Psycho-Sexual Santa Claus

Eyes Wide Shut

The Long Kiss Goodnight

Ho, ho, howdy, dear readers! It’s not quite time for Hanukkah or Christmas, but despite my lack of Holiday spirit this year (or perhaps because of it) I’m extra eager to watch Holiday movies. There are so many kinds of subgenres within the Holiday movie genre, and I plan to explore as many as I can. There is an odd trend among Holiday films, especially Christmas films, where filmmakers seem to derive great pleasure in juxtaposing the wholesomeness of Christmas against something shocking and depraved. This time of the year is certainly a time for love and a time for cheer, but it is also, apparently, a time for scintillating mysteries. Tonight’s films both explore the deepest, darkest parts of our psyches, and they also happen to take place during Christmastime. Up first was a film that I have wanted to watch for a very long time, a provocative and peculiar film from 1999 called Eyes Wide Shut. Eyes Wide Shut took 400 days to shoot, which the Guinness Book of World Records recognizes as the longest consecutive film shoot to date. Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist, who nearly killed Shelley Duval in the process of filming The Shining, and who ultimately worked himself to death. He died of a heart attack just six days after showing the final cut of this film to Warner Bros, and kept such vague, mysterious notes about this film that the marketing team didn’t know how to sell it. This film was ultimately marketed as an “erotic thriller”, which in some ways, I suppose it is. But in reality, this film is much more of a meandering journey of the self, an anxious exploration of marriage, and a vehicle for Nicole Kidman to shine like the star that she is. Trust me, I wish that Eyes Wide Shut was a more textbook psycho-sexual thrill ride, but it was mostly just Kubrick doing Kubrick, and creating chaos for chaos sake. Eyes Wide Shut is based upon Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle or “Dream Story”, and was originally centered upon a Jewish family. In fact, when Kubrick first decided to adapt this story in 1968, he envisioned a sex comedy starring the likes of Steve Martin, but somewhere along the way, when old friends no longer wanted to work with Kubrick due to fear of a long filming process, the director decided to make the protagonists Christian, and changed the narrative’s antisemitic threats be homophobic ones instead. The real slap in the face is that Kubrick used the most Jewish-sounding music he could find to score the film: Shastakovich’s Waltz No. 2. We could’ve had a silly, goofy, sexy comedy with Steve Martin playing an attractive Jewish doctor who is desired by everyone during Hanukkah but instead we got this. But I digress. Eyes Wide Shut is a long, winding road of intrigue, insecurity, and eroticism, and I took TOO many notes during it, none of which helped me make any sense of what I was watching. The film stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (famously a couple at the time) as Dr. Bill and Alice Harford, a young, hot couple, with a daughter, and a gorgeous apartment in New York City. The very first shot of the film is Nicole Kidman’s naked body, so I knew what I was and was not in for pretty early on in this film. We meet them on a night where the couple attends a boujie Christmas party, and both Bill and Alice are pursued by horny party-goers. Neither Bill nor Alice engage in this, but they do not fight the flirtations—they seem to welcome it. Bill runs into an old friend from med school, who is now a piano player, and while he catches up with him and flirts with a couple women, he is quickly thrust away by the host of this party. Mr. Ziegler, the rich host and shady patient of Dr. Bill’s is in trouble, because the sex worker he’s hired for himself, (to enjoy during this party??) has nearly overdosed. After helping this poor woman, Bill and Alice go home, where the trouble really begins. Nicole Kidman is always iconic, but her rolling a joint just might be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen her do. After effortlessly rolling a j, she smokes it with her husband and they begin to talk. Nicole’s slow-talking high-acting, next to Tom Cruise’s overly forced high-acting was shocking enough, but what comes next is pretty appalling. After Alice and Bill get into a pretty deep discussion about sex and the difference between female and male desire blah blah When Harry Met Sally did it better blah blah, Alice reveals that she’s had fantasies about another man, and Tom Cruise becomes butthurt past the point of no return. Now, I could keep telling you about this plot, about how things really escalate at this point in the film and yet the pace slows down significantly, but I’ve already wasted enough of my time explaining a movie that just gave me psycho-sexual