The Shining

I watched EWS and The Shining recently and i'm pretty sure Tome Cruise is playing Jack Nicholson playing Dr. Bill, esp in the argument w/ Kidman scene. Same phrasing and everything.

ok, i haven't seen either in awhile but that's unimaginable. Maybe just cuz both characters ask a lotta questions?

kubrick had never seen 'the tonight show' and didn't know what 'here's johnny' meant either!

yes, def a Jack improv

I'm not sure anyone has ever linked this quite extensive interview w/ SK by Michel Ciment.

Stephen Crane wrote a story called "The Blue Hotel." In it you quickly learn that the central character is a paranoid. He gets involved in a poker game, decides someone is cheating him, makes an accusation, starts a fight and gets killed. You think the point of the story is that his death was inevitable because a paranoid poker player would ultimately get involved in a fatal gunfight. But, in the end, you find out that the man he accused was actually cheating him. I think The Shining uses a similar kind of psychological misdirection to forestall the realization that the supernatural events are actually happening.

I hope the audience has had a good fright, has believed the film while they were watching it, and retains some sense of it. The ballroom photograph at the very end suggests the reincarnation of Jack.

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/interview.ts.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwcfDa0gEPQ

LOL awesome! I just watched that clip the other day. I'm really trying to get into Johnny Carson recently...

the three huge interviews with the kube on that site are amazing, maybe the best director interviews i've ever read anywhere.

Yes! There goes my evening...

Did you have all those extras pose for the last shot?

No, they were in a photograph taken in 1921 which we found in a picture library. I originally planned to use extras, but it proved impossible to make them look as good as the people in the photograph. So I very carefully photographed Jack, matching the angle and the lighting of the 1921 photograph, and shooting him from different distances too, so that his face would be larger and smaller on the negative. This allowed the choice of an image size which when enlarged would match the grain structure in the original photograph. The photograph of Jack's face was then airbrushed in to the main photograph, and I think the result looked perfect. Every face around Jack is an archetype of the period.

i love the idea that the narrative progresses from "this is all in his head" to "this is REALLY happening."

God does watching vid of Ed McMahon without his glasses kinda freak me out

Watching Paths of Glory, i can totally see Kubrick faking the moon landing. This movie is ambient!

Anyways this movie is great, it's like Dr. Strangelove mixes with 2001.

omg R00m 237. kind of crazy. it succeeded in making me want to rewatch every kubrick movie though, so that's good.
conspiracy theory stuff aside (because, seriously, um... entertaining but o_O), i was really into the reading of the film via kubrick as auteur, what comes up thematically and technically in the shining that also comes up in different ways in his other films. and i love the hotel as labyrinth. but i was into that idea before seeing this. well, i guess there wasn't much if any new 'film theory' stuff in this, but it was kind of cool to see the film deconstructed over and over again.

i feel like this movie will never not be scary to me

I watched the Viv K making-of doc for the first time, lol'd at Kub typing out new pages at the same table where Jack and Shelley are (separately) running lines.

did you really find that doc "brutal," Eric? I'm not sure it shows anything I wouldn't expect from a high-stakes movie shoot led by an exacting chief. "Making a movie is like going to war," as Coppola pere said.

there's a Viv K commentary on her documentary which is worth hearing, if only to confound/confirm expectations of what you might imagine stanley kubrick's daughter to be like - shame she never completed her Full Metal Jacket doc

caught paths of glory the other day on netflix, loved the trial scene. their voices in that huge hall reverb

YES that movie is terrific! The bits on the battlefield are very surreal as well. Some really experimental sound work throughout that movie.

some kubrick clan are doing a reddit thing right now
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/134rvs/stanley_kubricks_daughter_katharina_kubrick_and/

what they used for verification is interesting
http://imgur.com/knmVI

did you really find that doc "brutal," Eric?

