10 11m- Tit 1 Itti Thursday, junr 19. 1980
arts
Script
t M
technically
By Tom Moore
Stylistically Stanley Kubrick's The
Shining is very impressive; nevertheless,
The Shining is a very confused movie. In
what Newsweek deemed "the first epic
horror film," Kubrick mixes humor,
horror and metaphysics for fairly
disastrous results. It's not that Kubrick
shouldn't have tried to intertwine all these
elements in the film, but he could have
come off much, much better.
cinema
With frenzied music on the soundtrack
through most of The Shining you expect
something horrible or exciting to happen
in the film almost any second, but the
movie mostly just plods along for its two
hours and 20 some minutes.
However, there are two genuinely
horrifying classic sequences in the film.
The first is when Jack Nicholson, who
plays a writer baby-sitting a resort hotel in
the mountains for the winter, goes into
Room 237 to see what has frightened his
son. What Nicholson finds is first highly
erotic, but soon turns into a sickening
image of the grotesque, so wretched that all
in the audience must turn their heads away
from the screen.
The second classic sequence is when
Shelley Duvall, who plays Nicholson's
wife, begins to read the novel her husband
has been working on. Other than these two
sequences The Shining doesn't deliver any
scares.
The Shining is pretty funny in parts,
especially the scenes where Nicholson is
drinking with a ghost in the big ballroom
of the hotel and the parts when Nicholson
first begins to pursue his wife and son with
an axe.
But Kubrick's cold and removed tone
camouflages many of his intended jokes.
Strange stuff that must appear funny to
Kubrick is presented with no concern for
the film's audience and in such a bizarre
and detached manner that it simply falls
flat. Kubrick's sense of humor is especially
evident in the final stages of Nicholson's
madness where he staggers around
slobbering, his face and body twisted into a
witless parody of those murderous maniacs
in Grade D horror movies.
Kubrick always has tried to make films
that will cause his audiences to think a bit
after they've seen them. In The Shining
Kubrick attempts to examine
reincarnation, ghosts, clairvoyance, the
persistence of evil and the old oedipal
conflict between father and son. The points
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brilliant
'Shining
that Kubrick tries to make are so muddled
that no one has any idea what he's
attempting to say.
Kubrick tries to make it seem that
everything that goes on at the hotel is the
product of the conflict between Nicholson
and his son and that it's the conflict that
eventually drives Nicholson loony.
. Kubrick suggests that the ghosts in the
hotel are only the projections of the
hysterias of Nicholson, his wife and son.
But then Kubrick turns around and
suggests that the ghosts are real and that
the hotel is an evil spot. In the past one of
the hotel's previous caretakers murdered
his family and there have been other
sinister goings on in the place since it was
built In a conversation Nicholson has
with a ghost and in the film's final frames
Kubrick suggests that Nicholson has
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always been at the hotel. The trouble with
all this conflicting and confusing
gobbledygook is that it's so vague and
dopey it's hardly worth pondering.
The same things wrong with Kubrick's
film are what's wrong with Stephen King's
novel. In the past, with the exception of A
Clockwork Orange, Kubrick has reworked
almost totally the books he films. Dr.
Strange love, for example, was a non-comic
novel. In reworking his material in the past
Kubrick has managed to get most of the
kinks out, but he wasn't able to do this in
The Shining. The plot barely is reworked
and what's been changed is for the worse.
The Shining is the biggest film
disappointment so far this year. Yet despite
its flaws it's a movie that should be seen for
its technical brilliance. Just don't go
expecting much more.
by Garry Trudesu
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