Dr. Strangelove or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb; any fans?

[Byzantine Prince]

I just got the DVD. ~:cheers:
Is anyone else here a fan?
If so what's your favorite qoute?

[Big_John]

love it, kubrick's masterpiece, imo. but i don't have the dvd ~:(

don't know if i have a favorite quote.. my favorite scene is probably the discussion between ripper and mandrake about 'purity of essence' and fluoridation of water.

[InsaneApache]

Ok hows this from memory...

'Mein Fuhrer...I can walk!!!!!'

and the classic...

'Gentlemen, Gentlemen you cant fight in here!!!!....this is the war room'

:book:

[Beirut]

"But... he'll see the Big Screen!"

Great flick. I just bought Kubrick's Paths of Glory, which is an excellent (and devastating) film as well. I also have 2001: A Space Odessy, which I bought but didn't watch for six months until I bought my new TV.

There was a box set of Kubrick's movies that I saw in the store, but I didn't have the $150 to blow and it included Eyes Wide Shut which was awful. I'll just buy them one at a a time.

Spartacus. Full Metal Jacket. Barry Lyndon. Clockwork Orange.

Can't wait.

[Watchman]

Kubrik rules. And Strangelove rocks so hard it's not even real.

The big sign "S.A.C. - Peace is our profession" in the background of the soldiers assaulting the base has to be one of my favorite images ever. Probably tells something about my sense of humor.

The scene with the phone and the Coca-Cola vending machine was pretty brilliant too - "You'll be dealing with the Coca-Cola Company!" - as was the bomber crew's "gearing up" for their mission.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Ah. Great choice BP. So many absolutely hilarious quotes and scenes in that one.

[Byzantine Prince]

"But... he'll see the Big Screen!"

Great flick. I just bought Kubrick's Paths of Glory, which is an excellent (and devastating) film as well. I also have 2001: A Space Odessy, which I bought but didn't watch for six months until I bought my new TV.

There was a box set of Kubrick's movies that I saw in the store, but I didn't have the $150 to blow and it included Eyes Wide Shut which was awful. I'll just buy them one at a a time.

Spartacus. Full Metal Jacket. Barry Lyndon. Clockwork Orange.

Can't wait.

LMAO, EWS is my favorite movie of all time. Watch it again and again and you'll like it. It takes time. The onyl I'm not interested in is Lolita. That movie's concept makes me sick.

Paths of Glory is great too(and cheap ~;) ). I know only have 5 Kubrick films. I need Barry Lyndon though.

[Voigtkampf]

It is a legend of a movie. As a great Fallout fan, I have made some good connections between the two. I enjoyed it very much, and I'm currently scanning for the DVD.

The finest scene? That cowboy pilot captain, riding on the nuke as it fell down. I had a Fallout wallpaper with the exact theme, and remember Homer Simpson pulling off something similar. ~D



http://fusionanomaly.net/drstrangeloveridingthenuke.jpg

[Spino]

I LOVE Dr. Strangelove. One of the best comedies of all time.

"You try any preversions in there and I'll blow your head off!"

[Big King Sanctaphrax]

"This is it boys. Toe to toe combat with the Rooskies..."

[doc_bean]

The speech about women wanting to steal our precious bodily fluids :help:

[Sjakihata]

I didnt see this film - a mistake I can tell.

[Hurin_Rules]

Kubrick is my favorite director.

Dr. Strangelove is fantastic, especially when you think of the time in which it was made: the height of the cold war and not too long after McCarthyism. To make a satire on the whole thing in that age of communist witch hunts took a lot of balls. Even if it had sucked it would have been an achievement.

I finally saw Paths of Glory last weekend. Great flick.

I also highly recommend Barry Lyndon. It's a change of pace for Kubrick, I think, but underrated.

If he only hadn't made Eyes Wide Shut!

[Byzantine Prince]

I liked Eyes Wide Shut more then this film. I like both a lot though. The main thing about EWS is that it's really complex and if you don't watch a couple of times you won't get the full experience.

Ok if you want to get this on DVD make suer you get the 40th anniversary edition. It's a little darker then the normal one but the top and bottom black strips are gone. Also it's packed with extras and it looks pretty kewl.
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0002XNSY0.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
link (http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0002XNSY0/qid=1110563921/sr=2-2/ref=sr_2_3_2/701-0170853-8576376)

[Big King Sanctaphrax]

I liked Eyes Wide Shut more then this film

Does...not...compute...

