Their Holiday Favorites: Daniel Metz Champions 'Eyes Wide Shut'

Their Holiday Favorites is a series in which members of the Austin film community tell us about movies they enjoy watching during the holiday season. Today, Austin film programmer and producer Daniel Metz (Slacker 2011) explains why you should consider Stanley Kubrick when picking movies to watch this holiday season:

It's not hard to see why Christmas movies are so often placed in the ghetto of film genres; for the most part schmaltzy, child-oriented and low humored, these pictures prey on the weakness of seasonal sentimentality to the detriment of meaningful storytelling. Christmas movies don't ask questions, they don't get at truths about human nature, and they don't take risks.

With one exception. Only one truly great filmmaker has ever made a Christmas film: that director is Stanley Kubrick, and the film is Eyes Wide Shut. Every frame of this striking, dangerous last film from the master that gave us Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining is littered with Douglas firs, incandescent bulbs, and various other Yuletide tchotchkes. Tom Cruise, who manages to deliver one of his rare stellar performances, plods through the NYC streets in leather gloves and a cashmere overcoat, his short breaths creating little clouds as he's haunted by Christmas fever around him. It's a celebration of Christmas tradition and symbols, and the trouble we can get in when we have the freedom of a holiday night.

Eyes Wide Shut is also a dream-film, hopelessly curious and nightmarishly anxious, about sex and the way that modern times have made it a very tricky landscape to maneuver. In this way, it's hard to avoid looking at the details of its production -- this was Kubrick's last film, and he died before it was released. He knew he was dying, and made this film as a condemning goodbye letter. What Kubrick is saying here is that there's this crazy world of depravity, hedonism and confusion, and he can't help us with it.

Also keep in mind that Eyes Wide Shut was released in 1999, and shot in the two years prior -- a time when the "new millennium" was on everyone's mind, and there was this feeling that a new age was upon us. Kubrick felt that a new era was coming, and he was telling us that he wasn't able or willing to join it.

And that's what Christmas is all about, really -- seeing the horrors of the world and the most vile examples of decadence and resigning yourself to it, giving up more and more of your humanity every year, until you finally give up. Merry Christmas.

Want to watch? Eyes Wide Shut is available to rent at Vulcan Video, I Luv Video and Encore Movies and Music.