- Eyes Wide Shut (allthetropes.org)
Stanley Kubrick’s last film, completed just days before his death in 1999. It follows Dr. Bill Harford (played by Tom Cruise) as he spends two noirish, surreal nights on his sexually charged adventures wandering New York City when his wife Alice (played by Cruise’s then wife Nicole Kidman) reveals that she had contemplated an affair a year earlier.
- How Kubrick Uses the Camera (YouTube)
Kubrick is one of the most influential directors of the 20th Century, his career spanning almost five decades. He is perhaps best known for his bordering on insane attention to detail when it came to what’s in the frame, requiring take after take until the shot was perfect. This video looks at a handful of his most interesting shots, and breaking them down, examining how they elevate the themes of their films, and the visual techniques that are on display.
- Utopian and dystopian fiction (Wikipedia)
Utopian and dystopian fiction are subgenres of science fiction that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction portrays a setting that agrees with the author’s ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal to readers. Dystopian fiction offers the opposite: the portrayal of a setting that completely disagrees with the author’s ethos. Some novels combine both genres, often as a metaphor for the different directions humanity can take depending on its choices, ending up with one of two possible futures. Both utopias and dystopias are commonly found in science fiction and other types of speculative fiction.
- Eyes Wide Shut (Wikipedia)
Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 erotic mystery psychological drama film directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick. It is based on the 1926 novella Dream Story (German: Traumnovelle) by Arthur Schnitzler, transferring the story’s setting from early twentieth-century Vienna to 1990s New York City. The plot centers on a doctor (Tom Cruise) who is shocked when his wife (Nicole Kidman) reveals that she had contemplated having an affair 12 months earlier. He then embarks on a night-long adventure, during which he infiltrates a masked orgy of an unnamed secret society.