1290 Eyes Wide Shut

[MichaelB]

Grain and YouTube are not bosom chums.

[ryannichols7]

all the clips in the extras looked fantastic on the disc. I made sure to take note of this (sorry I didn't include it in my post) since I of course only watched the movie on the 4K disc, and wanted to see if the quality held up on the Bluray. it did, so any of the "the Warner BD is superior crowd" I can say truly has no clue what they're talking about

[TVC 15]

What were the colour changes made for this from the original colour timing does anybody know?

[Matt]

There are quite a few links on the previous page to interviews and such about this. I think, in short, this UHD represents a return to the original color timing of the film that has not been reproduced accurately on previous home video editions. Of course, there are many claiming the opposite against all visible evidence!

[hearthesilence]

FWIW, Metrograph is once again showing a 35mm print around Christmas time, but I know it's screened elsewhere in the country in 35mm over the past few months. I should add that one booker stated that all 35mm prints come from the original 1999 run - as far as they knew, no newer prints have ever been struck for repertory programming. Honestly, if people are going out of their minds about the look of the film, they should just buy a ticket and attend a screening and then look at the Blu-ray afterwards.

[Roger Ryan]

... Honestly, if people are going out of their minds about the look of the film, they should just buy a ticket and attend a screening and then look at the Blu-ray afterwards.

True, but as I noted earlier, the 35mm screening at the TIFF Kubrick retrospective in 2014 with Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan in attendance (although not for long) was a mess with every other reel looking completely different from the reels coming in between. Who knows what you'll be seeing at a 35mm screening these days. I think the release may have even been compromised during the initial 1999 run due to Kubrick not being alive to inspect the prints going out as he did for earlier releases.

That's not to say that I don't trust his cameraman to make an accurate grading of the film for this UHD release.

[hearthesilence]

Good points, and I should walk back what I said in light of this comment from Larry Smith:

Well ... the film grade. I don't know, in Stanley's career as a filmmaker, if he ever allowed his film to be graded, color graded by anybody else but him. I don't think it happened at all, but I'm not a hundred percent sure on that. It certainly didn't happen, I can say, from Dr. Strangelove all the way through Eyes Wide Shut. So the tragedy of that was, that after he delivered the final cut, the film wasn't completely finished in terms of color grading. Well, it wasn't finished at all in terms of color grading, but we had a level of control over that already. Because again, unlike most other filmmakers, we used to give the labs our printer lights. So we knew what we were getting was what we were telling them that we wanted.

So you could arguably say the film was always going to be 70-odd-percent, 80% in the area that it should have been, but it wasn't finished, and it got finished by other people in the chaos after he died. I first saw the finished film at the premiere in L.A. and personally I wasn't too pleased with it, because they should have called me, and they should have gotten me in. Even though I was working on something else [at the time], I would've done something. So the film was never finished I would say definitely not to his standard, and certainly not the way I would've finished it. Now, fast forward to where we are now, and having the discussions with Criterion, they asked me what did I think about the look of the film? And I told them what my view was and they said, "Well, we think exactly the same thing."

So we then did a whole grading session based on how I felt it should be. And also, remember this: Eyes Wide Shut, when we shot, it was all force-developed two stops, at a time when you don't have the post-production facilities that you have now. So there were things that weren't corrected. As an example, there's a scene in the overdose scene in the bathroom where when you track through the bathroom, there's a chrome strip, which is like a mirror. And my focus puller, my first [assistant cameraperson], was in that — and not just a glimpse; you could see who it was, it was a fairly slow track. That was never [fixed]. So things like that I was able to rectify.

[Peacock]

I watched the Criterion reissue so see if my opinion (not positive) had changed over time. The first hour is brilliants, razor sharp dialogue, top notch performances by Kidman and Cruise. After that it falls into woowoo Bosch Imperiati sex party crazyland.
After aother half hour EWS stuggles to right itself on the rails but cannot. It's like someone who tries to convince you something illogical makes sense only to make it seem even crazier.
The Criterion extras make a big deal about how Kubrick replicated NYC but even that seems false: wrong extras, body language, street lighting.

