Eyes Wide Shut (Unrated Edition) [HD DVD] | ![Eyes Wide Shut (Unrated Edition) [HD DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51jF0j6ObnL._SL500_.jpg)
| Director: Stanley Kubrick
Actors: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Madison Eginton, Jackie Sawiris, Sydney Pollack
Studio: Warner Home Video
Category: DVD
List Price: $28.99
Buy New: $27.98
You Save: $1.01 (3%)
New (1) Used (3) from $19.99
Rating:  748 reviews
Sales Rank: 40242
Format: Ac-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Original Recording Remastered, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Languages: English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), English (Original Language)
Rating: Unrated
Media: HD DVD
Region: 0
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 159 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.1
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 5.3 x 0.5
MPN: 81833
UPC: 012569818330
EAN: 0012569818330
ASIN: B000I2J0VK
Theatrical Release Date: July 16, 1999
Release Date: October 23, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com
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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 743 more reviews...
 eyes wide shut bluray June 11, 2009
M. Lopez
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I just received this movie, and I can say that this is by far the most "Noisiest bluray" I've ever seen, I really doubt the movie is on 1080p, I think is barely 720p. The sound pcm 5.1 is really good, I hope to find in the future a new release of this great film with a real "pristine video quality"
 Good intentions? Poor execution. May 25, 2009
Eric J. Anderson (Ankeny, Iowa)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
The first time I saw Eyes Wide Shut, I focused on the revelation of the perversions of the rich and powerful. They have moved beyond morality. They believe they can get away with anything. Sadly, as we see the financial corruption in plain sight today in our banking and investment world, and their incestuous relationship with Washington -- which is bailing them out with trillions of taxpayer dollars -- it is clear that the oligarchy thinks it can screw the "little people" with impunity. In the sexual realm, there may be no difference, and the film depicts this. People are just pieces of meat, to be used for whatever whim these super-rich elites should desire. I suspect there is more truth to this aspect of Eyes Wide Shut than we would like to believe.
The second time I watched Eyes Wide Shut, I concentrated more on its theme of fidelity, jealousy, interactions within a marriage relationship, and of course the "adventure" Tom Cruise's character has as a result. What is the message here? There is something to be said for the safety and stability of home, though fantasies do intrude and can lead to danger, even destruction.
The concept of the film, to address these issues, was probably a reasonable goal. However, for all the labor expended on crafting this film, all the little details that the film buffs and movie historians will obsess over, all the craft involved in filming and editing, the movie is ultimately a flop.
Why?
The dialog is laughably bad at times. Cruise's and even Kidman's acting seems incredibly phony. The overall plot probably would have served as the framework for a good movie, had the script and the performances not been so awful. Even the erotic scenes are not titillating, because of the revolting and bizarre atmosphere in which they are contextualized.
Perhaps worst of all, the couple at the center of this story are not interesting people. Cruise does not in any way appear or act intelligent enough to make a credible physician in this role, not just because he's a pretty boy, but he simply doesn't have the bearing of a professional man. And why should we care about these people, seemingly sleepwalking through their pampered and conventional lives? Yes, the troubling things that the good doctor gets himself mixed up in give us a sense that he has confronted evil, and we do root for him on that basis. But at the end of the film, we almost do not care whether this couple stays together or breaks up.
The movie is pretty to look at, at times, with low-contrast naturally-lit interiors. The "orgy party" scenes are a bit more stark -- with the pseudo-cultic circle of people in robes and masks in their ceremonial rites. However, there is nothing mind-blowing like 2001 or the battle scenes in Full Metal Jacket.
It's hard to recommend this movie. For all its apparent intentions to tell a good story and comment on relationships and society, it feels to me like a dud. Perhaps like me, you will have to watch it twice to convince yourself of that, but frankly I think it would be a waste of time.
 Mix up on title May 21, 2009
Kupaianaha (Maui)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Got mixed up on video. I was sent HD copy and it took 6 weeks to get here. In the meantime I had purchased another one from another merchant. The original merchant was outstanding in handling the mix up. I will use them again.
