Friday, 16 July 1999

WEEKEND PREVIEW

Welcome to the first truly wild, wild weekend of the summer. Four major releases in one summer weekend. Four almost completely separate audiences. Eyes Wide Shut is truly a movie for adults. Lake Placid is gloriously silly fun that will appeal to adults and kids. The Wood is, you have to admit, being marketed to a black audience first and foremost. And Muppets From Space is kid stuff, pure and simple. Being out of town this week has cost me the opportunity to check out The Wood and Muppets From Space. I reviewed Lake Placid last month (right here) and allow me to say right now, welcome to the bandwagon, gang. As a friend said to me, "It's okay to be a quote whore if you're right." This movie now looks to be one of the summer's true surprise hits. I look forward to seeing it again myself. Finally, Eyes Wide Shut opens. More on that below.

Holding over in what I expect to be one of the strongest holds of the summer so far is American Pie, which seems to just be starting its run near the top of the weekly box office lists. Big Daddy will almost certainly move past Wild Wild West at the box office and in your hearts. And look for Star Wars: Episode One -- The Phantom Menace to kick off the weekend with $390 million domestic already in the bank.

On the art house front, The Blair Witch Project hits a few screens. If you couldn't put up with my Wednesday ravings long enough to read the transcript, you're still just a click away. Hugh Hudson has finally recovered from Greystoke and has a movie with some buzz coming, My Life So Far. Again, haven't seen it. But I hope to soon. And I will continue to press you to see Run Lola Run, no matter what your age, Buena Vista Social Club, if you love the beat of drums and the wail of horns and The Dinner Game, if you have any love of French farce. Three wonderful films that are worth your hard earned cash.

Box Office Extra will arrive at noon e.s.t. with all the screen counts and my weekend guesstimates.

THE BAD: First, before reviewing Eyes Wide Shut, let me write about the CG covers for sex that have become such the point of controversy. My sense that Warner Bros. blew it by waving the red flag in front of the critical bull by showing the incomplete product is, I now believe, dead on. Especially after reading Roger Ebert's interview with Tom Cruise (which contains one massive spoiler which could have and should have been avoided). I actually felt bad for Roger as he restrained his intensity of feeling on the subject (as expressed in his column and Cruise gave him what seemed both to be the party line and his truth. The issue sucks up almost a third of Roger's interview, as printed in the New York Post (again, mind the spoiler). And it just isn't worth that much effort. The discussion will distract from the work more than the CG cover does. And where Roger, I feel naively, tries to buttonhole Cruise into being the point man for the fight against the MPAA's failure to make a reasonable adult rating work, Cruise just puts it all back in Kubrick's hands, saying Stanley knew this was coming. The truth is, there will have to be commercial demands that push the MPAA into a change, just as PG-13 was created because Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was not going out as an R. Eyes Wide Shut will not be a $150 million film and, in a moment where governmental hyperbole is in vogue, it is unreasonable to expect that the time for change is now. Add in the whining by Democrats about Republicans "publishing pornography on the web" by publishing "The Starr Report" and the climate is all wrong.

But I digress...

I would say that if you took a poll of an audience that was not familiar with the controversy, maybe 2 percent would notice that there may have been something askew with some of the bodies obscuring the 4 acts of sex that are obscured. Even more telling, I would say that only about 15 percent of people would be able to tell you where the CG was, even if they went into the theater looking for it. Compared to the figures on deck in the overhead shot in Titanic, these human forms are remarkable. Whoever built these six electronic humans (there is one black cloaked, shapeless figure that any CG monkey could have done) has done some real breakout work. The human shape has eluded programmers and you still get the feeling that if one of these bodies had to move, the jig would be up in a hurry. But these characters look pretty damned real. It is ironic that the movie itself has made the work easier because the scenes the CG is used in involve hardbodies whose lack of major rear body curves made the reality less demanding. In the end, these figures are used to do exactly what would be done to deal with more graphic sex in most films. You still can clearly see that people are having extremely vigorous, multi-partnered, orgiastic sex. You just can't see the thrusting hips anymore. Had Spike Lee rendered his Plato's Retreat scenes in Summer of Sam with as much bravado as these "fixed" scenes, he would have had a better movie. I hope the critics who were displeased with the Saturday Night Massacre screening of EWS will step back into a theater, if only for that one controversial minute, to see if the final outcome really was a travesty.

THE GOOD : There is no question that Eyes Wide Shut is good. In the Kubrick pantheon, it fits most closely to 2001: A Space Odyssey in that it will take many, many viewings before you can be sure any of us have caught everything that went on, textually and sub-textually. I'm not going to get into clues that seem to be there so as not to spoil anything. Even more so, I look forward to seeing your interpretations of what certain things may mean. The film embodies the Kubrick-designed ad campaign in one huge way. This film is Cruise, then Kidman and Kubrick. Kubrick may belong in first position, but it is appropriate that he floats to the back because his work as a director in the film is not overt. There are classically Kubrick tracking shots here and there. But what is remarkable about his work here isn't about the camera. It's about sheer chutzpah. The balls of this man staying inside "The Mask Sequence" for as long as he does without giving the audience a chance to breathe is like watching a ballerina dancing on a wire over the Grand Canyon. There were, I'd say, some unintentional laughs in both screenings I attended, because people just couldn't deal with the portentousness (note: not pretentiousness) of it all for so long. The choice to observe Nicole Kidman and her remarkable shape in ways that you wouldn't normally see in a movie. (Note: Underwear plays a big role in this film...more so than nudity.) The choice to shoot Cruise from some very wrong angles and Cruise's willingness to be less than perfect at times. (Watching Cruise play one scene shirtless shows his torso to be made up of all kinds of quirky shapes.) And the choice not to shy away from artifice at times. (Of all the "service" people in the film, only one is not waiting, at a dead stop from all other work, for Cruise's arrival. That had to be intentional.)

Cruise and others have talked about the apartment in the movie being a literal representation of Kubrick's home with his wife when they lived in New York. Beautiful digs indeed. But Dr. and Mrs. Harford seemed a little out of place there to me. This may have been a personal film for Kubrick, but my sense would be that if he and his wife were being sucked into a world that asked too much from them as the world asks too much of the Harfords in this film, then The Kubricks were more a part of that world and not quite the tourists that Bill and Alice (Tom and Nic) are in this film. But it's a small quibble.

PAGE TWO: "My Eyes On The Acting And Will You Be The Ugly?"