Kubrick’s Cruise Kidman Schnitzler Sex Sizzler

Kubrick’s Cruise Kidman Schnitzler Sex Sizzler

An excerpt from ‘Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker’: Dreaming, With ‘Eyes Wide Shut’

BY

DAVID MIKICS

AUGUST 10, 2020

A.I., the Aryan Papers, and Eyes Wide Shut all present characters who are locked into their roles and cannot be authentic: the robot boy who yearns to be accepted as real, the Jewish child forced to masquerade as a gentile, and the man Bill Harford who cannot quite dare to break through from dreaming about a sexual adventure to actually having one. Like Barry Lyndon, Bill remains on the outside looking in even when he’s at the center of the action.

Tilda Swinton, Demi Moore, Julia Moore and Nicole KidmanSwinton and Moore: Courtesy Toronto International Film Festival; Moore: Chad Salvador—Variety/Getty Images; Kidman: Niko Tavernise—A24

While Brad Pitt and George Clooney Settle Into Silver-Fox Charm, Their Female Peers Are the True Stars of the Season

BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

20 September 2924

The pleasures of writer-director Jon Watts’ crime caper Wolfs are numerous: George Clooney and Brad Pitt play dueling fixers called in to clean up the accidental death of a young, adorable student—prior to his demise, occasioned by his jumping on a hotel bed, he’d been picked up by high-powered district attorney Amy Ryan in a bar. Clooney and Pitt have reached the age where they know it’s useless to pretend they’re something they’re not. Their faces look handsomely lived in; the whispers of gray in their artfully sculpted chin stubble feel honest and earned. Like Lucy and Ethel in the throes of a falling out, they’re fun to watch as they bicker and crab at one another, leaning heavily on their silver-fox charm. Still, what they’re offering feels as comfy as the worn-in leather jackets they wear. And in this late-2024 movie season, if you find yourself wishing for something more—for another view of what actors in the 50-to-60-ish age bracket can do—look to the women, who insist on pushing themselves out of the comfort zone rather than settling into it.

Demi Moore in Coralie Fargeat’s horror-of-aging black comedy The Substance, Nicole Kidman in Halina Reijn’s May-December sizzler Babygirl,Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in Pedro Almodóvar’s moving and provocative The Room Next Door: These big-name movie stars are pushing into new territory rather than just riffing on whatever may have made them appealing 10, 20, or 30 years ago. That’s a luxury no actress can afford, and these women know it.

Peter Lindberg / Pirelli 2017

Penélope Cruz

Peter Lindberg

 Pirelli 2017

Nicole Kidman

Robin Wright

Robin Wright

Julianne Moore

Barely Ther Dress / Charlize Theron wows in revealing black Dior dress at premiere of Bombshell

Charlize Theron wows in a black Dior dress as she promotes her new film 'Bombshell'

BARELY THER DRESS 

Charlize Theron wows in revealing black Dior dress at premiere of Bombshell

• Jake Harrison

• 12 Dec 2019, 1:23
• Updated: 12 Dec 2019, 1:24

CHARLIZE Theron looks an Atomic Blonde again as she steps out for a movie premiere in Los Angeles.

The American actress, 44, donned a racy-black Dior dress as she joined her co-stars, Nicole Kidman, 52, and Margot Robbie, 29, at the Bombshell US premiere.

The trio of leading ladies were all dressed to the nines at the event of the movie, which focuses on the sexual harassment claims against former Fox News Chief Roger Ailes, 77.

Posters / Jane Campion / Portrait of Lady

Jane Champion

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

Posters

The 100 best novels / No 36 / The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)

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EYES WIDE SHUT: I WAKE UP DREAMING 

Review by J. Hoberman

by J. Hoberman

The best thing about Eyes Wide Shut may be its title, but anyone planning to see Stanley Kubrick’s long-awaited, posthumously released swan song is advised to go with their eyes open. Completed by Warner Bros. after the director’s death last March (and shamelessly proclaimed a “brilliant,” “haunting” “masterpiece” in the advance cover story provided by the studio’s corporate sibling, Time), this two hour and 39 minute gloss on Arthur Schnitzler’s fantasmagoric novella feels like a rough draft at best.
At worst, Eyes Wide Shut is ponderously (up)dated—as though Kubrick had finally gotten around to responding to Michelangelo Antonioni’s druggy Blow-Up—if not weirdly anachronistic. (It’s difficult to make a movie about a city you last set foot in 35 years ago.) Shot in London, Eyes Wide Shut opens in a fabulous Upper West Side apartment filled with florid paintings, Alice (Nicole Kidman) stripping down to dress up—and not for the last time. She and her doctor husband Bill (Tom Cruise) have been invited to the splendiferous Christmas bash hosted by a wealthy sleazebag of mystery (Sydney Pollack).

