How did you say goodbye to 2021 and hello to 2022?
Say hello to 2022! Were you up watching Andy Cohen get hammered and tell off Bill deBlasio? Maybe you watched Myley Cyrus experience a “wardrobe malfunction.” I did neither. I ordered a pizza (peppers, onions & mushrooms) and did a Zoom show. Then I went to sleep. Well, I went to bed and watched The Truman Show until I fell asleep. No ball dropping for me!
Also, my neighborhood was very quiet. I think I heard some fireworks this morning but nothing on New Year’s!
The new version of Windows has turned me into my mother
She has been upset with the updates to Windows and other applications she uses. I don’t normally have an issue with them. Things change all of the time. Why get upset? Well, I am not thrilled with the updates to Windows. I gave in to the pressure to update a few days ago and am not all that happy with the results.
Anyone else feel that way? I sure hope that is not some indicator of how 2022 is going to pan out. If it is, we all need to hold on because it’s gonna be a bumpy ride. I can kind of understand how frustrated my mother gets.
Movies I was told were great but left me wondering what all the fuss was about
Someone I know told me that Eyes Wide Shut was Stanley Kubrick’s best film. He also said it was the “most dense and most cryptic.” I watched it last night. What am I missing? I know I am so late to the party that it ended but this will be on my mind until I write about it to here goes.
- First of all, the timing was all wrong. Tom Cruise’s (Bill) character finds out about the death of the woman who rescued him from the orgy by reading about it in the newspaper. The woman was sent to the hospital that morning. That is not enough time to get it into the paper he is reading. I think if the movie took place over a longer time period a lot more would make sense. It’s only 48 hours.
- Then, they leave a lot on the table. Bill goes to the orgy party after Nicole Kidman’s Alice tells him she saw a Naval officer when they were on vacation and was so enamored by him that she wanted to give up her whole life. Bill becomes obsessed with cheating on her and goes to the orgy party but … who are these masked orgy people? We get the sense they are the rich and powerful elite (Jeffrey Epstein anyone?) but we never really learn who they are. If you introduce a gun in act one of a play, you need to use that gun in act 2. That never happened here and I was left feeling it was a lot of mental masturbation without the climax.
- Everyone in this movie wants to have sex all the time. Bill is nearly seduced by two people at the party the coupe goes to at the start of the movie. Alice is nearly seduced by a mysterious man at the same soiree. When Bill goes looking for the friend that got him into the orgy, the hotel guy practically falls over himself wanted to sleep with Bill. I get it. The core of the movie is the sex cult but do we need to be hit over the head with it? Kubrick thinks so. I do not.
- The teasers for this movie all feature the Chris Isaak song, “Baby did a bad, bad thing” but what bad thing did these people do? Alice looks at a hot guy and has a dream of being unfaithful (which makes her feel super guilty and she tells Bill all about it). Bill goes to an orgy party and thinks about being unfaithul (at the party and with a prostitute) but he doesn’t actually cheat. He also confesses to Alice what happened. What bad thing did they do? Be human?
This movie took forever to make and runs a very long time and yet it was totally empty. Someone, tell me what I am missing because I just don’t get it. Best Kubrick film? Hardly. Though I thought 2001 was boring, it was better. And then you have to compare this to The Shining and A Clockwork Orange and I don’t know how anyone thinks this was better.
Maybe you can explain it to me. Leave me a message in the comments if you want.
I know that movie came out in 1999 (a great year for movies) but I am often slow to watch certain things. Next week, I will review movies from 2000. In 2041, I will review movies from 2022.
