The Shining

lol
http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mauwabo7hB1qi4nyc.jpg

Just saw Room 237. Didn't think it was so hot. You never seen the various interviewees so it's this interlaced series of clips from the film with long expositions of what they are seeing in the various voices (there are sections to the film, but the structure doesn't seem to have any formal logic). Intercut with cheesy period TV footage of people watching TVs withe Shining superimposed on the screen. I guess I was expecting something along the lines of Cinemania--vignette portraits of the subjects that make you care a little more about the theories, which tend to sort of come one after the other in a round of speakers the way it was done here. I don't know if it was just me, but I felt the energy deflate out of the audience after about a half an hour. An older ABC New reporter, one of the interviewees (he has the thing about Native American genocide), introduced the film and was supposed to take questions after, but no one seemed jazzed about it (full disclosure, I left before the questions).
I think maybe this conspiracy theory stuff was more interesting pre-Internet, it sort of loses its mystery when everything's available at the click of a mouse. When it was more subcultural and clandestine?

Or maybe it's just meant for people who haven't heard alot of this stuff already (duh)

OK last point, not fair to compare, but Jon Ronson's "Kubrick's Boxes" is extraordinary

R237 is among the films I like better than the film it's about. It did bring back some things that struck me in 1980, like the superslow dissolves.

Some valuable segments by sexydancer, incl what I would call Mapping Big Wheels.

(also cameo of sorts by son of sexydancer)

Bill Blakemore's Q&A was OK... He asked Kubrick through mutual acquaintances why he wanted the 120-minute international cut kept in circulation, and the answer was that SK liked it better shorter.

yeah that was cool when they plotted the route of the big wheel

Guessing they're avoiding the awards-bait crush and you'll see this around March.

― crazy uncle in the attic (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Stated release date last night: March 8. I should be making the real money in indie booking.

SK's Boxes is wonderful. Watched it on youtube a few years ago...

Will definitely see Room 237 when it gets here. I saw that Jay Weidner film last summer and found it more persuasive than the rational part of me ever would have expected it to be. (Think I'll go see The Shining at a local rep Tuesday night.)

I wish they would do a giant coffee table book of stuff from the Kubrick archive....I love the insane research shoots he would send people on to photograph like thousands of hotel rooms, etc.

I wonder what they're selling, if anything, at that museum show that's just moved to LACMA.

there is that Napoleon book

brief article on the LACMA show: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-stanley-kubrick-lacma-20121028,0,6455684.story

Saw it again as part of a book-talk series tonight. I probably need to retire it at this point, after about 10 viewings over the years. I was looking hard for stuff I hadn't noticed before--like straining to see which player's signature was on Wendy's baseball bat, something that probably holds the key to the entire film. (Guessing Thurman Munson.) Couldn't make it out.

(The guy in line in front of me, with his girlfriend, actually got turned away for lack of ID--a 30-year-old movie showing at a rep. And it's not like he looked obviously underage.)

xp: Morbs, they just reprinted the Kubrick Archives book

but really, the Taschen facsimile of the Napoleon book set is totally awesome regarding "research mode" Kubrick

This essay (linked in one of J1m Emers0n's latest blogs) is one of the best things on the movie I've ever read, and is credited by JE to be one of the earliest essays to turn the critical tide on the movie: http://parallax-view.org/2009/10/28/kubricks-shining/

That is a very good essay and this def gets at something essential:

Surely this distraction of the self is Hell, not the seamy, vicious gestures by which the lost soul expresses its violence. Jack Torrance is presented with an oneiric environment in which only he matters—and then he doesn’t matter at all. This is the final vacancy. This is the bankrupt script. This is the horror that we feel when Wendy Torrance, come to look for her husband in his writing den, at last manages to see the Overlook manuscript, the outpourings of his creativity: the endless reiteration, in myriad configurations, of the same formulaic line, the same lyric bad joke—”All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Jack the dull boy becomes Jack the bright boy when, having done murder at last, he rises into a previously neutral frame: this time the vacancy is fulfilled in his wide, white, shining face.

The brutalization of Danny (of which Jack had been accused) took place in the mysterious Room 237, whose vibrations had tempted the boy several times previously. We watched through his eyes as he passed through the door, but were spirited away by Kubrick’s cutting to Wendy, who in turn led us to Jack in the throes of “the worst nightmare I’ve ever had,” the gory murder of his family. Hence, though technically innocent, Jack has been formally implicated in whatever transpired in 237.

