A bad, annoying, nearly 3 hour episode of All My Children.

Rating: 1/10 (18 July 1999)

Eyes Wide Shut is a shallow, appalling mess of a film which will no doubt be hailed as high art by the baby boom crowd. I suppose this sort of thing is what white bread America, particularly the repressed crowd I saw it with, imagines to be avant garde. Some phrases I heard from those around me in the theater: "I can't believe we're going to see this!" "This is too weird!" "Is that marijuana?" "Is she a prostitute?" "Oh, she isn't worthy of him!" "Thank God he didn't have sex with her!" "Oh, look. That's a nice apartment." Please. I've had racier things go on in my car than any of the sex or so-called orgy scenes in this film, and yet it was giving the fat, status-obsessed yuppies around me a case of the vapors. Eyes wide shut, indeed. An endless, overwrought, melodramatic morality play about sex and guilt. Nothing more. Imagine being taken on a tour of Studio 54 in its heyday while being flogged by a nun. The women in this film ranged from coked-out whores to merely dysfunctional housewives looking for some on the side. The one gay character with lines was stereotyped as a mincing little queen made almost faint by the overwhelming sexual prowess of Tom Cruise. Give me a break! Racial stereotyping was also pervasive, and not one moment of this film's so-called plot was unpredictable. If Kubrick hadn't croaked, this movie would have received all the rotten (and more to the point, honest) reviews it is due. Hell, the pace alone probably killed him. Anyway, if you enjoy being tortured for almost three hours, go see this film. If you're as fortunate as myself, you will get to see it with a bunch of sanctimonious Midwesterners, in which case you will find the audience's reaction more entertaining than what's on the screen.