[MichaelB]

My so-called Apple Intelligence AI-powered summary that typically mashes up wholly unrelated emails/forum threads has just thrown up this splendid juxtaposition.

[flyonthewall2983]

Is it true one of the masks from the movie is in the Epstein files

[Noiretirc]

I heard somewhere that all the masks got transferred to ICE.

[Black Hat]

The Criterion extras make a big deal about how Kubrick replicated NYC but even that seems false: wrong extras, body language, street lighting.

I dislike Schrader, but here, he is correct.

[Yakushima]

Heads-up: a Kubrick's retrospective is currently underway at Yale Film Archive. All films are projected from 35mm copies. All screenings are free and open to the public. Eyes Wide Shut will be shown on April 9, 2026.

[vertigo]

I think I am the only user that entered into Sir Evelyn de Rothschild's building in Londinium three times, yes, I have said 3, and get out more poor. Look his finger. That office was the proof that money can buy all. I wonder if the photographer was or is still alive.

[Stefan Andersson]

On similarities between Eyes Wide Shut and Richard C. Sarafian´s Fragment of Fear (1970):
https://brightlightsfilm.com/the-invisi ... ly-saw-it/

[JSC]

I've never been able to warm to Eyes Wide Shut, even though there are parts of it that are brilliant.
I remember seeing it opening day back in 1999 and something always felt a bit off about it. Maybe there
was just too much publicity riding on it at the time, but having seen it again more recently, it still seems
flawed to me. It's too bad that Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh had to back out of the project, since
Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson (as much as I respect their work) seemed a bit flat to me.

[hearthesilence]

I don't think it ever would've worked with Keitel, there's no way they were going to get along. He was asked about the film in a television interview and even though he wouldn't go into details (at least in the clip I saw), he made it clear he thought Kubrick was "disrespectful" in his approach and that was a flat out deal breaker.

[swo17]

I want to see the Woody Allen version

[JSC]

I'm not doubting that Keitel had good reasons for leaving. It's just a shame, since he
would have brought something interesting to the part. I think there was some interview
with Gary Oldman where he mentioned that Keitel got fed up with Kubrick asking him
to do multiple takes of walking through a door.

[beamish14]

I want to see the Woody Allen version

John Le Carre got as far as a long walk with Kubrick and had no clue as to what their script should be about.

Honestly, I’d rather see a version with Steve Martin than Woody Allen

[The Curious Sofa]

Unlike so many Kubrick movies, which felt ahead of their time, like JSC I have never been able to get on board with Eyes Wide Shut. This vision of theatrical hetero kink always struck me as stuck in the cinematic Euro sleaze of the '60s/'70s, which I often enjoy but find hard to take seriously.

It's not the supporting performances that I have a problem with; it's the stunt casting of the real-life married couple Cruise and Kidman. Setting aside my reservations about Cruise's acting abilities (when he steps outside his action-comfort zone, he delivers performances that I'd describe as "shouty") I can't think of any other star who is less capable of generating erotic chemistry with a co-star than him. Denzel Washington might come close, but that seems to be a deliberate choice. There is also something oddly self-conscious about Kidman's acting centrepiece here, although I think she's a great actress otherwise.

Perhaps it's just that I can't relate to someone being so insecure that they become unstuck when their partner confesses to still being attracted to others and this being the thing that sets the plot in motion. Of course, that comes from a source written long before the sexual revolution.

I only have watched the film twice so far and I'd like to revisit it in light of the recent Criterion release, which looks far better than the poor-quality Blu-ray I last watched. Maybe I'll finally see the light.

