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Aside from George Lucas's Star Wars, Episode One: The Phantom Menace, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut was arguably the most anticipated film release of the summer 1999 season. And it was perhaps only the critical failure of Lucas's overhyped and under-scripted space epic that kept Kubrick's film from being the biggest critical disappointment of that same season. Adina Hoffman's comment that the film functions as little more "than a tedious, overlong footnote to [its] coming attractions [trailer]-in which real-life superstar husband and wife Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman neck in the buff, before a mirror, to the down-and-dirty strains of Chris Isaak's "Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing"-- certainly underscores this feeling of disappointment. The mass audience of eager cinematic thrill-seekers, no doubt tantalized by the turn-on quality of the trailer, found themselves watching a film almost completely devoid of sexual "chemistry" between its two stars, who instead of making mad, passionate love prefer to smoke dope and argue about suspected marital infidelities. And for many of the (presumably) more sophisticated critics, the film seemed poorly acted (especially by Cruise), oddly paced, overly long at approximately two hours and forty minutes, and finally unconvincing as an in-depth examination of sexual jealousy within the life of a relatively young, well-to-do married couple (see e.g. Barclay, Carr, Covert, Millar, Denby, Kauffmann; for more positive reviews, see Maslin, Schickel, Kroll, Herr, Siegel). While on the one hand, Janet Maslin praised the film as a "haunting bedroom odyssey" and rated it as number nine on her year's top ten list, on the other, Robert Ebert failed to include the film on his list; Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian all but dismissed it as "minor Kubrick"; and Louis Menand, writing in The New York Review of Books, saw it as evidence of the final bottoming out of a cinematic talent that had begun to slip badly after the commercial success of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 guaranteed Kubrick virtually unlimited control over his subsequent films.
If The Guardian's Bradshaw disliked Kubrick's final filmmaking effort, he at least gave the film itself the somewhat dubious credit of creating a "genre . . . of its own": "Manhattan porn gothic." Although Bradshaw's tongue-in-cheek assertion is both clever and reasonably accurate with...