Eyes Wide Shut

Stanley Kubrick, the man who brought us Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, and The Shining was the screenwriter for what would be his (un)intentional swansong, Eyes Wide Shut. Being the self-exiled iconoclast that he was, he would do something he hadn't done before: soft-core porn. In keeping with Kubrick's lifelong vision of anti-Hollywood movies, Warner Bros. would market it with a tag-line consisting of the actors and director's names.

Caught somewhere between Jack Nicholson and Kevin Smith.

Coming from the three-part writing device known to high-earning professionals as "The Tree" (capitals used for importance), Eyes Wide Shut will be reduced from a 158 minute "masterpiece" into a summary worthy of a B- in a high school english class. For Cracked readers just graduating from the eighth grade, "The Tree" is thus: 1. introduce your character and put him up a tree, 2. have shit happen to him while s/he is in the tree, and 3. get your character down from the tree somehow. Add "The End" if you are in seventh grade or are Stanley Kubrick.

Hopefully it's accompanied by an alarm clock.

Bill Harford (Cruise) is a nice guy: nice career, nice place in Manhattan, nice family. His only problem is that is hot wife Alice (Kidman) is about to shatter his perfect world. Poor Cruise, ever since this movie he's seen nothing but monsters.

Disco-dancing, dreadlocked monsters

The movie opens with the Harfords getting ready for an upscale party. "Getting ready" means Kidman naked, Kidman going to the bathroom, and Cruise putting on some height-enhancing shoes. "Upscale party" refers to your run-of-the-mill champagne laced flirt fest where old Europeans dance with the women and young models tag-team the men. Luckily Dr. Harford is saved from this fate when the host of the party, Victor Ziegler, calls him up to attend to a hooker that overdosed in his bathroom. Naked. Since Harford is a doctor, he knows that all he has to do is shake her a little bit and call her name. Ziegler thanks him by telling him not to mention the incident to anyone. Alice rebuffs her Romanian suitor's advances after getting wasted on a couple glasses of bubbly, and the Harfords return home and get naked in front of a mirror, which must have happened a lot in the Cruise-Kidman marriage.

"What's my motivation?"

The next day we are treated to the normalcy of the Harford marriage by way of a music-less montage of Bill at the office, Alice at home with their daughter, and Bill watching football at the end of the day. Then they smoke pot in their underwear, which couldn't have happened a lot in the Cruise-Kidman marriage based on the way they act stoned. Alice starts probing Bill on where it was he "disappeared" to with the two women she saw him with. He counters by asking about the Ricardo Montalban-George Hamilton hybrid she was dancing with. An argument ensues, and Alice tells him about a one-night-stand she almost had with a naval officer. With his sense of a perfect life shattered into a thousand cheating pieces and his masculinity threatened, Bill Harford is now up in a tree.

A thick, hard tree... with lots of nuts.

This is where Bill spends most of the movie, clinically unable to get the image of a sailor discharging semen into his wife's aft. He sees sex everywhere (he's in Manhattan, so it's really like he just noticed it). He gets the size/existence of his cojones questioned by a sextet of guys. He gets picked up by a prostitute and takes her up on her offer to "come inside".

"What's my motivation?"

Then he gets a phone call from Alice, and quicker than you can say "the water's cold" a hundred times, Bill has to go. He comes around to the "Sonata" club and meets his old med-school mate Nick Nightingale who throws another opportunity at him: crashing a private masked orgy. All he needs to know is the password and the dress code, but where is he going to find a tux, a cloak with a hood, and a mask at 2 in the morning? (end of video may not be safe for work)

Here.

Bill proceeds from the costume shop to the address in a taxi and pays the cabbie to wait for him. He gives the password, is ushered to the house of sex, and though being warned to leave by a woman in a mask and shoes, stays and witnesses lots and lots of sex. Ten minutes of watching Tom Cruise, er, Bill Hartford walking through a ritualized orgy. Thanks, Kubrick.

They haven't heard of Barry White.

Once again, Bill is warned to leave but doesn't. He gets fingered, either due to the cab he showed up in or the receipt in his coat, and has his dignity/life threatened before Baroque-style Imperial guards. The woman-with-a-warning shows up again with the "take me instead routine", and Bill is saved from his own thoughtless/dickless-ness and told once more to not mention a word of what he's seen to anyone. Or else.
At this point Bill could've just fallen out of "The Tree"; rather he acts like Rambo and grabs every branch on the way down. And every branch breaks. At this point in the movie, it's more fun to watch Sly Stallone doing his impression of a rock in a fight with gravity. By "rock" we mean Tom Cruise, and by "gravity" we mean "what the viewer already knows".

Basically the next 40 minutes of "Eyes Wide Shut"

After learning the hooker he almost had sex with tested positive for HIV, the woman-with-a-warning OD'd the next day, Nick Nightgown "checked out" under suspicious circumstances, and Ziegler tells him outright that the whole thing was staged and he should let it go, Bill reluctantly lets it go, and the last 140 minutes of your life are summed up with "Tom Cruise is confused about seeing other people have sex." He goes home and sees the mask he wore lying on his side of the bed. Waking up Alice with his whimpering he collapses into her, promising to tell her everything. Everything.

Vanilla Sky made us cry, too.

Settling for the door prize of "Well I almost cheated, too", Bill and Alice realize that they have to take their daughter shopping at FAO Schwarz. It is before Christmas with their seven year old daughter running around in a Manhattan toy store that Bill just has to bring it up one last time and Alice decides what they need to do. (bad rip with subtitles and end maybe nsfw)

But what's my motivation?