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Good news for fans of Eyes Wide Shut: a new DVD edition of Stanley Kubrick’s final film is on the way, complete with rated and unrated versions of the film, plus two documentaries, commentary from Sydney Pollack and historian Peter Loewenberg, and more. It will be available for purchase on its own, or as part of a nine-disc Kubrick collection, coming out in late October.
And if you read the above and immediately thought to yourself, “WHAT fans of Eyes Wide Shut?”, you should go read this appreciation of the film by Jeffrey M. Anderson. For several years I’ve thought (mostly in a lazy, cocktail chatter sort of way) of writing a book about Eyes Wide Shut — not so much the movie itself as the press surrounding its production, Kubrick’s death, the controversy surrounding preparing the film for MPAA approval, and its reception amongst both critics and audiences. Every time I gear myself up to actually do the writing, I inevitably lose confidence–something happens and I think, “Oh, nobody cares about that movie.”
Jeffrey’s post–and, especially, the comments it has engendered–has possibly convinced me otherwise. It’s one thing for a couple of critics to remain fascinated by a widely-reviled film ten years after its release, but those comments suggest a common relief among Eyes Wide Shut lovers: they’re all basically saying, “Finally, it’s okay for me to come out of the closet about this.”
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We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
Fantastic news, I love it!
Some people have brains, some doesn’t have (enough).
It’s a great movie.
Never let the hoi polloi decide what’s worth your time. If
you write it, readers will come. I’ve always felt that it’s
the unpopular works that need articulate defenders most. And
very often the films that were considered most important 20
years ago are different to those we consider important now.
If you really love this film, it’s your responsibility to
write on its behalf, and you’ll probably get a better handle
on your affection for it in the process.
I can’t say that I love “Eyes Wide Shut” — I found it sort of infuriating and unnerving, but not in a good way.
Nevertheless, whenever I speak of films that are “bad” but actually better than most “good” films, I always come back to this talking about this one and really should give it a second look. It’s idea may have been kind of screwed up, but I had to admire it’s commitment to those screwed up ideas.
Another way of putting it is that in order to make extraordinarily great films you have to risk making an extraordinarily bad films, but if you’re committed enough and willing to provoke enough, the film won’t actually be all that bad. Got it?
Or maybe all I’m saying is that I’d rather see a bad Kubrick film than a good Chris Columbus film.
For lots of people both within and without the hardcore cinephile contingent, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ is THE great American film of the 1990s. (Ferrara’s ‘Snake Eyes’ and ‘New Rose Hotel,’ and Lynch’s ‘Fire Walk with Me’ will get their due someday, too.) I remember a turn of the conversation during one recent confab after the first New York screening of Rivette’s ‘Out 1′, whereupon the topic of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ was broached, and the consensus among the 7 or 8 present was that one would be in contempt of cinema to suggest ‘EWS’ was anything BUT a supreme masterpiece.
A framed one-sheet for the film hangs on my wall just to the right as I type this…
Definitely write your book. (And check out the good one that Michel Chion wrote too, in that BFI series.) The middlebrow idea-bereft Sunday-cinema blather all drones away in time anyhow. Just look at the trajectory of ‘Vertigo’ over the last fifty years…
in praise of ‘Marnie’,
craig.
I definitely liked the movie when it came out, and my appreciation has grown with time.
Check out this analysis, I certainly got a lot out of it.
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0096.html
[...] confessed my secret dream to write about Eyes Wide Shut for a [...]
I’m old enough to remember that most of Stanley’s movies were NOT well received. Eyes Wide Shut has taken on the same trend. We need perspective on this film.
2001 flummoxed critics. The public embraced it. Now it’s an essential entry in all “Best of” lists.
While A Clockwork Orange was loved by critics and did quite well in its year, its challenging themes keeps it out of mainstream appreciation to this day. (In other words, it’s not a film you think of showing to mixed company.)
Barry Lyndon shares a lot with EWS to this day. Scorsese famously thinks it’s Stanley’s crown jewel and Stanley himself predicted a gross of over $100 million, but its reception was the weakest of all his post-Spartacus work. Yet it is every bit the masterpiece its admirers claim it to be.
The Shining, for all its well-deserved praise these days, opened to very mixed reviews indeed. This movie was not a blockbuster. I recall vividly the widespread criticism of Nicholson’s performance as being way too over-the-top.
Full Metal Jacket has resurged in public appreciation, but it has a ways to go. Not far, but the second half of the film needs to be seen as the same work of art that the first-half nearly universally enjoys. [I still recall watching Siskel & Ebert’s review of the release as it first began in U.S. theaters. Ebert was greatly disappointed in it. When Siskel, who recognized its genius, said, “I can’t believe you’re giving a thumbs-up to ‘Benji, The Hunted’ on the same show you give a thumbs-down to Full Metal jacket,” Ebert SHOUTED at Siskel: “Gene, that’s not fair and you know it!”
EWS is a beautiful work of art; it is funny, terrifying, challenging, superbly acted, and holds as much densely layered symbology as The Shining.
Eyes Wide Shut will take a few more years, but it will gain its place alongside Stanley’s others as an equal in every way.