"The life of the heterosexual is a SICK and BORING life!"

Rating: 5/10 (30 September 2011)

Some observations:
1) As the movie starts, with that nonstop jazz waltz by Shostakovich playing and the New York Xmas party at an elegant townhouse with everyone in gowns and tuxes, and then, OMG—is Sydney Pollack in this movie?—I had to wonder if I was watching a parody of all those Woody Allen Manhattan melodramas. Only much funnier.
2) Directed by Kubrick and co-written by Fredric Raphael...who both had such seminal successes in the 1960s...this movie strikes me as the very last gasp of 1960s Eurotrash. The nudity + Venetian masks, opulent houses and clothes, the terrible acting...if only it were badly subtitled and starred Alain Delon instead of Tom Cruise, this could be a lost "masterpiece" by some forgotten Italian hack-director. (Except the 1960s Italian version would have been a lot more violent, bloody, and...fun!)
Alas, Kubrick made this movie exactly 30 years too late. I think maybe there should be a rule that 70-year-old filmmakers should NOT try to make "erotic" thrillers. The result is inevitably creepy, and not in a good way.
3) As the "story" progresses, with poor Tom unable to get laid and witnessing one buzz-killing scene after another, I couldn't help but think of that classic line by Edith Massey in Female Trouble, hysterically warning her son away from the straight world: "The life of the heterosexual is a SICK and BORING life!" Kubrick seems to have made this exercise to illustrate just that point.
4) Rich weirdos having a sex orgy-cum-black mass at a mansion in the middle of nowhere is a venerable Eurotrash cliché, but I think Roman Polanski had the last word on this particular motif in The Ninth Gate, also released in 1999, and an infinitely sexier, more sinister movie. If only Polanksi had made Eyes Wide Shut...sigh...
5) Was this Kubrick's pro-monogamy, post-AIDS rebuttal of Rocky Horror Picture Show? Tom & Nicole as Brad & Janet, tempted to stray from their marriage vows. But here, they don't. "Don't Dream It, Be It" is replaced by "Think About It Constantly, Don't Dare Do Anything (You'll Die!)"...and of course, rich weirdos in costumes being kinky in a mansion in the middle of nowhere.
6) Why the Xmas trees everywhere? (Except of course at the mansion of the human-sacrificing Satan worshippers.) Because this is a Christian movie, duh!
7) Death looms over every scene of Tom seeking to get laid outside his marriage. At the first party, the naked woman (tempation) almost dies of an OD. When his patient's daughter kisses Tom, her dead father is right there in the room. The hooker Tom almost sleeps with (saved by a phone call from his wife) turns out to have tested HIV-positive; that was a close call! And of course, there is a human sacrifice at the masked ball; another close call, as it could have been Tom. At the end (while Xmas-shopping, and in the presence of their daughter) the two procreators face up to the inevitability of having sexual fantasies, but renew their "covenant" to "f" only each other.
8) Thus, Kubrick's final message to mankind: sex outside procreative monogamy = death.
And here are all these "reviewers" rattling on about how transgressive this movie is, when it could hardly be more conservative. Titillating, yes, but only so as to show a man walking through the dangerous fire of temptation and coming out the other side.