Eyes Wide Shut, and pub

[ciphergoth]

First off, come to the pub tonight!

Second, I watched Eyes Wide Shut on C5 last night. What was that all about then?

Lots of impressive but meaningless imagery, very very slow plot development, rather irritating incidental music and an inconclusive conclusion. I saw lots of sex-related imagery, but if there was a sexual morality fable in there, a warning against "empty, meaningless sex" or otherwise, then it passed me by. To me, it was a warning that if you gatecrash a party and someone warns you to get away before they kill you, do as they say. Also a warning against telling people you don't know very well about things you've been paid to keep secret; or against working for organisations that have people killed in the first place.

At one point, taxis refuse to pick him up because he's crossed the Bad Guys. What did they do, send a fax to every taxi driver in New York saying "don't pick this guy up, photo attached, signed the Bad Guys"? Or did they write "don't pick me up" on Tom Cruise's forehead while he slept, in a special ink that only taxi drivers can see?

I think EWS doesn't work for me because it depends on the audience imagining that sex parties are the most forbidden and secret thing there could ever be. I'd like to wave a little flag at this point and say that, in common with many of you reading this of course, I go to sex parties quite often, they're generally jolly good fun, and people hardly ever get murdered! After watching EWS, I wanted to write that on banners and hang them out the window.

Though it did make me wonder if an opening ceremony at a sex party might be a cool thing. Unfortunately that would require people turning up on time...

Comments

[kaet.livejournal.com]

I had a similar thing with 8mm. There was stuff that was clearly bad in it and other stuff that seemed completely unrelated, and some kind of moral connection I didn't get, and it all seemed a bit melodramatic.

I've not seen EWS because I thought it might be how you said it was. I don't really enjoy sex parties, though I don't think they're particularly remarkable from a moral PoV, it's an aesthetic thing (not of the people, but of the idea), and difficult to describe, I'd have to think about it, and don't have any problems with them happening! Their potential illegality also worries me (in both the political and the selfpreservation sense), particularly about the issues surrounding watched male/male acts and the victorian bawdy houses laws.

From the clips of EWS I saw on Film Whatever, I also got the idea that there was very little empathy with why the characters might be doing what they did (in terms of the sex), little motivation, dahling.

[lovingboth]

The European Court of Human Rights effectively legalised gay group sex at the end of July 2000 - a few months after Tory and Labour MPs voted against changing this bit of law. Someone got over £20k compensation after having been 'done' some years ago.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk_politics/newsid_859000/859506.stm