blue balls. To make a long story short, Dr. Bill’s feelings of inadequacy and insecurity leads him on a late-night Christmas odyssey full of tits, ass, full bush, zero male nudity, and not nearly enough Nicole Kidman. I’m sorry, but I was under the impression that this was a Nicole Kidman movie, not a Tom Cruise movie. So that was the first disappointment. The second disappointment came from the fact that when things got spicy and some truths were revealed, all that was found was a fairly unsexy exploration of sex. You know when you’re a kid, and sex is the last thing you’re allowed to ask about but you’re so curious that you come up with your own made-up version of what it is based on what little you do know? That’s a little bit what this film felt like. Putting the most taboo, but curious, but crass, but enticing thing behind a curtain and going, “don’t look.” For that reason, Eyes Wide Shut kept me thoroughly compelled throughout its frenetic journey. But because I am an adult and I do know what sex is, I was disappointed by what was behind the curtain. Call me a philistine, call me basic, but I love a good, old-fashioned, sexy mystery. And very few films have actually delivered on this. Very few can achieve this without solely catering to the male gaze. There’s been a lot of talk of the male and the female gaze lately on Film Twitter, to the point that I don’t really want to comment on it. But this film is just so classically male-centric, despite and because of all of the attention placed upon the female form. It was a constant stream of Christmas trees, and tits. It was an endless supply of waif-ish women desperately wanting to fuck Tom Cruise. And while I’d hate to alienate anyone who found Eyes Wide Shut hot, I feel like it must be said for anyone looking for a hot movie, that this movie is not hot. I have never seen so many horny people in a movie, who simultaneously did not seem that into it. Maybe the over year-long exhaustion from the crew bled into this film too much, because it was really an effort to get through it. Everyone wants a piece of everyone during the holidays, apparently: in Tom Cruise’s case everyone wants to sleep with him, and for Geena Davis’ character in the next film I watched, The Long Kiss Goodnight, everyone wants to kill her. I’m going to try my best to be like Renny Harlin’s 1996 action-thriller The Long Kiss Goodnight, and keep this next review as short and sweet and silly as possible. This film stars Queen Geena Davis as Samantha Caine: a school teacher and mother happily living in a small town in Pennsylvania, until she bumps her head (in the [second] most dramatic car crash scene I’ve ever seen), and remembers she used to be a spy. Don’t you hate it when that happens? There’s a bit more to the plot than this, though the film struggles to get all of it out, and it also stars a hilariously brazen Samuel L. Jackson—who cites this film as his favorite role ever. Samantha, the happy amnesiac, was perfectly fine with her simple life, but now has no choice but to jump back in the game, after a Christmas parade she’s in is televised and viewed by some of her old enemies. Just normal Christmas stress. With some insane editing, an overly trusting Geena Davis, and some wild dream sequences, The Long Kiss Goodnight is basically Memento meets A History of Violence—but for the girlies! The dialogue is weird and clunky, but also randomly really funny, and some of the stunts are so ridiculous they could rival the ones in Speed. I had so much fun watching this movie, but I do want to point out some odd things that puzzled me greatly: Brian Cox calling Geena “frumpy”, Samuel L. Jackson putting on a fuzzy green paperboy hat, Geena throwing her child into a treehouse and her landing inside smoothly, Geena having short, bleached hair, Santana’s cover of “She’s Not There” going right into Patti Labelle’s “Lady Marmalade”, Samuel L. Jackson lying down in the street smoking a cigarette and not getting hit, and the sexual chemistry they tried to force upon Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson—when their friendly, coworker-level chemistry seemed just fine on its own. The Long Kiss Goodnight was just as over the top and sometimes just as hard to follow as Eyes Wide Shut but it was so much more thrilling to me, which I never would’ve guessed. This film is also not sexy, but it certainly tries to be. And despite all of the bizarre happenings, I actually loved how Geena Davis transformed herself into a terrifyingly capable assassin and Samuel L. Jackson was the helpless one. I love a Christmas movie, I love a psycho-sexual thriller, and I love when two crazy themes converge, so for that, I can fault neither film tonight. All I wanted from these films was holiday hotness, but even A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas was hotter than these.