Nicole Kidman Movie:

		List Price: $16.99		Label: Warner Home Video Salesrank: 4314 Released: January 22, 2008
		Our Price: $10.49
		Used Price: $10.26
		MPAA Rating: Unrated Media: Blu-ray

Editorial Review:
Stanley Kubrick’s daring last film is a bracing psychosexual journey, a riveting suspense tale and a career milestone for stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Cruise plays a doctor who plunges into an erotic foray that threatens his marriage – and may ensnare him in a murder mystery – after his wife’s (Kidman) admission of sexual longings. As the story sweeps from doubt and fear to self-discovery and reconciliation, Kubrick orchestrates it with masterful flourishes. Graceful tracking shots, rich colors, startling images: bravura traits that make Kubrick a filmmaker for the ages are here to keep everyone’s eyes wide open.

Description of Eyes Wide Shut [Blu-ray]:
It was inevitable that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut would be the most misunderstood film of 1999. Kubrick died four months prior to its release, and there was no end to speculation how much he would have tinkered with the picture, changed it, "fixed" it. We'll never know. But even without the haunting enigma of the director's death--and its eerie echo/anticipation in the scene when Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) visits the deathbed of one of his patients--Eyes Wide Shut would have perplexed and polarized viewers and reviewers. After all, virtually every movie of Kubrick's post-U.S. career had; only 1964's Dr. Strangelove opened to something approaching consensus. Quite apart from the author's tinkering, Kubrick's movies themselves always seemed to change--partly because they changed us, changed the world and the ways we experienced and understood it. And we may expect Eyes Wide Shut to do the same. Unlike Kubrick himself, it has time.

So consider, as we settle in to live with this long, advisedly slow, mesmerizing film, how challenging and ambiguous its narrative strategy is. The source is an Arthur Schnitzler novella titled Traumnovelle (or "Dream Story"), and it's a moot question how much of Eyes Wide Shut itself is dream, from the blue shadows frosting the Harfords' bedroom to the backstage replica of New York's Greenwich Village that Kubrick built in England. Its major movement is an imaginative night-journey (even the daylight parts of it) taken by a man reeling from his wife's teasing confession of fantasized infidelity, and toward the end there is a token gesture of the couple waking to reality and, perhaps, a new, chastened maturity. Yet on some level--visually, psychologically, logically--every scene shimmers with unreality. Is everything in the movie a dream? And if so, who is dreaming it at any given moment, and why?

Don't settle for easy answers. Kubrick's ultimate odyssey beckons. And now the dream is yours. --Richard T. Jameson

Eyes Wide Shut [Blu-ray] Reviews:
blue ray waiste
2009-10-30 - buy this on dvd. The blue ray is no better than dvd. This is the worst blue ray I own. Picture quality is poor. I have a new sony blue ray player and a samsung LED t.v. so the flaws really show.

The "sadistic" Mr. Kubrick
2009-10-21 - I have no intention of plowing my way through all the reviews of "Eyes" to see if anyone caught the De Sade element in this movie. The scene of the so-called orgy is in fact a literal representation of the high-literary sex scenes in the novels of the late-18th-century novelist Marquis De Sade. These scenes occur in all versions of "Justine" as well as in that novel's "twin" namely "Juliette." A catalog of Sade's personalized deliberate insult delivered to religious believers and 18th-century worshippers of "reason" alike would include the following list, all of which items appear in "Eyes":

(1) a mimicking of a religious edifice, normally a monastery of monks. Here, the monastery fuses with another element in Sade, namely, the isolated fortified castle.
(2) monks who systematically assault all Christian religious values. The red-cloaked "monk" who wields a incense censor (drawn from Roman Catholic religious ceremonies) which is juxtaposed against the near-naked females who form a kind of religious circle around him.
(3) The black cloaks worn the "watchers"--lots of voyeurism in this sexualized religious ceremony, including those figures who were brought in supposedly to mask the sex scenes--are in fact direct reference to the monk's robe worn by Sade's libidinous monks.
(4) Hints a torture practice--something much more explicit in Sade's fictions--as well as of some mysterious power that can reach outside the monastery/fortress and attack enemies on the outside: a plot factor realized in the incompletely developed harrowing of Dr. Hartford after the ceremony.

All these elements are very "literary" in the sense of "literary allusion" to be accidental on Kubrick's part. Whatever "moral" theme the movie possesses or pretends to (and it does this sporadically throughout the film), it is clear that Kubrick was trying to bring an updated of a Sadian (and "sadistic" if you will) version of how late 18th-century "rationalist" France's literary world was deep-sixed by its own involvement in the French Revolution. De Sade himself made up a part of this revolution until finally imprisoned for life by Napoleon, but much of his work is satirical in the mainstream tradition of 18th-Century French and English satire.

One of the things Kubrick--for whatever thematic issues he wanted to hawk abroad publcly--was doing was mimicking the view of "ordinary" people about the absoluteness of the separation between human holiness and human depravity. Sade scholarship and literary analysis has advanced sufficiently far today for us to recognize that much of his "blasphemy" is a mirror-image presented to the sentimentalist believer in the goodness of human nature. For Sade, such a simplicity is mirrored back to the sentimental reader in his rendering of a world consisting of nothing but villains and innocent victims. Dr. Hartford gets a whiff of this dialectic and then retreats back into his marriage.

Disgusting, why would anyone want to watch such a sick looking film!
2009-08-29 - I guess the fact that this marriage ended right after this release shows us all that it is an evil film and should be avoided like the plague.


Eye is best on blu-ray
2009-08-14 - There are a plethora of reviews of the movie, but my review is a comparison of the BD vs DVD version. The BD version is by far, the best version released for home use, even if there are purist who argue the loss of image space cut from the 4:3 format made into 16:9. The BD version removes the digital censoring used in the USA version, the difference is hardly worth the hoopla. The video and audio have far greater dynamic range, with greater color space and wider sound stage than the DVD. The video is brighter and sharper than when I saw the theatrical release. Audio has superior imaging and dynamic range equal or better than the theater.


Movie is great; quality of Blu-Ray poor
2009-07-12 - Please note this review is not about the movie itself, but rather the picture quality of the Blu-Ray version.

I am a big fan of this movie and some of the wonderful qualities of the film are the use of color and the set up of many of the wonderful shots. Unfortunately, the Blu-Ray does not upgrade/enhance the picture quality significantly over the DVD version. Using a Panasonic Blu-Ray player with a 50-inch Panasonic plasma screen TV, the quality of the picture was mediocre if not poor. There was visible pixelation and the colors did not 'pop'. This stands in contrast with the other Blu-Ray movies I have purchased and my OTA HD TV signal. Overall, disappointed.