I was talking about the shot of Jack N. threading up his mic cord through his pants.

heheh

I did listen to Viv's commentary, she is/was pretty laidback and goofy (for a Scientologist?).

also, Stanley's voice -- Sellers was definitely doing it in one of his Quilty scenes, sounds like.

just watched this again for first time in like 10 years. just a few observations:

1) never realized before how much this owes to The Night of the Hunter, particularly Nicholson's performance and the slight ridiculousnouss AND menace he exudes.

2) the music being so "obtrusive" struck me as really interesting. there's a weird reversal of ordinary background/foreground things going on. (much as in a typical kubrick movie im always surveying the decor and props). In anycase i think the obtrusiveness is perhaps doing something really interesting tonally.

3) it's almost too lame to point out, and im sure it's noted many times before, but it finaly hit me that "dull boy" vs. shining and danny's "talent" play off of Jack's own artistic insecurities.

also the music cues really reminded me of EWS in terms of that obtrusiveness and, well, just loudness. it's like a film version of Miles Davis's Nefertiti--it reverse the normal relationship between sound and image.

oh yeah and along the lines of number 1 above it felt telling that Danny is at one point watching a Roadrunner cartoon on tv (which we only hear, and it's some song ABOUT the Roadrunner that I've never heard in any other context...but anyway that seemed pretty funny given how hapless a murderer of his family Jack turns out to be).

3) it's almost too lame to point out, and im sure it's noted many times before, but it finaly hit me that "dull boy" vs. shining and danny's "talent" play off of Jack's own artistic insecurities.

ha see this had never occurred to me but yup

the dumb obvious thing that i appreciated last time (after reading about it, too) was how it's never dark in this horror movie. even at the end in the maze at night it's floodlights-on-snow which just looks like evil daylight. i think "redrum"'s the only scene where the lights are off.

I recently re-read the novel in anticipation of King's upcoming sequel, and the conventional wisdom about "novel Jack" vs. "movie Jack" is way off. Even on the page, King's Jack Torrance is a dude so on the edge and full of rage that he mocked a debate team student to his face about stuttering, then beat him half to death in the parking lot when he caught the kid slashing his tires. And that's *after* breaking Danny's arm and sobering up.

Yeah, movie Jack is for at least a few scenes shown trying to hold it together. I don't remember novel Jack making that much an effort.

Here's a few of Saul Bass's rough sketches for The Shining poster design. More here

http://www.thefoxisblack.com/blogimages//saul-bass-the-shining-film-poster-2.jpg
http://www.thefoxisblack.com/blogimages//saul-bass-the-shining-film-poster-5.jpg

Are they Kubrick's notes on them?

"Make the logo bigger"

I think they're Bass's notes. xp

The Shining is a classic. I wasn't really unnerved by it until after several viewings. Somehow the humor distracted me from the horror. But recently the plain fact that it's about a man going nuts and trying kill his own family - with an axe - hit me hard and I realized that the humor is necessary because without it the horror would be too complete.

I admire Kubrick's decision to go completely against stereotype and cast a (conventionally) unattractive actress in the part of Wendy. In the book Wendy is basically the sexy blonde we'd expect to be terrorized in a horror film. Preferably with plenty of gratuitous cleavage along the way. Not here. I admire Shelley Duvall's performance, I think it's awesome. The look on her face the first time Jack gets angry with her...

In a few parts she looks almost exactly like Munch's iconic "The Scream" painting.

about that original penultimate scene:

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2013/01/shining-time.html

btw I think I went to the same theater Glenn Kenny did on 5/23/80, about 7 hours later.

you really need to see this

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/room237/

This is nice! Though they should have added some miniature furniture floating around...