[hearthesilence]

Since the story is transposed to late ‘90s America, and given the occupation (highly regarded physician), I would have liked an Asian-American leading man, whether East Asian or Indian American, but realistically I think it would have been a challenge to get it made at the same scale without a bankable star. (I can’t think of one in 1999 that would have fit the bill. The only East Asian stars in Hollywood were Hong Kong stars that wouldn’t come off as American citizens.) Tom Cruise still works without feeling compromised, but it would’ve been interesting to see. Becoming a doctor was a common ambition in the Asian-American community, one many carried out, and making the ethnic difference (which is explicit in the original story, albeit with a Jewish doctor in an anti-semitic Austrian world) more pronounced would also play into the idea of assimilation as one aspect of desired social climbing, especially if it pits the idea of a “model minority” against the private vices of the upper echelons of society. But I don’t want to take this too far because then whose movie is this?

[MichaelB]

I don't think it ever would've worked with Keitel, there's no way they were going to get along. He was asked about the film in a television interview and even though he wouldn't go into details (at least in the clip I saw), he made it clear he thought Kubrick was "disrespectful" in his approach and that was a flat out deal breaker.

Interestingly, Paul Schrader said that, when making Blue Collar, Keitel needed a fair number of takes before he was truly happy with his performance (the technical challenge from Schrader's perspective being that co-star Richard Pryor would be good on the first take, brilliant on the second, but diminishing returns would set in thereafter as Pryor got bored), which suggests that it wasn't the number of takes that was the problem per se as the fact that Keitel didn't know why he was being asked to do yet more once he'd—as far as he was concerned—nailed what he was trying to do.

Perhaps it's just that I can't relate to someone being so insecure that they become unstuck when their partner confesses to still being attracted to others and this being the thing that sets the plot in motion. Of course, that comes from a source written long before the sexual revolution.

God, I can! I had a partner exactly like that, and I didn't realise this at first, so I'd casually use words like "attractive" to describe other women, and she'd assume that I was pretty much announcing my intention to bang them behind my back. She made this explicit when she rang me up one evening (we're almost coming up to the thirtieth anniversary of that phone call and I can still remember huge chunks of it verbatim) and literally went through a list of pretty much every woman I've ever mentioned to her in order to grill me about my intentions towards them (I remember that phrase particularly vividly), and our relationship never recovered from that. Not least because pretty much overnight I switched from saying the first thing that popped into my head to carefully parsing every syllable lest she read it the wrong way, which isn't an ideal situation in a relationship—and she'd still manage to read it the wrong way regardless.

(Interestingly, and probably relevantly, the only two women I've been out with who had a problem with that kind of thing had been cheated on in the past, so I do understand where they were coming from, even if their concerns were wildly misplaced with me. Whereas my wife has never been cheated on and thinks that the idea that I'd cheat on her is absolutely hilarious—and she's right—so we can be totally open about whether or not we find other people attractive.)

[The Curious Sofa]

I’m not claiming that such people don’t exist, but I don't find it a compelling driving motivation for a film of this scope. While many may believe their partner shouldn’t find anyone else attractive, that perspective strikes me as somewhat immature, and I struggle to take anyone who holds it, it seriously. This is one of the issues I have with updating Schnitzler’s work to a contemporary setting: within the context of the early 20th century, the protagonist’s turmoil feels far more understandable, than a supposedly worldly man of the present. A less conventionally handsome actor than Cruise may also have worked better, especially when matched with someone like Kidman. In that case I'd buy the insecurity more.

[MichaelB]

I’m not claiming that such people don’t exist, but I don't find it a compelling driving motivation for a film of this scope. While many may believe their partner shouldn’t find anyone else attractive, that perspective strikes me as somewhat immature, and I struggle to take anyone who holds it, it seriously.

You say that in the abstract, but I've actually lived through it, twice (although second time round the girlfriend in question got dumped within days; I wasn't going through that again). And in neither case was I expecting it to happen.

In fact, come to think of it, I saw Eyes Wide Shut a mere three years after living with someone who had a similarly obsessive personality to Tom Cruise; I don't think she literally set out on a weird nocturnal odyssey to try to get her head straight about what she'd convinced herself I'd been getting up to behind her back, but it wouldn't have surprised me one iota if she'd done it in her head. And I absolutely think it's a compelling driving motivation for a narrative—why would it not be?