No Late Movies Blogathon this year? I’m always late in announcing it and attempting to round up participants, and this year I’ve been pleasantly busy with three video essays for three different companies at various stages of (in)completion, so basically nothing got done. But I do hope to write something on the theme myself. It having been twenty years since I actually watched EYES WIDE SHUT, I figure maybe I should look at that — a late film, a final film, a posthumous film and a Christmas film all in one.
My previous impression of it, for the record, was that it was enjoyable and pretty but sort of inept. Long-winded, heavy-handed, unconvincing on every level. I was fairly convinced Kubrick would have tightened it later had he lived, as he did with 2001, BARRY LYNDON and THE SHINING quite late in the process (the last-named was pruned after its US release, resulting in a shorter UK version). But the news headline declaring LUCKY TO BE ALIVE would still have been hilarious. It’s a very funny film, but it’s the only Kubrick film where I can’t always decide if I’m laughing with or at it.
But I should put that opinion in the past tense because who knows, everything could change. It would be nice to think I’ve evolved. Or that the film has.
It would make sense for me to get the film watched and written up by the seventh, the usual closing date of the blogathon. And then I need to get back to Chaplin — A WOMAN OF PARIS is next, another film of would-be sophistication, decadent parties and improbably melodrama, another film whose director rather baffled his usual audience…
shadowplay 