The Weak in Review 7/26/99
Roommate Movie Review with Brad & Amy
Big Daddy: two thumbs
down
American Pie: two thumbs
up
comments: "I would see American Pie ten times before I saw Big Daddy"
South Park: Brad:
thumbs down, Amy: didn't see it
comments: Inconsistently funny. Wait for video. "For
gross-out
comedy this summer, you can't beat American Pie."
Movie Review: Eyes Wide Shut (1 1/2 stars)
Eyes Wide
Shut may be respectable art, but it is by no means entertainment. After
hearing several people’s disappointed reactions to this movie, I half joked
that audiences had been going to see it expecting Basic Instinct
and were ending up with The Ice Storm (a painfully boring movie
about marriage in the ‘70s that was out about 2 years ago and for some
reason got 4 stars from all the critics). Although I knew not to
expect
Basic Instinct, I didn’t know how right I was about the Ice
Storm part: besides the similar theme of marital infidelity,
both films were extremely slow and boring and I didn’t care about any of
the characters in either of them.
The plot of
Eyes
Wide Shut was so foreign that I found my attention drawn to beer and
food items whenever they appeared in frame because they were the only parts
of the film that applied to me. In the movie, Tom Cruise is a rich
doctor (note: the film is better if you think back to Kubrick’s
The
Shining and mentally superimpose Jack Nicholson over Tom Cruise) and
Nicole Kidman is his beautiful wife. The premise of the movie is
that people are lining up to have sex with both Cruise and Kidman, but
because they’re married, they have to limit themselves to only having sex
with each other. And its such a burden. It makes life is so
difficult, so dark and grainy, so filled with tense piano music that they
can only speak in slow misty-eyed staccato. I felt like a homeless
guy watching two and a half hours of people lamenting about how tough it
is to own a Lexus because you can't park in certain neighborhoods.
The
other theme besides the sexual limitations of marriage is the guilt and
shame that Kidman and Cruise both felt because they had incidences of attraction
to other people and thought, didn’t act, just briefly thought, about infidelity.
All this guilt didn't make much sense to me because it was caused by the
idea that marriage hinges upon the ability to completely stop being attracted
to anyone except your spouse. Granted, I don’t know jack about these
things, but it seems to me that you wouldn’t expect occasional attraction
to other people to cease just because you got married any more than you
would expect flatulence to cease because you got married. The key
to both is to be considerate and keep it to yourself, either that or let
it out in the open and recognize that it's a natural biological function.
If there is anything that the viewer can take away from this movie, it’s
that the grainy, piano-stabbed predicaments in which we often perceive
ourselves to be mired probably amount to “who cares” when viewed objectively.
As for
the highly-anticipated nude scenes, one of the few things that made the
film watchable were the nearly ubiquitous naked women. The nudity
wasn’t particularly provocative- in fact, after a while it became almost
National Geographic-like, both because of the sheer quantity and because
the naked bodies didn’t belong to characters we were interested in.
Still, it was nice to have the option at almost any point in the movie
of shifting your attention from the plodding dialog and characters to a
naked body and getting a little shot of that “Mmmm breasts” biochemical
released into your otherwise bored as hell brain. A word of caution
though: if you’re thinking to yourself “well damn, a movie with that
much nudity can’t be too bad”, I have one word for you: Showgirls.
Archive:
Weak in Review 7/12/99
Weak in Review 7/05/99
Weak in Review 6/20/99
Weak in Review 6/02/99
Weak in Review 5/19/99
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