Eyes Wired Shut (Worst Movie You've Ever Seen?)

Name: skittle

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Product:	Worst Movie You've Ever Seen?
Date:	31/10/07 (161 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It ends, eventually

Disadvantages: It ever began

I’ve seen some bad movies, it’s true. From appalling acting to awful camera work, there are some dreadful films out there, but some of them deserve special mention. Spiceworld is the first one that comes to mind. Obviously they were cashing in on the popularity of girl power, but the least they could’ve done was include an actual plot when they started filming this shocker.

Battlefield Earth is another one that made me shudder, how John Travolta didn’t die of embarrassment after ‘starring’ in this one I don’t know. Then there were Monkeybone and Freddie Got Fingered which both came out in 2001 and were both so desperately poor that I had to force myself to finish watching them. Then, of course, there was Glitter, the Mariah Carey vehicle that should’ve run her over, to be honest. It would’ve saved the rest of us an awful lot of torment if it had.

There is one film, however, that beats all of these to earn my personal award for the worst movie I’ve ever seen – mainly because in the run up to its release I’d been anticipating it so eagerly and then… But I’m getting ahead of myself here. The worst movie I’ve ever seen is Eyes Wide Shut.

Co-written and Directed by Stanley Kubrik and starring husband and wife (at the time) Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, the hype about Eyes Wide Shut was enormous, and I fell for it hook line and sinker. Of course, I should’ve smelt a rat when I noticed that all that anybody talked about was that Nicole Kidman went to the loo on film, but even that didn’t ring any alarm bells for me. And she did, go to the loo on film, I mean, but it was really nothing to get so over excited about, and it certainly did nothing to lift this film out of the garbage in my humble opinion.

Eyes Wide Shut is the story of New York Doctor William ‘Bill’ Harford (Cruise) and his wife, Alice (Kidman). The story, from what I can remember (it has been around eight years since I attempted to watch it, and I didn’t really understand it at the time anyway) was that Alice confided sexual fantasies about another man to her husband, Bill. For some reason that I never could quite fathom, this started him on a sexual journey that at one point found him at a really quite bizarre masked ball where all of the guests were members of a secret sexual society.

Ok, if I’m being totally honest here, most of this film went whistling right over my head and smacked straight into the wall at the back of the cinema. I didn’t have a clue what was going on for the vast majority of the time and found the long, drawn out scenes where nothing really happened annoying and irritating. Yes, the music was brilliant and the camera work was great, it was moody, dark and beautiful, but I didn’t have a flipping clue what was going on most of the time and felt absolutely nothing at all for the main characters. Not a thing.

It wasn’t just me, either. My husband was showing the clear and typical signs of ‘man being forced to watch stupid girly film by the other half’ that all men seem to have mastered so well. You know the signals girls, the long sighs, drumming fingers on the arm of his chair, nipping out for a smoke/drink/wee. Still, I’d wanted to watch this film so much that I made my mind up to grit my teeth and soldier on. It didn’t help.

For a film high in sexual content, Eyes Wide Shut wasn’t really sexy at all. Then again, I have absolutely no idea if it was intended to be sexy or not. In fact, I don’t really have any idea what type of a film Eyes Wide Shut was meant to be – perhaps that’s where I’m going wrong.

Anyway, after a monotonous hour or so of Eyes Wide Shut I noticed that it wasn’t just my husband and I who were having trouble enjoying this film, as our fellow cinemagoers began to leave the theatre in ones and twos.

I genuinely tried to stomach Eyes Wide Shut right through until the very end, I really did, but it was getting late and the film just kept droning on and on and on… at 159 minutes this is by no means a short film, and after more than two hours it was still apparently getting nowhere. So we finally gave up, admitted defeat and left the cinema well before the end of the film. That was the first time I’ve ever done that, no matter how bad the film has been, and I’ve never felt the need to do it again since, either. When we left the cinema there were only four people still in there watching the film. I’d love to know how many of them actually sat right through it to the bitter end.

Still, if the three quarters of Eyes Wide Shut that I did stare confusedly at the screen at were anything to go by, I don’t think I missed much. This is definitely one to avoid.

Sigh, though having said that, I’ll admit that I feel a little guilty slating this film so utterly when Kubrik was hailed as a genius and this was his last work. It’s just that for me Eyes Wide Shut was not only unremittingly dull but also, if you’ll pardon the expression way too far up it’s own ass.

Stanley Kubrik is generally viewed as one of the great directors of modern cinema - I guess I’m just too ordinary or too dim to truly appreciate his greatness.

Summary: Dreadful movie, do not be tempted.