, I believe there's a little more nuance to it than you realize.
Middle-class parents in a low crime neighborhood don't really have to worry about young Sally growing up to be a psychotic warrior because they to occasionally watch blockbuster movies like 300 or Saving Private Ryan.
But if family movie night regularly included films like Eyes Wide Shut or Fifty Shades of Grey, one can certainly imagine it may influence a young adult's sexuality. And at a time when they are exceptionally impressionable and have particularly poor judgement no less. This is an unsettling thought to most parents.
That said, I do believe that Americans generally overexpose their children to bombastic, violent movies. I'm certain that this has something to do with our relatively higher violent crime rates. I'm not sure if our media shapes our collective consciousness or the other way around. I suspect it's both.
Fine. The point is, Kubrick wasn't done with Eyes Wide Shut when he died, at least by his standards. The film was cut and digitally altered after his death to keep it down to an R rating. Kubrick's cuts routinely occurred as late as after the film was released.
Only in the US release -- extra bodies were added in to the orgy scene to hide certain things.
I saw it when it came out in the uncensored version and, frankly, the less said about the whole movie the better. Stanley Kubrick made some of the greatest films of all time... and then he made Eyes Wide Shut as an old man because it gave him an excuse to look at boobs for six months.
Censorship does happen. Stanley Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut, was censored to avoid an NC-17 rating. You're correct NC-17 movies do get made, but how often can you go to your local cinema and see an NC-17 movie?