Reviews

This is an amazing movie that I've watched 3 times already. Yes, it is a little difficult to fully understand the actors as they are speaking in an Old English accent, but it just adds to the authenticity. For those who rate it only 1 Star, they never watched the movie, watched only 15 minutes of it, or are the top of guy who loves to jerk off to gun magazines. They would rather see Saw, Saw 2, Saw 3, Saw 4, and so on. Only blood, gore and guts gets these trolls off. Perhaps if they watched it with an open mind, they would appreciate the beauty of this film.

This was never about the evil witch in the woods, this was about the cultural and familial pressures that cause an otherwise innocent and good Christian girl to turn bad. A witch may have killed some people she loves, but she isn't turning towards a new family of women or serving the witches, she's turning towards a life of serving herself. Now that she's alone, she can be free, and must do something to save herself. Rules did nothing for her, and now she will live without them.

This is a movie about how you make witches, and the woman on the movie posters and dvd case is not the witch coming from the woods to do harm, it's Thomasin walking into the dreaded wild, away from God, away from oppressive, controlling Puritan society, and away from the bitter, painful life of pioneers and colonists that has won her nothing but loneliness, hunger, and abuse. The movie closes on her ecstatic face as she literally defies the rule of gravity, for the first time totally, completely free.

In the film, Dr. Bill (Tom Cruise) is a married doctor in an upper class neighborhood in New York. When Dr. Bill finds out from his wife (at the time, his real-life wife, Nicole Kidman) that she's considered cheating on him, he embarks on a strange journey of encounters throughout the night that takes him to the decadent underworld of the rich and famous.

At a jazz club at closing, he meets an old friend from medical school, Nick. Now a jazz piano player, Nick tells him about a party he will be playing the piano for later, but he must play totally blind because of the debauchery that takes place there. All of the people wear long hooded cloaks with Venetian masks, so Cruise ends up renting out a similar costume and takes a taxi to a Hellfire mansion out in the country where Nick will be performing. Hellfire Clubs are meeting places of persons of high quality (politicians, Hollywood executives, etc) who want to take part in extremely immoral acts. Their activities included mock religious ceremonies, devil worship, and occult rituals.

The music in the movie changes drastically when Cruise arrives at the Hellfire mansion. Right after Cruise enters this mansion, the very odd song heard in the background is called "Backwards Priests" and features Romanian Orthodox Divine Liturgy played backward. The reversal or inversion of sacred objects is typical of black magic and satanic rituals. By having this Christian liturgy played backward right before widespread fornication, it's a way of stating that the "elite of the world" is nothing less than satanic!

Although none of this is actually mentioned in Eyes Wide Shut, the entire movie can be interpreted as one big "magick sex" journey, characterized by a back-and-forth between opposing forces: life and death - pleasure and pain - male and female - light and darkness! A great film that raises a lot of moral implications. A film one should watch with eyes wide OPEN!

With the possible exception of "The X-files" I love "Northern Exposure" more passionately than any other show ever televised. Northern Exposure takes us back to the show's halcyon days when we got our first taste of Joel and Maggie's quasi-romantic sparring, of Holling and Shelly's May-September love, of Chris's half-brilliant, half-scatterbrained philosophizing, of Maurice's slow burns and Marilyn's unflappable calm. Northern Exposure takes us to its own cozy, quirky little world and envelops us in it...in a a perfect sixty-minute vacation of escapism and humanity. The premise of the show is simple: It's a fish out of water situation for the new family doctor (a recently graduated family physician who also happens to be Jewish and who's idea of roughing it is a stroll through Central Park) who moves to Alaska because the state picked up the tab for his education on the condition that he becomes the family doctor for 5 years up there. He goes through the usual efforts to pry himself loose from the situation but eventually finds himself blending in and accommodating his new lifestyle with the new friends he meets.

I absolutely loved "THE GAME"...while it was on. Why not more than just one season, I'll never know. I love this genre and the 6 episodes drip in espionage as if it was written from the pen of John le Carré's monozygotic identical twin. It has a certified fresh rating of 95% for a reason. I suggest you watch it with closed captions on to help you understand the British accents better. I would also suggest you watch this on your DVD player so you can rewind the parts that might confuse you too much. The show reveals ways in which the USSR would plan out espionage years in advance and how it infiltrated into top positions of government. Deliberately paced and brooding in tone, yet laced with caustic wit, personal tragedy and sinister inference, The Game keeps us wondering how far will a foreign government go to disrupt and destroy our way of life in the west. It is a first rate production of the Cold War terror that we all feared at times growing up in the 60's and 70's.

I'm not going to add anything new other than to say if you like period shows, especially about British history during the 1700 and 1800's, you will appreciate the set designs, the customs and the scenery. The one thing you probably won't enjoy, the only thing you might not like, is the funky soundtrack. The one reviewer hit this nail on the head. What was the prod/dir's thinking of? The music (so called) is terrible. It doesn't fit at all. Imagine the period drama, "Cold Mountain" with rap music! Ick! Icky! Disgusting to say the least.