The Shining

lol 12 years ago I called this Kubrick's second worst movie (after Eyes Wide Shut) although after watching most of it over the weekend in a hotel room (lol) I feel a bit more generous towards it.

Which makes uh Full Metal Jacket his second worst movie, I guess? The back half of that is a slog.

Do people just not count Fear and Desire when making statements like that?

in my case yes, it's the only one I've never seen

The Shining. pic.twitter.com/Y1T0gaXNKG

— Amazon Movie Reviews (@AmznMovieRevws) February 7, 2020

Ashamed to say but there’s a shining Mountain Dew commercial out now, wtf fml

Fuck advertising

Mountain Dew pouring through the elevator lobby in that ad made me lol, not gonna lie.

“The Shining” but from an Aunt’s POV.#31auntsforhalloween pic.twitter.com/Gfm32iTDb9

— Andrew Farmer (@thatsajellyfish) October 10, 2020

Don't begrudge it to me, J.J.--I'm allowing myself exactly one of these.

https://phildellio.tripod.com/bernie.jpg

late lol at that aunt twitter

Good one

Just to clarify, I lifted that from somewhere else...Thanks for pointing out the Aunt's POV tweet--that is pretty great.

"Once again, I am asking you to come and play with us, Danny."

re-read the novel & i just need to dump this out of my head because i am working through some shit lol

I think the disconnect btw Novel Jack vs Movie Jack needs to be expressed like, um… it’s not that movie jack is bad & novel jack is good
there’s more nuance & subtlety carried in the book, and i think ultimately, as w most SK books to movies, what is lost is the internal strugglesof the characters because that’s where all his best writing really lives imo
and it is not something easily shown onscreen & kubrick is not one for that stuff anyway

the thing is novel jack *knows* deep down that he is incapable of not fucking up, and wants to earn himself a reprieve from fucking up by putting himself somewhere where he hopefully can’t. Removing all stimuli, etc.
And naively/selfishly thinking that by doing that, his family will be ok by extension.
it’s all addict-driven thought, clean slates, etc.
like if i do THIS perfectly then everything will be fine, but the pressure to do everything right is what makes it so much harder because you are starting with a flawed premise that you are even emotionally able to achieve such a high bar … so it becomes self-fulfilling addict-brain self-sabotage.

anyway.

what the movie takes away is the really slow, scary way that the hotel is trying to tune jack into selfdestruct, tuning him into the self isolating hunted addict mind where everyone is against him, where alcohol makes him the better version of himself, where he is finally surrounded by people and parties and not left to his thoughts & doubts & fears of being a bad father, bad writer, bad person, alcoholic etc

the way the book slowly dials him in to the poison brain is so well done, like it starts SO early and you don’t always catch that that’s whats happening to him. and it’s truly, genuinely heartbreaking towards the end, like watching someone slowly turning inside out, the moment where the hotel wins its fight with him when he is rationalizing his father’s abuse of his mother when we’ve already walked through the horror that he witnessed. like, oh. ok he’s gone.

and worse … when Danny sees his dad and the dread he experiences when he realizes the dad he loves is no longer there….

that emotional journey is the whole point of the book, i think. not jusr the journey of the addict, but the moment for the child of the addict when a parent is replaced by a monster, and the real loss that is felt when they realize what is happening.
jack is abusive to danny throughout the book yes but it co-exists in a real way with a tender relationship & genuine sweet moments of parenting, and without any of that tenderness, with Jack as just a jerk all the time like he is in the movie, there’s nothing for danny to lose, and there’s no real tragedy in jack giving himself over completely to the hotel’s malevolent pull/ addiction.

thank you for attending my TED talk

The directors cut of Doctor Sleep is v good, because they chapterize it, so it’s like watching a 6-ep HBO miniseries

Also, yeah, rewatching the film and re-reading the book last month does kinda justify SK’s position to me of why he didn’t like the adaption.

Tho I don’t know if this justifies the 1997 tv miniseries, which you can watch in full on Archive.org (with commercial breaks!). That one is more hilariously dated than anything just by showing Tony in a VERY 1997 outfit, glasses, and hairstyle.

VG your fandom posts are always such a treat, brings me into the joy you feel and lets me love it too. Don't ever stop!