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EYES WIDE SHUT: IN DREAMS BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Writing about Eyes Wide Shut in Time, Richard Schickel had this to say about its source, Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 Traumnovelle: “Like a lot of the novels on which good movies are based, it is an entertaining, erotically charged fiction of the second rank, in need of the vivifying physicalization of the screen and the kind of narrative focus a good director can bring to imperfect but provocative life—especially when he has been thinking about it as long as Kubrick had”—i.e., at least since 1968, when he asked his wife to read it. This more or less matches the opinion of Frederic Raphael, Kubrick’s credited cowriter, as expressed in his recent memoir, Eyes Wide Open. But I would argue that Traumnovelle is a masterpiece worthy of resting alongside Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” Kafka’s The Trial, and Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. Like the Poe story, it features a phantasmal masked ball with dark and decadent undercurrents, and like the Kafka and Hedayat novels, it continually and ambiguously crosses back and forth between fantasy and waking reality. But it differs from all three in having a development that might be described as therapeutic—Schnitzler, a doctor, was a friend of Freud—making Eyes Wide Shut a rare departure for Kubrick and concluding his career with the closest thing in his work to a happy ending. Moreover, the question about the novella isn’t whether Kubrick has “brought it to life”—it lives vibrantly without him, even if he has brought it to a lot of people’s attention, including mine—but whether he’s done it justice, a problem also raised by his films of Lolita and A Clockwork Orange.

Posters / Stanley Kubrick / Eyes Wide Shut

Stanley Kubrick

EYES WIDE SHUT

Posters

Eyes wide shut / What the Critics Failed to See in Kuibrick`s Last Film

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EYES WIDE SHUT: WHAT THE CRITICS FAILED TO SEE IN KUBRICK’S LAST FILM 

by Lee Siegel 

[Harper’s Magazine]

Eyes Wide Shut is one of the most moving, playful, and complex movies I have ever seen.  I love the way Stanley Kubrick expresses the film’s theme of social and psychological doubleness through a double entendre in the film’s very title—Eyes Wide Shut—and through his choice, for the title song, of a waltz by Dmitry Shostakovich, a guileful composer famous for writing music whose subtle motifs seemed to celebrate Stalin but actually undermined him. I love the film’s spare, almost allegorical portrait of the tension and complexity at the heart of a marriage. So imagine my alarm when, picking up one magazine and newspaper after another, I read reviews calling Kubrick’s film a disaster and a titanic error, trite and self-important, one of the worst movies the critics had ever seen.

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EYES WIDE SHUT: ALL EYES ON THEM 

Review by Richard Schickel

History and horror, crime and war, sci-fi and sexual transgression. He may have made only 13 feature films in the course of his 46-year career, but Stanley Kubrick covered a range that more prolific filmmakers might—and often did—envy. But whether the films were set in the deep past or the near future, whether their prevailing tone was comic or violent, sly or brutish, weary or idealistic, Kubrick really made the same movie over and over again—vivid, brilliant, emotionally unforgiving, imagistically unforgettable variations on the theme that preoccupied him all his mature life.

Eyes Wide Shut / Stanley Kubrick’s Final Masterpiece

Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick’s Final Masterpiece

Eyes Wide Shut is one of Stanley Kubrick’s last great masterpiece, and personally one of my favorite Kubrick films. Many critics and Kubrick fans considered it one of his lesser works when it was released. But as the years have gone by Eyes Wide Shut has aged extremely well. Even legendary director Martin Scorsese considers the film not only one of Kubrick’s best but on of the best films of the 90’s.

The film is an erotic drama film released in 1999 deriving its roots from a 1926 novella – Traumnovelle (Dream Story) written by Arthur Schnitzler. It was the last film to be directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick as the famous producer died four days after he showed his final cut of the movie to Warner Bros Pictures and four months before the eventual release of the film.

Kubrick’s record-breaking production schedule for Eyes Wide Shut (400 production days) garnered the Guinness World Records award for the longest continuous film shoot in history. It earned over $30 million during its first week of release, and that made it take the box office’s number one spot. Eyes Wide Shut won the Best DVD Collection for Warner Bros at the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films, Saturn Award in 2012.

Why does Nicole Kidman undress in the opening shot of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’?

Stanley Kubrick’s last project Eyes Wide Shut (1999), which features Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise as a well-to-do Manhattan couple whose marriage is in trouble, is a cult work. It had a mixed critical reception on its first release, but since then its reputation as one of the director’s finest works has grown. The film is controversial for many reasons — as much to do with its production and reception as for its supposedly sensational sexual content, heavily hyped by Warner Bros. Like so many Kubrick films, Eyes Wide Shut confounds expectations and tests viewers to the limit. The director was a perfectionist and his attention to detail is legendary; one of the fascinations of his work is the pleasure of unpicking every nuance of image and sound in search of a definitive meaning — a quest destined to be frustrated. This is cinema for obsessive compulsives.

Eyes Wide Shut / Opening scene

Eyes Wide Shut

by Stanley Kubrick 

(1999) 

Opening scene (with Nicole Kidman & Tom Cruise)

Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 erotic drama film directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UO7qzwH_RM

Stanley Kubrick / Eyes Without a Face

EYES WITHOUT A FACE

by Charles Whitehouse

The dream interpreter is a kind of detective, and given the orgy of opinion about Eyes Wide Shut currently being enjoyed, let’s use the detective’s dictum and stick to the facts. The most shocking aspect of Eyes Wide Shut is not its long-anticipated sex scenes, but its fidelity to literature. No one expected such a faithful plot adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Novel(Schnitzler was a friend of Freud’s)

Val Kilmer and Nicole Kidman / Batman

Val Kilmer & Nicole Kidman

BATMAN

Golden Globes 2013 / Best Dressed

Nicole Kidman Golden Globes 2013 Best Dressed

Golden Globes 2013

BEST DRESSED

Glenn Close Golden Globes 213 Best Dressed

Naomi Watts Golden Globes 2013 Best Dressed