I really hope this will be available at the German itunes in March as well.

per promo email for Room 237

Opens in New York on March 29 at IFC Center and Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center

National Expansion Begins April 5 in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Seattle and Miami

i saw room 237 tnite. it's very compelling to watch - i was never bored and at times it was as frightening as watching the shining itself. both bc it is scored and edited so well and the scenes are gripping even when slowed down and decontextualized. also bc some of the theories are so outlandish and still so compelling (failing on an intellectual level while eliciting such a kind of interpretative ecstasy) that there's a real sense of insanity + untetheredness.

one thing that a lot of the theories of the film share is that they're about elisions of trauma. i don't remember how much the movie goes into this, but the book is pretty clearly dramatizing the abuse of danny by his father - in this kinda freudian analysis everything emerges from the broken arm incident (or sexual abuse i've heard argued) and the horrific phenomena are a manifestation of this sublimated wound. but other theories make a similar move. the film is about the holocaust, but kubrick can't look it head-on (room 237 notes that he abandoned his own holocaust film after struggling unsuccessfully w/ it), or the film is about the genocide of the native americans that slowly slips back into consciousness (the blood oozing from the sides of the elevator) - but can never be acknowledged directly.

when i first watched lolita i was struck first by how formal it was compared to the other - far more stylized - kubrick films i had seen (at the time the shining, full metal jacket, eyes wide shut). also (and i haven't read the original nabokov so i can't speak to how it compares) that kubrick so intentionally elides the central crime of the film - the 'murder' of charlotte and the ongoing rape of her daughter. instead the most explicit narrative of the film for me was this kind of doubled paranoia. like in the shining these supernatural events emerge from an internal psychological neurosis - in humbert's case the repressed guilt over his actions manifests as his being tracked and stalked throughout their trip together. it's a kind of interesting freudian procedure bc humbert's internal state is so overwhelming, so total and crushing that it eliminates dolores's narrative almost entirely (she becomes this subject/nymphet lolita character) and then actually redraws the contours of reality as well so that everything is humbert and his sado-paranoid psychosis (the strange phone calls, the inspector, etc).

(this is room 237's dominant mode of interpretation i think - this obliteration of subjectivity along the shape of the readers' own psychological topography. these interpretative fantasies are so potent that the shining seems to bend to accommodate them.)

also i don't know if kubrick faked the moon landing and i very much doubt that he did but i am also convinced that the shining is a film about him faking the moon landing. however you can tie those two assertions together idk.

room 237 notes that he abandoned his own holocaust film after struggling unsuccessfully w/ it

This was afterward, I think, The Aryan Papers (Julia Roberts)?

kubrick so intentionally elides the central crime of the film - the 'murder' of charlotte and the ongoing rape of her daughter.

well, 1962 censorship.

Johanna ter Steege was cast as the lead ultimately. The installation of her screen tests is one of the highlights of the LACMA exhibit.

nice post, mordy. I am intensely excited for Room 237.

Regarding "elision of trauma": I've been thinking about that a lot lately and I've been wondering if the rather obtrusive music in the movie isn't in some sense motivated along those line. It's funny how often the most seemingly banal things are imbued by Kubrick with such intense inchoate horror by the score and camera staging.

oh yeah i also wanted to mention re doubled paranoia that humbert humbert's name reflects this - this reflected projection of self + doubling, the self in subjective experience and the self silkscreened onto the supposed objective reality. and of course he's a literary scholar.

http://i.imgur.com/ZpN6Lda.jpg

kubrick so intentionally elides the central crime of the film - the 'murder' of charlotte and the ongoing rape of her daughter.

well, 1962 censorship.

― saltwater incursion (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, February 13, 2013 10:40 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not really... that is pretty faithful to the book's aims

http://static.squarespace.com/static/50271a61c4aab6c54f9af5ee/t/51107bb1e4b060f86e759b5f/1360034738849/DSCF4948.jpg?format=1500w

From this blog entry of exhibit photos: Kubrick at LACMA.

but s1ocki, SK subsequently said a filmed Lolita doesnt work w/out eros, which would surely make eliding rape harder, yeah?

I don't know if its filmable at all tbh considering how unreliable HH is...