Eyes Wide Shut (July 18th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[EYES WIDE SHUT screens Saturday July 18th at 8:55 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Nobody should be blamed for having trouble keeping their eyes
open during EYES WIDE SHUT. Stanley Kubrick's scandalous final feature film was released in 1999 after a much-publicized, drawn-out, two-year production history (nothing unusual for Kubrick) and hitting screens not long after Stanley Kubrick's own death. The heavily hyped melodrama is 169 minutes long, and you feel every second. Sometimes that is a good thing. And sometimes...

Kubrick had a reputation for jumping with graceful unpredictability from one genre to another, from horror in THE SHINING to costume drama in BARRY LYNDON to sword-and-sandal in SPARTACUS, and back again. Here he takes on the much-travestied sexual psychodrama-cum-thriller, the territory of countless direct-to-video softcore films (not to mention Times Square "grindhouse" stuff and Euro-thrillers, before BASIC INSTINCT kind of made the genre respectable).

And so what you've got to ask yourself is: even if Kubrick does make the world's most baroque, certainly longest T&A film...so what?

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (October 28th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE screens Friday October 28th at 9:25 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Robots equals big box-office, right? The TRANSFORMERS movies, without a brain in their mechanical heads, are licenses to print money (and action figures). And Steven Spielberg - who co-produced TRANSFORMERS, remember - is next doing an adaptation of Daniel Wilson's war-against-robots novel Robopocalypse (which I've just finished reading; let's just say that, as with Jaws, odds are the movie will be better). Who can imagine a robot epic that doesn't draw crowds?

2001 A Space Odyssey (July 16th and 17th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY screens Saturday July 16th and Sunday July 17th at the Cleveland Cinematheque. Star Keir Dullea will be on hand at the July 17th screening to answer questions from the audience.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

There was a time when a sizable number of moviegoers actually wanted to see films that made them think, perhaps challenged them, even. It was in such a climate that Stanley Kubrick released his 1968 science fiction classic 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Audiences and critics were divided, but everyone talked about it. And there were actually things in the movie to talk about. Big ideas about where the human race was headed, where we had been, and the forces that shaped us on that journey – God, evolution, benevolent space aliens; take your pick.