No dream is ever just a dream.
A review by Mike Shea Movie Rating: ( * * * * · ) DVD Rating: ( * * * · · )
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Ok, I gotta come clean. I didn't get this movie. There, I have said it and now I feel a whole lot better. I wanted to get this one, I really did. The movie had a lot of cool stuff in it and the story was enough to keep me interested for two and a half hours, but that didn't give me any deep understanding of the dysfunction in the marriage of our two main characters. I will say that the main feature of the movie, the large ummmm party was really quite a piece of work. It is such an apex to the rest of the movie that the rest seems a little slow. There is a lot of funny subjects like the weird costume guy and his daughter, the fact that the good doctor uses his medical id as if he was Fox Mulder on the case of a huge giant mutant alligator instead of a big sex party. The relationship between Alice and Bill is much more complex that my feeble un-relationship synched mind can make sense of. If anything it seems that two wrongs make a right or something, but that is about as much as I can dish out. Cruise and Kidman do some wonderful acting, I can really tell they are feeling something, I'm just not sure what. No matter what, I really dug that crazy masked orgy scene, even if it didn't have about half a million naked women in it. It really showed how much of a great director Kubrick was. I am just not sure my eyes are good enough to pick up the rest. The DVD has a 4x3 full frame picture that was stated as being the way Kubrick wanted, showing that even though he was a master director, he didn't know dick about home theater, and a great Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack that seemed full of a single loud piano key for the majority of the movie. There are some interviews but obviously no commentary track.
Ok, so now it is time to get on my soap box. In my mind, the censorship of this movie shows that the evil movie nazi's of the MPAA need to be killed. Here we have a well known genius director who, after his death, has to have his movie censored by having pots and figures digitally placed over people having sex. In my mind the only obscenity is that they got away with this censorship. Finally a movie could have pushed the NC-17 rating into the modern world and allowed movie lovers like me to see whole uncut movies without having to put on a trench coat and heading downtown to the red light district. Instead of being able to see a movie the way a director truly intended, I have fucking parental groups telling me that I can't watch the movies I want because they can't control their own children. It really shows how ass backwards our society is when it comes to movies. Now how Saving Private Ryan can show a 17 year old holding his intestines in while shouting "MOMMY" and still get an R while Eyes Wide Shut gets an NC-17 because it shows people having sex in real time instead of slow motion is truly sickening. Ok, end of soap box. Let people know how you feel and maybe somebody will listen. Anyway, even with the blatant raping by the MPAA, Eyes Wide Shut still is an excellent movie even though it is a little deeper than I am capable of going.