CineBad!!!

This movie was very, very bad. They did a bad, bad thing. I don’t even know where to begin. Usually, we here at MGotD make a point of not being overly bitchy about bad movies. We like bad movies, after all. But then again, rules were made to be broken.

Stanley Kubrick’s supposed to be one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, right? And now he’s dead, so everyone wants to be able to tell their grandkids that they stood in line for a hour (in front of the Cheri theater, dodging traffic because the line extended all the way across the street, by the way) to see the Bard’s Last Film Ever. Everyone’s all excited because it stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (the couple who put the “sigh” into “Scientology”) who are supposedly so sexy and all that, yadda yadda yadda, RIGHT?

So, like, whatever. It would have helped if this movie had a plot. Tom Cruise wanders around all night trying to be unfaithful to his wife, but ultimately failing. Why does he fail? Because he’s utterly confused by this movie, as was I. He and his wife (Nicole Kidman, who plays most of her role in her underwear) get together and swap stories about how they’d like to be unfaithful, except they’re too stupid or clueless, or whatever. Then they cry a bit and get paranoid. It’s all so psychological.

Tom wanders into a variety of comic situations, which come across as sort of embarrassingly corny. The rest of the movie is so unbearably pretentious and stilted, that when something funny happens, it seems like it must be a mistake. The only moment I even came close to enjoying was Alan Cumming’s portrayal of a gay bellhop, which was only funny in that it pointed out how unremarkably untalented and wooden Tom Cruise is as an actor.

And then there’s the soon-to-be-infamous “orgy” scene, when Tom crashes an exclusive sex party about a million miles out of town in some mansion that looks like Hagia Sophia. People in capes and masks mill around listlessly while naked women have sex just out of camera range. People stare at each other and don’t say anything. Weird organ music plays. It kind of reminded me of some half-forgotten episode of Dr. Who, in which scantily clad maidens danced around clumsily while chanting “Sacred Fire, Sacred Flame!” Except this time, the scene probably cost roughly the Gross National Product of Sri Lanka, as opposed to being filmed in some quarry in the south of England.

So what was the point of this film? I don’t know. It seems to be some kind of warning to rich about-to-be-middle-aged couples about not cheating on each other. The main thing I took away from this movie, though, is that rich people are really self-indulgent. Tom Cruise spends about a trillion dollars on his little nocturnal adventure. The film opens on a huge ballroom gala, hosted by some annoying bearded baby boomer, while everyone mingles and is preoccupied by sex. The weird Satanic sex cult who are so boring (and apparently bored, if you bother to see this movie for yourself) are apparently so rich (and therefore, important) that if we even knew the names of those having sex in this big mansion, we “wouldn’t sleep at night.” And then again, there’s the rich self-indulgent dork who actually MADE this film and tricked me into blowing $8 on seeing it at a crummy theater with broken air conditioning…

There, I feel better now.