Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999)

Seems more like Ed Wood than Stanley Kubrick! The opening voiceover is definitely a cross between the type of insane nonsense in a Wood film with a few Twilight Zone overtones--although this was a few years BEFORE the Twilight Zone debuted. The acting is pretty bad as well, topped by Mazursky quoting from the Tempest as he goes crazy. Are Harp and Coit playing dual roles meant to be symbolic--or is it just a sign of how cheap this film was? Kubrick can't be blamed for Howard Sackler's show more screenplay in any case, and the two of them went on to a much more enjoyable collaboration on Killer's Kiss. Watch that instead. show less

9/26/25 (cinema): Beautiful. I was rapt throughout. I think of it as a movie that requires effort, active attention, but even the Tron segment held me. The benefits of seeing movies at the theater. Also my interpretation was much more optimistic than last time -- the prehistoric monolith gifts pre-humans with a great leap forward in the form of tools, which are misused for violence and destruction, but they leave a second chance for us to discover once we've achieved space travel, and the show more ending is optimistic -- a new start, a reset.

6/25/23 (streaming): I felt so sad and depressed watching it. It all felt so hopeless and pointless -- the bone rotating in the sky, the whole great leap forward simply being the use of tools to exterminate each other, and for some reason some higher power, or higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe, sees fit to "gift" our species that special knowledge. And then a computer misbehaves because it's been set a mission without full information, and then there's 15 minutes of Tron, and then Dave is old and then a fetus facing the monolith. I accept it as a beautiful tone poem rather than an inscrutable narrative. Also the internet was acting up and causing it to pause every once in a while, only for a few seconds but it gets to be like water torture, drip drip. And I was trying not to order food, and so I instead let myself scroll Facebook, where I saw an article about the BBC doing a deep investigative dive into the market for animal torture. Rich westerners paying people in other countries to live-stream themselves torturing and killing baby monkeys. I don't like this world. I wish we weren't like this. I wish we'd never evolved. Imagine if we hadn't. Imagine if our genes had zigged instead of zagged, and the non-hominid -- or non-sapiens descendants of my pre-zig ancestors were now rustling through a jungle, foraging for leaves, threatened by disease and predators and rival tribes, but not wreaking destruction and brutal, gratuitous suffering in such great quantities that how has the universe itself not cracked and shattered? show less

The screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut in this volume seems to exactly correspond to the film as released, which makes me suspect that the text was actually conformed to the final cut of the movie. Of course, since Kubrick was the director, he was in a position to "enforce" the screenplay, but in any case, those curious for unscreened ideas from writers Kubrick and Raphael will be disappointed.

The script is bound with Arthur Schnitzler's novel Dream Story, of which it is in fact a rather show more faithful adaptation, transposing the narrative from its original setting of Vienna in the 1920s to New York City in the 1990s. There is no editorial apparatus or commentary to assist the reader in any contextualization or comparison of these two documents.

Schnitzler's novel has been alternately viewed as an precocious piece of Continental modernism, or as an advanced item of Viennese decadence, and it has features to credit either classification. It is certainly informed by the ideas of Freud, with whom Schnitzler had a significant dialogue. The doctor Fridolin (Bill in Eyes Wide Shut) is furnished with ample realism in the details of his medical practice--easily written by Schnitzler who himself had had a career as a physician before dedicating himself to writing.

Schnitzler's story is more explicit about the protagonist's confused hostility toward his wife, whereas the screenplay does a better job of communicating a pervading atmosphere of menace. The endings of the two versions also strike somewhat different notes, with a greater sense of closure in Schnitzler's original--not necessarily to its credit. The dream element is certainly more significant in Schnitzler, and the Freudian tone is overt in the characters' recurrent trepidation that "no dream is altogether a dream": that the play of fantasy always provides evidence of a self which is masked by waking responsibilities. show less

Definitely an interesting movie to not rewatch at all between youth and middle age, to see only from those two very different perspectives. Ironically, when I was young Alex seemed more alien, maybe because I was a timid young person, and maybe because back then a movie from 15 years ago was ancient. Of course, there's also the fact that when I last saw it, the future it took place in was still ahead of me; now the designs and styles are quaint, very specific to their time's caricaturish show more idea of the future. The story's more tightly constructed than I would expect, really, as far as cause and effect. Neatly laid dominos, as opposed to Do the Right Thing which is more of a series of vignettes hinting at the tensions set to explode at the end.

It's lively, vibrant, engaging -- and extremely problematic. At a time when people mistakenly accuse almost every movie that depicts violence and misogyny of condoning them, this really does feel guilty as charged. Glenn Kenny articulates it perfectly in this review from 2019. https://decider.com/2019/03/06/a-clockwork-orange-netflix-glenn-kenny/ show less