[Byzantine Prince]

Well as I said Eyes Wide Shut is maybe my number 1 or 2 favorite movie of all time. You can't compute it because it's too complicated for you ~;) .

[Big King Sanctaphrax]

Nice use of the wink smilie to disguise a really rather offensive personal attack...

[Byzantine Prince]

Yeah I really learned my lesson.

[Big_John]

Yeah I really learned my lesson.hahahaha :laugh:


anyway, eyes wide shut was pretty weak, imo. i 'understood' it just fine, and have read more than a couple of critical analyses of it (trying to figure out why some people swear by it). just seemed pretty shallow to me. it's the kind of movie that should have come out like 30 years ago.. then it would have been something. now it's just stale, easily kubrik's weakest that i've seen.

[InsaneApache]

Yeah I really learned my lesson.

obviously not ~:confused:

[Byzantine Prince]

You don't get it.
I learned my lesson: always put a winking smiley when you offend someone and you don't want them to take it seriously. ~;)

[Spino]

Eyes Wide Shut was...

PURE UNFILTERED CRAP!!!

[Byzantine Prince]

I love how Spino always badmouths movie with enormous letters. That never gets old. Actually it does. Nevermind.

Just because you didn't like it doesn't men it wasn't as exceptional movie.

[Snowhobbit]

Sure it does ~D

[Byzantine Prince]

Here's Ebert's review

Eyes Wide Shut

BY ROGER EBERT / July 16, 1999



Cast & Credits
Dr. William Harford: Tom Cruise
Alice Harford: Nicole Kidman
Victor Ziegler: Sydney Pollack
Nick Nightingale: Todd Field
Marion: Marie Richardson
Milich: Rade Sherbedgia

Directed By Stanley Kubrick. Written By Kubrick And Frederic Raphael. Inspired By ``Traumnovelle`` By Arthur Schnitzler. Running Time: 159 Minutes. Rated R (For Strong Sexual Content, Nudity, Language And Some Drug-Related Material).

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Stanley Kubrick's ``Eyes Wide Shut'' is like an erotic daydream about chances missed and opportunities avoided. For its hero, who spends two nights wandering in the sexual underworld, it's all foreplay. He never actually has sex, but he dances close, and holds his hand in the flame. Why does he do this? The easy answer is that his wife has made him jealous. Another possibility is that the story she tells inflames his rather torpid imagination.

The film has the structure of a thriller, with the possibility that conspiracies and murders have taken place. It also resembles a nightmare; a series of strange characters drift in and out of focus, puzzling the hero with unexplained details of their lives. The reconciliation at the end of the film is the one scene that doesn't work; a film that intrigues us because of its loose ends shouldn't try to tidy up.

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman star as Dr. Bill and Alice Harford, a married couple who move in rich Manhattan society. In a long, languorous opening sequence, they attend a society ball where a tall Hungarian, a parody of a suave seducer, tries to honey-talk Alice (``Did you ever read the Latin poet Ovid on the art of love?''). Meanwhile, Bill gets a come-on from two aggressive women, before being called to the upstairs bathroom, where Victor (Sydney Pollack), the millionaire who is giving the party, has an overdosed hooker who needs a doctor's help.

At the party, Bill meets an old friend from medical school, now a pianist. The next night, at home, Alice and Bill get stoned on pot (apparently very good pot, considering how zonked they seem), and she describes a fantasy she had about a young naval officer she saw last summer while she and Bill were vacationing on Cape Cod: ``At no time was he ever out of my mind. And I thought if he wanted me, only for one night, I was ready to give up everything ... .'' There is a fight. Bill leaves the house and wanders the streets, his mind inflamed by images of Alice making love with the officer. And now begins his long adventure, which has parallels with Joyce's Ulysses in Nighttown and Scorsese's ``After Hours,'' as one sexual situation after another swims into view. The film has two running jokes, both quiet ones: Almost everyone who sees Bill, both male and female, reacts to him sexually. And he is forever identifying himself as a doctor, as if to reassure himself that he exists at all.

