Just another strange film

Rating: Null/10 (10 January 2001)

Please! "Eyes Wide Shut" is another one of those bizarre films that make the viewer think, "this film is so 'different' and strange, there must be something wonderful about it that I'm just not getting". It's simply one of those films that plays on peoples' forced love of the bizarre.
Eyes Wide Shut was entertaining, but was hardly anything special. Alice Harford tells her husband Dr. Bill Harford that she had fantasized several times about a sailor, and Dr. Harford goes out to have some fun in revenge. So what's so special about this movie? The fact that he almost sleeps with a prostitute named Domino who ended up HIV positive? The fact that he makes his way into a cult-like orgy? The fact that he gets scared by their threats? The fact that a friend of his happened to be involved? Where is the plot? Part of what makes a movie special is how interesting the story is while adhering to the plot. This movie, however, seemed to be one of those anything-goes; whatever the screenwriter could conjure up in his head was added to the plot. This does not make a good movie. It can make an interesting movie. It can make an entertaining movie (which it was), but it does not make a good quality movie. Eyes Wide Shut was a meaningless film choc full of cheap "thrills" because you weren't sure what was going to happen next (after all, this was an anything-goes film). Of course, one issue I had with this film was the fact that everything took place so slowly. People walked slowly, people talked slowly, with excessively long pauses between sentences and words. It got annoying.
This film is typical of Stanley Kubrick; making it bizarre so people say to themselves, "I probably SHOULD be liking this movie". Sorry Stan, didn't work.