Eyes Wide Shut

Although Stanley Kubrick is one of my favorite directors, I wasn't especially looking forward to seeing his final film. An erotic thriller starring a real (at the time) couple just seemed a bit beneath him, I guess. Of course, it wasn't really that simple. It never is with Kubrick. Even if maybe he died of a heart attack before he was actually totally finished working on it, it's still a remarkable movie, one of his most artful, and easily one of my favorites of the ten I've seen. It's foreboding and exciting, and it does deal heavily in sexual themes, but it's definitely not your standard erotic thriller.

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman star as Bill and Alice, a married couple with a daughter that begin the story by going to a Christmas party hosted by a patient of Cruise's played by Sydney Pollack. Alice becomes suspicious when she sees Bill with a couple models and then disappears for a while (he's actually treating a prostitute who overdosed when she was with Pollack). In a later argument, Alice reveals that she thought about an affair a year earlier, and Bill gets called away just in time to get sucked into a world of sexual desire and paranoia. He eventually ends up at a weird party that's equal parts orgy and cult ritual, in an infamous sequence that was initially censored in the United States to get an R rating and is one of the most compelling things I've ever watched.

After the party, the intensity doesn't really let up, as Bill continues to learn strange things about what went on that night, and becomes increasingly suspicious of what's really going on all around him. It's a pretty long movie, but I never felt its length pressing on me, due to the constantly interesting cinematography (the movie always looks great, even if the New York scenes were filmed on a London set) and score, which uses various orchestral pieces to great effect. The film eventually has a scene that finally explains what happened to Bill, and taken at face value it's a bit of a letdown compared to the unbearable tension of what came before. Of course, there's no guarantee that it's the whole truth, because we never really see one way or the other. Going along with the upbeat denouement, I can see why the movie might seem like much ado about nothing, but there's always more layers to a Kubrick movie than you might initially expect. He was a great filmmaker, and Eyes Wide Shut is a completely fitting final work for him.

GoldenEye

We're finally into the Bond movies I've definitely seen all the way through. The gap between the last film and this one was the longest in the series' history, and they even talked about rebooting it like they would end up doing 11 years later. They probably should have, because there's no reason it had to be tied to the existing continuity. Desmond Llewelyn as Q is the only returning actor, and the hiatus between films did him absolutely no good. He's always been an old guy, but he never looked like this. Pierce Brosnan is a solid Bond, but it's weird how the opening sequence supposes something that happened nine years earlier, when the character was in transition between Moore and Dalton. Judi Dench takes up the role of M, with them needing to explain she's a successor to the old one thanks to the switch in gender, and it's weird how she refers to an actor 18 years her junior as a "dinosaur of the Cold War". Despite these little things, it's a good film, the best in the series in a while.

It's in a slightly weird position, stuck right before CGI really took off in films, and it's a little strange to see so much slightly obvious work with miniatures for the first time in the series, right before the shift into computer effects. As they enter the 90s, the sex scenes become more explicit, especially a scene where Famke Janssen (the only significant female villain in Brosnan's films that he doesn't bone) kills a guy in coitus. There's also an increase in violence; Bond's kill total jumps into the twenties as he is seen firing a machine gun wildly into a crowd as several go down at once for the first time. Robbie Coltrane is a cool Russian guy, and Sean Bean's character is interesting. I mean... yeah, he's the villain. He betrays 007. Sorry, the movie's 14 years old. It's cool to see him "die" in the beginning only to come back as an adequate, fairly rape-y antagonist. If you've ever noticed, Bean gets a lot of roles where he either dies or disappears early or gets fucked over in some way, to see it subverted before it ever became a thing is neat. Anyway, Brosnan's first Bond film was his best, and still pretty good.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "GoldenEye" by Tina Turner
Foreign locations: Russia, Monte Carlo, Cuba
Bond, James Bond: 20:25
Martini shaken, not stirred: 20:05
Ladies seduced: 2
Chases: 2
Kills: 26, plus explosion victims
Non-lethal takedowns: 7