OTM, don’t stop ever

thx u guys :)

rereading it, i definitely was struck by how much of this story was SO personal for SK, wrestling w fatherhood, alcoholism, etc which def explains why he was always so outspoken about the Kubrick movie

i love the Kubrick movie too though!
but i do find the Shelley Duvall stuff hard to watch, especially at the end.

When you were reading the book, were you picturing the characters as Nicholson, Duvall etc?

Novel Jack felt more Michael Keaton to me, you need someone who can do the genuine tender moments but look like theyre maybe holding a tiny crazy thought in their head at the same time
Wendy i pictured her more like a blonde Julianne nicholson.

its hard to picture Nicholson as jack in the early chapters, but later when he starts to really go to crazytown you can def see where the casting came from, even the lines sound like him

Oh man I'd love to see early 80s Keaton in that part

right? i think he would have been perfect

iirc king was angry about the nicholson casting as it made the transition from all work to no play sorta meaningless; you knew he was apeshit immediately

yeah exactly

Yeah I think that’s one criticism where you can really see where he’s coming from

I’m not at all a stan of the film but in general tho I think the changes are improvements, or at least make for a better movie - hedge maze better than topiary, ending way better (lol I think it’s in danse macabre where king is like “I had a cool explosion at the end but in the film he just freezes to death, how lame is that” which is like ok sure Steve), axe probably a bit better than roque mallet but they’re about the same really (but I do like to think Reiner was trolling king’s whininess years later when king actually did write a scary axe attack and Reiner changed it… to a mallet)

& just the weird little touches like the different names for Grady give it such this uncanny vibe

That 90s version is truly fucking dogshit, maybe king’s worst screenplay which is saying something, if he & garris were trying to make a case for a faithful adaptation… case dismissed

king was angry about the nicholson casting as it made the transition from all work to no play sorta meaningless

this must be why they want hard in the other direction for the TV miniseries by casting the funny guy from Wings

it was supposed to be Tim Daly but he couldn’t do it so he suggested Weber

Good post, VG. I always ranked The Shining as my favorite King novel and so much of my appreciation of it stemmed from how richly drawn and heartbreaking Jack’s journey is.

Movie rules too, it’s just a different thing entirely. And as stated, I always kinda got why King didn’t like it. All that shading (and a lot of it possibly personal for King) almost entirely excised.

https://i.imgur.com/JKv1jF9.png

*vomits*

One of the worst movie posters of all time

What a rich film and story…and this is what they go with. I guess the 2001 baby connection is a thing? W/e

you're crazy, that poster is great.

I love both the novel (for many of the reasons that VG elucidated above) and the film, but that's because the novel showcases King's strengths and the film showcases Kubrick's. Obvious, yes, but that's what it is.

http://polishpostershop.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/z/e/zebrowski-poster02861.jpg

jesus

also i think i realized the guy getting blown by the man in the bear suit is maybe supposed to be Horace Derwent & the bear suit guy is the dog suit guy from the book?

is how i break it down to an extent

You have to assume (another good adaptation if so)

also i fucking love the scrapbook device in the novel as a way of exploring the hotel’s backstory, & the means by which the hotel entity really can get its hooks into him

https://i.imgur.com/9fnTPaE.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/TE3pExD.jpg

I thought Alex Garland's Men had a Shining feel to it at times.

Jesus, just when I thought the Rough Trade compendium (which I got for Xmas and love) would be the last word on spendy, over-reaching art books exploring this movie, along comes Taschen with a $1,500 three-volume slab:

https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/film/all/66983/facts.stanley_kubricks_the_shining.htm

Yeah. Fuck off with that, Taschen.

A book shouldn't cost more than a couch, really

A coffee table book shouldn't cost a month's rent, people will buy it though.

It's plausible that they release a regular-edition that's only the cost of two bottles of Dom, as they did with the Tati set

Da fuq
Will torrent the shit out of that

I guess I can get behind Taschen fleecing moneyed dorks and douchebags to fund their high quality/low cost line, but yeah, hope some reasonable soul PDF’s it.

Also I love The Shining, but the kinda white glove treatment it’s gotten in recent years is still somewhat lol to me.

same tbh. it's a good film! why it's everybody's accessible HIGH CINEMA puzzlebox seems more a function of nostalgia than anything else.

this comes with a "box of ephemera" at least, which is difficult to torrent.