Word: clockwork
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...director Stanley Kubrick [NOTEBOOK, July 12], you noted that AI, a science-fiction film about artificial intelligence, might have been a better film for his finale than Eyes Wide Shut. But the fact that Kubrick had already made a trilogy of sci-fi flicks (Dr. Strangelove, 2001 and A Clockwork Orange) is probably why he opted to do something different. Kubrick virtually reinvented each genre in which he worked, whether it was a horror film like The Shining, an antiwar movie like Full Metal Jacket or a science-fiction feature. It is not surprising that he chose to make...
Indeed, as in most of his films, his characters here are nothing more than props. And while such an approach worked wonders in 2001, A Clockwork Orange and Dr. Strangelove, here it's an unforgivable error. In Eyes Wide Shut, sex is so unerotic, so frigid, so unfulfilling that the story exists as a two-dimensional vision of perversion and nothing more...
...installed two colonies of Italian bees in a clearing beyond the apple orchard. They have settled into the hives, and, with a single-mindedness that is funny and impressive, go about the business of their miraculous, strange little universe. I watch them with almost parental affection--the buzzing, teeming clockwork, the workers cleaning cells, guarding the front door, foraging for nectar; the short, fat drones, fatherless and stingless and indolent, swaggering about, hoping to get lucky with a virgin queen...
...sophisticated eroticism of Kubrick's Lolita--an eroticism created through words and glances and not a single scene of naked flesh. As for violence, a director like Quentin Tarantino is put to shame when one looks at the cold but gleeful presentation of crime and pain in A Clockwork Orange, which was withdrawn from theaters in England...
Whether it was sexual taboos in Lolita or individual and societal violence in A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick used his films to examine the unspoken problems in our modern world, to step back and look honestly at the issues no one wanted to confront in the open. We'll look for the same fierce realism in Eyes Wide Shut, his last movie, due in July and starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (see clip below). In a way, Kubrick was the most moral of filmmakers because he was not afraid to be called immoral, not afraid to tred where audiences didn...