TM2YC said:
On the radio yesterday, somebody suggested 1917 was connecting strongly with younger viewers because the one-shot thing subconsciously recreated the immersive feeling of playing videogames like Call of Duty (which obviously contain no cuts). An interesting theory, could be some truth in it.
Not gonna lie, it occurred to me in the first 20 minutes how similar in feeling it was to some FPS games, notably
Resistance: Fall of Man. But it's a bit of a catch-22, because games for the last 20+ years have increasingly been attempting to become more cinematic. Sometimes if you were sitting in someone's living room, watching them play a game, the line between a movie and a game would be very thin indeed. But I'm far too old for this to be a generational thing, I think it might just depend on personal experience/preference. I really liked it anyway.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Makes for an awkward Christmas movie with the family.
Director Stanley Kubrick submitted a cut of this film 4 days before he died. He wasn't around to hear that it wouldn't get the R-rating he'd hoped for, nor could he finish the scoring or post-production for it. Apparently Kubrick went through a long process of adapting the novel, originally aiming for a comedy starring Woody Allen or Steve Martin, then a drama with Harrison Ford or Alec Baldwin, finally settling on something like a suspense/thriller with Tom Cruise. I think the source material (Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler) just isn't very interesting for me. It seems meant to be a depressing piece of introspective Eastern European turn-of-the-century literature.
Kubrick's film starts out very well, with a great show of the dynamic between Cruise's "Dr. Bill" and his wife, played by real-life wife, Nicole Kidman. Kidman, as in nearly every film of hers, is the best part of this movie. She gives a riveting monologue early on that would shake the foundations of any married man. The implication is that despite all they have built together and everything he has done to love her and provide for her as a husband, deep down he is not enough for her and she craves another man. That is the kind of honest statement that can never be unsaid, and is hard to do anything about in a marriage.
The film ostensibly is meant to be following Dr. Bill as he tries unsuccessfully to deal with this, basically by looking for some sexual ego-stroking or revenge or parity, but life keeps preventing this in very un-sexy ways. (If you saw trailers and tuned into this to watch an erotic thriller, you got played. The infamous "orgy" scene is really pretty tame and almost done like a tour through a gallery of Renaissance paintings...it's all pretty to look at, but there's no "shock", nothing scandalous.) The absurdity of these events might be what prompted Kubrick to consider this as a dark comedy, but the tone of these is very uneven and problematic.
It's also problematic in that it totally excludes the point of view from anyone who isn't a white male, and the white males don't have anything interesting to say. It doesn't reach any answers for the questions it asks. The "mystery" is incredibly straightforward and not suspenseful at all. You know the advice to writers to "kill your darlings"? Well, at this point in Kubrick's career, nobody was giving him that advice. He luxuriates in every shot, whether it moves the characters or the plot forward or not. I checked my watch at just shy of 2 hours... most movies would've ended by then, and I felt like the plot was just starting to get going in this one. A well-shot flick, but ultimately a waste of time.