Word: directoral
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...over and over again (fans murdering each other over opening night tickets realized soon enough that there were other showings--and nothing changed from one showing to the next!) The problem, of course, is that George Lucas lost his way a bit after a double-decade absence from the director's chair. He slowed down the plot with unnecessary detail (why, for goodness' sakes, did we need an introduction sequence to the first prequel that's supposed to start everything off?), forgot to make Darth Maul important, and tried too hard to make it a movie that could appeal...
...something like an exercise in emotional sadism. Without any sense of irony, they play at love like two young teenagers, not like adults made wise by past love affairs. And like teenagers, they fall away from each other and come back together with equal parts earnestness and bewilderment. Why director Roger Mitchell thought this age-inappropriate emotional roller coaster would be entertaining, I'll never know. It's not love that William Thacker and Anna Scott need. It's some semblance of emotional maturity, or at least organizational skills...
...female halves at one another's throats. Julia Roberts as Maggie Carpenter is everything a man can fear in a woman: pretty and sweet but a heartbreaker of the first order. Richard Gere plays her male alter ego the cynical, emotionally distant, and self-assured journalist Ike Graham. Had director Gary Marshall simply let these two archetypes battle it out on the farm fields of Maryland, all might have been well. But inevitably, Maggie and Ike leave their fairy tale roots behind and fall in love, at which point any energy the movie had to begin with is lost. There...
...often been said that Stanley Kubrick has a tendency to put mood ahead of content in his films. But while such a predilection for atmosphere would be a fault in other directors, in Kubrick it was a gift, and in Eyes Wide Shut this gift comes shining through. A sort of Everyman for a sexually liberated age, Eyes Wide Shut features Tom Cruise, a sex symbol himself, as its wandering pilgrim. And the overwhelming tone of the film is certainly one of wandering. Progressing from one self-contained vignette to another, the movie moves from a theme and variations motif...
...truth. And no dream is entirely a dream." Instead, the movie ends with a thud--a curse word, no less--that proves how desperate Kubrick was to shock. But even a shock would have been welcome. Instead, we got a tame lesson in perversion from supposedly the most astute director of our time...