i've been liking this scene a lot lately and i think that "technically innocent ... formally implicated" thing is rly good cuz it's part of this ongoing thing w jack's relationship to his own idk capacity for violence: the dazed and hurt look on his face when wendy says "YOU did this to him!", the compulsive self-justification to lloyd about the time he broke danny's arm months ago ("it was an ACCIDENT -- coulda happened to anyone!" is the less flashy kubrick equivalent of the part in blue velvet that freaked out dfw so much, where dennis hopper, also looking more-or-less into the camera, says "you're like me"), the genuine confusion, his and ours, over whether he did do this to danny this time and whether he did it to him before and whether it makes him a bad person even though he knows or thinks he knows he's not the kind of person who hits his kid. and then there's the Other Crime that no one in the movie likes to talk about but reminders of which are totally ubiquitous and ambient and which jack and everyone in his country are technically innocent of but formally implicated in, and which is of course not the kind of thing that any of us would ever do, cross our hearts, but was just a kind of unpleasant historical accident, so haha surely we're not required to carry it around w us and be mindful of it and feel the weight of it and doubt our own character like wendy so infuriatingly expects jack to do wrt his personal sin, no, you can rest assured, mr. ullman, that's not going to happen with me.

oh man also this is an excellent reading of the nuance in a linereading we were arguing over upthread:

Jack repeats “A ‘nigger‘?” (a superb reading by Nicholson) in a tone that suggests he is not used to considering negritude an offense, is on the verge of disbelieving laughter, and yet is also fascinated by the new ripple of self-congratulating possibility here.

great post dlh

Now we cut to a position directly opposite him. He drags his hands down over his face and then peers straight at us. His face is brightly—too brightly—flooded by the warm glow of a lighting strip built right into the bar; and now the fluorescence is increased by a sudden, hail-fellow-well-met grin. “Why hello, Lloyd!” And Jack slides into a well-rehearsed litany of worldweary wisdom, a soliloquy pretending to be a monologue, delivered to a composite image of all the bartenders in his past. We have been cast as “Lloyd.” The role is bizarre, but not intolerable. Then Kubrick reverse-cuts and there, where we figuratively stood, is Lloyd (Joseph Turkel).

this is almost the exact reverse of the stunning shot in 2001 where we are looking through the young spacesuited dave bowman's eyes at an old man seated at a table, facing away, who seems to hear us behind him and turns around and comes towards us - but then we realise the bowman whose eyes we were looking through is gone, was never there for the old man who is bowman.

The thing with Danny and room 237 doesn't really make sense to me. Initially, Wendy logically realizes that Jack must have done it, and accuses him accordingly; a scene or two later, in their room, when Jack raises the possibility that Danny might be making it up, Wendy's sold on the crazy-woman-in-the-bathroom claim of Danny's. This seems like a slight disconnect to me.

The guy who gave the book said there are things that don't make sense in the film no matter how many times that you've seen it, but that that's okay with him.

It makes sense if Wendy is starting to choose sides, and is choosing to believe Danny.

off to see this tonight at the cinema - i've only seen it once, probably about 10 years ago.

Not that I needed much prodding, but that Jameson article more or less confirmed for me that The Shining is Kubrick's greatest movie.

for me it's really a tossup for between The Shining, EWS, and Barry Lyndon (2001 just feels exhausted at this point, as great as it is).

Yeah, those three (four) are the only contenders now.

2001 = Shining > Strangelove = Lyndon >> EWS

Best Stanley Kubrick movie

A Clockwork Orange 	15
Eyes Wide Shut 	3

Still smdh.

I like so many of them. I guess I'd put Barry Lyndon, Paths of Glory, and The Killing at the top.

Seeing people pick Paths of Glory as their Kubrick pick is like:

http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/26600000/The-Shining-GIFs-the-shining-26648297-500-251.gif

starting to get the impression Eric likes EWS or something

my crazy ranking that no one ever agrees with:

1. lolita
2. barry lyndon
3. strangelove
4. paths of glory
5. the shining

i basically at least like all of them, except ACO.

Yeah, Clockwork Orange is sort of the only capitol-K Kubrick movie I don't really like that much.

It's hardly unusual to consider Paths of Glory one of Kubrick's greatest. (I can't see Eric H.'s image, so maybe I'm missing the punchline.)

strangelove forever for me

Guess I need to see Lyndon again, I thought it was mad boring LOL.

yeah I tried to watch it, it's v nice to look at but it sort of lulled me into intermittent napping

it's a vice grip of fate played out against a gorgeously indifferent universe kinda boring.

Calling a Kubrick movie boring is way rookie.

it's definitely a slow burner (tho never boring imo) with a really enormous pay-off.

I think Barry Lyndon is hilarious, but others may disagree

The compositions in it are pretty crazy. There probably isn't another movie that looks like it (except other Kubesies)

yeah I wouldn't say it was boring. it just required more extended attentiveness than I was willing to offer, lol

wasn't barry lyndon intentionally funny? i lol'd at lyndon.

I think a lot of people think it's more of a tragedy than a tragicomedy

definitely a lot of black humor.

I think I was into the bleak humor enough that I laughed when the insufferable main character's insufferable kid died