Article from: September 22, 2003 Author:Alison, Jane CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Post _script_, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information) ________ When Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut appeared in 1999, it was titillatingly billed as a film about sex and jealousy starring a genuine Hollywood couple, and the element of the film to stir the greatest pre-opening excitement was generally dubbed the orgy. Once the film opened, some critics hailed it as a masterpiece, but far more called it a catastrophe, and the scene that embarrassed even the film's most positive critics was in fact the orgy. Yet it was not the fornication vignettes or even (in the American version) their digital revisioning that were most troubling; it was the scene's alarming staginess, which critics such as Richard Schickel of Time described as risible. This staginess was seen by harsher critics to plague the entire film