Kubrick's great achievement in the film is to find and hold an odd, unsettling, sometimes erotic tone for the doctor's strange encounters. Shooting in a grainy high-contrast style, using lots of back-lighting, underlighting and strong primary colors, setting the film at Christmas to take advantage of the holiday lights, he makes it all a little garish, like an urban sideshow. Dr. Bill is not really the protagonist but the acted-upon, careening from one situation to another, out of his depth.

Kubrick pays special attention to each individual scene. He makes a deliberate choice, I think, not to roll them together into an ongoing story, but to make each one a destination--to give each encounter the intensity of a dream in which this moment is clear but it's hard to remember where we've come from or guess what comes next.

The film pays extraordinary attention to the supporting actors, even cheating camera angles to give them the emphasis on two-shots; in several scenes, Cruise is like the straight man. Sydney Pollack is the key supporting player, as a confident, sinister man of the world, living in old-style luxury, deep-voiced, experienced, decadent. Todd Field plays Nick, the society piano player who sets up Bill's visit to a secret orgy. And there is also a wonderful role for Vinessa Shaw as a hooker who picks up Dr. Bill and shares some surprisingly sweet time with him.

The movie's funniest scene takes place in a hotel where Bill questions a desk clerk, played by Alan Cumming as a cheerful queen who makes it pretty clear he's interested. Rade Sherbedgia, a gravel-voiced, bearded patriarch, plays a costume dealer who may also be retailing the favors of his young daughter. Carmela Marner is a waitress who seems to have learned her trade by watching sitcoms. And Marie Richardson is the daughter of a dead man, who wants to seduce Dr. Bill almost literally on her father's deathbed.

All of these scenes have their own focus and intensity; each sequence has its own dramatic arc. They all lead up to and away from the extraordinary orgy sequence in a country estate, where Dr. Bill gate-crashes and wanders among scenes of Sadeian sexual ritual and writhings worthy of Bosch. The masked figure who rules over the proceedings has ominous presence, as does the masked woman who warns Dr. Bill he is in danger. This sequence has hypnotic intensity.

The orgy, alas, has famously undergone digital alterations to obscure some of the more energetic rumpy-pumpy. A shame. The events in question are seen at a certain distance, without visible genitalia, and are more atmosphere than action, but to get the R rating, the studio has had to block them with digitally generated figures (two nude women arm in arm, and some cloaked men).

In rough-draft form, this masking evoked Austin Powers' famous genital hide-and-seek sequence. I have now seen the polished version of the technique, and will say it is done well, even though it should not have been done at all. The joke is that ``Eyes Wide Shut'' is an adult film in every atom of its being. With or without those digital effects, it is inappropriate for younger viewers. It's symbolic of the moral hypocrisy of the rating system that it would force a great director to compromise his vision, while by the same process making his adult film more accessible to young viewers.

Kubrick died in March. It is hard to believe he would have accepted the digital hocus-pocus. ``Eyes Wide Shut'' should have been released as he made it, either ``unrated'' or NC-17. For adult audiences, it creates a mesmerizing daydream of sexual fantasy. The final scene, in the toy store, strikes me as conventional moralizing--an obligatory happy resolution of all problems--but the deep mystery of the film remains. To begin with, can Dr. Bill believe Victor's version of the events of the past few days? I would have enjoyed a final shot in a hospital corridor, with Dr. Bill doing a double-take as a gurney wheels past carrying the corpse of the piano player.
No I hate Ebert as much as the next guy but he does have some good points here. Hmmm... he didn't like the ending, which I loved. I guess he should stick the Passion, seeing as he liked so. He's an idiot but he's still a second opinion that this movie is good. A very respected opinion at that.

[InsaneApache]

I learned my lesson: always put a winking smiley when you offend someone and you don't want them to take it seriously.

Thats exactly my point...why would you want to offend someone, and then pretend that you didnt, just because you used a smiley?

Why not just PM 'em and get it off your chest?

ohhh and btw...... ~;)

Just in case you thought I might have offended you.

[dessa14]

you know what ruined eyes wide shut, it could have been good, but that incompetent pretty boy tom cruise can't act his way out of a brown paper bag.
thanks,
dizzy

[Tachikaze]

"Listen here, Colonel Bat Guano, if that's what your real name is . . ."

One of Seller's best deliveries.