Some Movies Go On Forever May 10, 2009
John F. Rooney
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
"Eyes Wide Shut," Stanley Kubrick's last major effort before his death, is beautifully photographed, well-mounted, but for long stretches very tedious, turgid, and overwrought. It's an adult fairy tale with a great deal of nudity. The mansion scenes with their sexual excesses by masked participants are staged in a grand rococo manner, but they seem like part of some moviemaking exercise.
Tom Cruise as usual is very intense, but this movie seen on a wide screen with many close-ups of him reveal that his acting talent and emotional range are severely limited. The moviegoer must live with Cruise for close to three hours which for a viewer can be an eternity. As movie time passes, he gets tiresome, a by-product of his mediocre acting. I think another actor with more depth could have sustained our interest. His then-wife Nicole Kidman is sublimated because his is the larger role.
Almost every woman who crosses his path tries to hit on him. For a successful Manhattan physician how could he be so naive, dense, and unworldly? His apartment is very spacious and elaborate, but it is nothing compared to Sydney Pollack's elaborate palace.
The scene in which Nicole is dancing with a lothario making a pass at her is endless. Every scene in the movie seems interminable.
The movie seems to skirt between a dream-like existence, a fantasy world and gritty reality at street level. Towards the end it's almost a murder mystery with Cruise playing the detective.
 Much meaning here May 10, 2009
Leonard Levicky (Observing the Joke)
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
Please be forewarned that these are spoliers since I am interested in maybe speaking to some detractors about some positive aspects of this movie that people may have overlooked.
Remember towards the end when it was mentioned by Pollack's character that the infamous night was much deeper down the rabbit hole than Cruises character could fathom derived from his hitherto background and life experience, and that he had basically gotten in over his head? Specifically that there were elite dynastic family names associated with the mysterious event which, if divulged to him would keep him up at night in a bad way... That is to say there just might be people who engage in rituals and symbolic activities as part of some cult for lack of a better, more sophisticated word which to the average joe are incomprehensible and otherworldly and to be simply cast off as so much weird stuff done by "weird" people - since naturally to us 9-5'ers we are certainly compartmentalized and in a secluded world - just as they are in theirs and therefore we cannot relate to each other - ever. And their fluff and nonsense may empirically be judged as such - objectively to us logical observers - especially pragmatic, non-superstitious types it comes off as "pretentious" and meaningless behavior. Yet I think to these "sophistos" and "culturos", with their impecable lineages thrive and live off of theater of life and grandiosity and pomposity.. the important point is it means something to them! Even if for just a time until they grow weary and bored and move onto something else - somewhere else. For ask yourself, once you have all the wealth and authority (I prefer this semantically over power) and your mind is rotting bored out of your decayed skull as a result of having done it all, owned it all, seen it all, etc, your activities become ostensibly more bizarre and perverse as some might call it and you just might engage in behavior which is out of touch with the rest of society.
Is it not possible that those ultra wealthy few that live among us but could never be us and conversely would say the same to you, that they would not want to mingle with the unwashed masses? Yes those 99.99999999% of us that are mere plebeians and must work normal jobs and are far too busy and underpriveleged and poor (economically) and unconnected to indulge in such far out scenes of lost time, and lost profane ritual. This is the crux of the matter and why some have a problem with the movie - they cannot make sense of the orgy scene...and why in hell should they?
So do not second guess Kubrick as saying he had created so many masterpieces in his time yet somehow inexplicably his last movie would be worthless and without meaning and merit. I believe Kubrick
was shining a light here - remember he had lived and had seen and heard many things from his lofty vantage point and was trying to show the rest of us something that lays dark and forbidden behind ornate locked gates. A world, among many other worlds within this earth that goes unnoticed and unknown except to those who were born to know and the priviliged whom might intersect it.
Maybe the convergence of "MK ultra" (look it up, it is declassified CIA record now) and illuminati are referenced ever so obliquely through the much more mundane story of a couple working through some shaky moments in their relationship. Brilliant!
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