August 23, 2007

DVDs, 8/23.

Eyes Wide Shut Eyes Wide Shut is to see a new, unrated release on Region 1 DVD, and yesterday at Cinematical, Jeffrey M Anderson argued the case for the defense; today, Karina Longworth tells us she's been thinking off and on for some time about writing a book about Kubrick's last film, but...

Every time I gear myself up to actually do the writing, I inevitably lose confidence - something happens and I think, "Oh, nobody cares about that movie."

Jeffrey's post - and, especially, the comments it has engendered - has possibly convinced me otherwise. It's one thing for a couple of critics to remain fascinated by a widely-reviled film ten years after its release, but those comments suggest a common relief among Eyes Wide Shut lovers: they're all basically saying, "Finally, it's okay for me to come out of the closet about this."

Inland Empire "was an overwhelming experience on the big screen, a three-hour waking nightmare that derives both its form and its content from the splintering psyche of a troubled Hollywood actress, played by Laura Dern," writes Dennis Lim for Slate. "But the natural home for this shape-shifting epic may in fact be the small screen.... [Y]ou sense that this lurid, grubby fantasy springs from deep within the bowels of YouTube as much as from inside its heroine's muddy unconscious. The DV that Lynch has come to cherish is the medium of home movies, viral video, and pornography - the everyday media detritus we associate more with television and computer monitors than movie theaters, more with intimate or private viewing experiences than communal ones."

The Films of Michael Hanke "Kino's new box set The Films of Michael Haneke, covering the German-born, Austrian-raised director's major works from The Seventh Continent in 1989 to The Piano Teacher in 2001, is its own seductive and treacherous lotusland," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "It's a must-have item for cinephiles, but beware: Once you enter Haneke's world, it's not easy to get out." Also, The Call of Cthulhu is "sometimes funny but never a spoof."

In the New York Press, Matt Peterson blows a kiss to Facets and reviews American Revolution 2 and The Murder of Fred Hampton: "It feels alien to us now, but these films show a time when protests were literally dangerous—back when slang cut like a knife, the leaders were charismatic and convincing and 'the man' was genuinely fearful of what might happen."

"Hou [Hsiau-hsien]'s Three Times, which I've been viewing repeatedly in parts, is politically and historically informed like much of Hou's work and embodies his characteristic formalism," writes MS Smith.

Blake Ethridge vs Deep Discount DVD: Parts 1 and 2.

DVD roundup: Cinema Strikes Back.



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Posted by dwhudson at August 23, 2007 1:22 PM

Comments

This paranoid, highly conspiratorial interpretation of Eyes Wide Shut made the film work in a pretty cool, new way for me.

THE LINK:
http://www.konformist.com/flicks/eyeswideshut.htm

AN EXCERPT:

An Interpretation of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut

Adam Gorightly

In Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut, are numerous veiled allusions to the CIA's MK-ULTRA mind control experiments and Monarch sex slave programming, subjects which readers of The Konformist should be well familiar. According to believed victims of Monarch abuse, their ranks number literally in thousands, and it has been alleged that these very same victims have been used extensively as sex slaves, drug mules and assassins. According to varied sources, Monarch programming begins immediately at birth, and is carried out through the lives of its victims, as they are used by intelligence agencies and secret societies like mere pawns on a gameboard, until--in many instances--they have outlived their usefulness, and are terminally "discarded". While this author does not buy lock, stock and barrel all of the sordid tales associated with Monarch abuse, I nonetheless suspect that it does actually exist in many cases, regardless of all the disinformation that exists in mind control lore obscuring the true reality of the situation. Like all weighty subjects--conspiratorial or otherwise--one must separate the wheat from chaff, which is not an easy proposition, to say the least. According to Per Sewen of Illuminati News, he viewed Eyes Wide Shut with a woman who had been "subjected to Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) by the Illuminati and she found it very, very accurate. None of us had any idea what the movie was about, so it was a shock for both of us, especially as these kinds of movies can be very triggering for victims of SRA. And it was. This girl didn't feel well afterwards..."

Posted by: Ju-osh at August 23, 2007 1:46 PM

Well. That's a new one on me. Would Kubrick really have an interest in such things?

Posted by: David Hudson at August 23, 2007 2:24 PM

Hopefully the "Eyes Wide Shut" release won't come in one of those cheap snap cases like all the other Kubrick movies!

Posted by: jordon at August 23, 2007 7:59 PM

My now-wife made me a homemade Haneke Box Set for Christmas, which has everything available (including Caché) in it (except The Castle, which just came out). She cut out pictures of the director, lamenated them on a box, and filled it with all of his films.

Could I ever have doubted I married the right woman?
True love.... *sigh*

Posted by: Tom at August 24, 2007 8:16 AM

Since I follow your blog, Tom, I know that wedding took place pretty recently, too - hope it's not too late for me to say, "Congrats!" to you both.

Posted by: David Hudson at August 24, 2007 9:54 AM