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.

Check out this analysis, I certainly got a lot out of it.

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0096.html

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.

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.

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.