Friday One Sheet: EYES WIDE SHUT @ 25

As is tradition for this column, the penultimate entry before the year's end is an alternate poster for Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut.

I like this one for its simplicity of execution. Take a postcard for the famous Paris cabaret -- Moulin Rouge from around the 1890s -- drop on black bars to give a nod to the curious censorship in the American release of the film, and put the title on the bottom in a classic, fussy font. Et voilà! The sexual politics and the emasculation are all here for the party!

I spent some time (probably too much time) trying to track down who the designer was, but the only real lead I found was that a digital artist and marketing sales-funnel guy (I am not sure which of these is the the side-hustle) named Wagner Dantas, who uploaded the image to the Movie Poster Database in 2022. His social media feeds have not been active since 2014. The film knows how to spawn a good mystery, even a quarter century later.

Eyes Wide Shut turns 25 this year. It is a movie I have heard described once as, "an interesting movie about uninteresting people. It remains, like all Kubrick films, studied, discussed, marvelled at for its the craft, and despised in equal measure for its detached coldness. It is set during Christmas, after all.

But remember, kids, that the final line of the oeuvre of one of the cinema's greatest technical and ambitious maestros was from this film, and it was simply one word, "Fuck."

Have a Merry Christmas, kink or no kink. There is no shame here. The final column of the year will be a gallery of the best movie posters of 2024.