By Joshua Hill for the Charleston Gazette-Mail
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — We all love “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Elf,” but there are only so much we can take of those bells ringing every time Clarence gets his wings. Revel in the hilarious, thrilling, frightening and scathing portraits of the holiday season with these four unconventional holiday classics.
‘Eyes Wide Shut’
Stanley Kubrick’s final film, released post-mortem, and celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, “Eyes Wide Shut” is a staggering work that finds the legendary director focused not on nuclear annihilation or sending audiences beyond the infinite, but in the desires, fears and insecurities that lead to the disillusionment of the societal constructs of a modern marriage.
Kubrick’s illusory vision of the most cheerful time of the year, his adaptation of “Traumnovelle” is haunting and seething with the director’s obsession with human behavior and the fragility of our lizard brain’s base impulses breaking through our supposedly evolved self-righteous understanding of morality and desire.