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The critics are the ones with their "eyes wide shut" ...

Posted by onetrick on August 12, 2009 at 19:01:31:
Like many of Kubrick's films, this one was panned and misunderstood at the time of its release and gained in stature and grandeur only as time passed and the general public's sensiblities caught up with Kubrick's.

So it was with 2001, now widely considered one of the highest cenematic achievements of all ... so it was with Full Metal Jacket, which disappointed audiences with its failure to live up to their expectations of what a "post-Vietnam War Movie" should be (Kubrick's ambition was much greater, and masterfully realized) ... and The Shining, which disappointed King's horror fans, but horrified the discerning film goers with a terrifying study of that greatest of all evils, the imperishable capacity of the human spirit to murder and mutilate those it is most closely bonded to in nature.

EWS, in its own rite, is a stunning mediation on the power of the human sexual psyche, how we attempt to control it, how we attempt to confine it within social conventions and moral systems, and how this all amounts, ironically, to a mere absurd masquerade -- ironically, since, in the film's venacular, it is the true carnal nature of the human psyche which finds its expression in a masquerade. The film asks, poignantly, if our human experience is a fountainhead of our animal spirits, or an ethereal dream of social ideals -- a dialectic which reveals itself as a paradox, and the conceptual fulcrum of which is, for Kubrick, the institution of marriage. How do we make this social concoction work, when, as the film clearly shows, it can so easily be knocked out of its orbit.

I liked it.

BTW, Pollack is barely passable, in my opinion. The film suffered when Harvey Keitel, Kubrick's original choice (and who would have been SENSATIONAL in the role), walked off the film. And for those who found Leelie Sobiesky "wanting" in her role as the Lolita-esque prostitute, I can only say that I found myself "wanting" whenever she was on the screen.

Finally, future generations of men for time immemorial will be grateful to Kubrick for his cinematic rendering of Nicole's exsquisite physical attributes.