“Eyes Wide Shut” was actually the third film to feature both Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but it’s the one most people remember. This movie was a big deal when it came out. Not only was it Stanley Kubrick’s first movie in over a decade, the legendarily long shoot only helped to raise expectations regarding what he and his leads were working on. It was the named the sexiest movie of that year. The film is about a New York doctor, who is married to an art curator. He is pushing himself on a harrowing and dangerous night-long odyssey of sexual and moral discovery after his wife admits that she once almost cheated on him. The movie would normally never speak to me, but it blew my mind. It’s that good!
Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, who had met on the set of “Innerspace” in 1987, had been married for a few years by the time they made this underrated drama. They play a mismatched pair of lonely Texans who begin a tentative romance, only to run up against the gosts of their unwittingly shared past. Quaid and Ryan have very different approaches, of course, yet they’re utterly comfortable together. I haven’t seen this film in a LONG time.
After “Cruel Intentions”, the careers of both Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon took such different direction. They where married shortly after the premiere. This film is certainly the last time you would see Sarah Michelle Gellar as the charismatic one and Witherspoon as the mild one. And you definitely wouldn’t imagine Witherspoon and Phillippe married after this initially. The story focusses on two vicious step-siblings of an elite Manhattan prep school. The start a bet: he has to deflower the new headmaster’s daughter before the start of the term. And if he does, he can have his way with his step sister. Silly plot actually, but a really good film.
Penélope Cruz won an Oscar for her role in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”. Why? Because she both plays into the sterotypes Allen knowingly writes for her character and also explodes them. As María Elena, a suicidal photographer with a tempestuous streak, she’s as much self-aware romantic Spanish caricature as her ex-husband, the rascally free-love painter Juan Antonio Gonzalo, played by Javier Bardem. Where other real-life lovers seem drawn to playing dour characters whose relationship has run aground, Bardem and Cruz have a blast portraying these two incorrigible nut balls.
Hollywood power couple Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander fell in love while filming “The Light Between Oceans”. It’s the story of a lighthouse keeper and his wife, living off the coast of Western Australia. They raise a baby they rescued from a drifting rowing boat. Since they didn’t have the best of luck having their own, this baby girl comes like a gift from above.
