Film Review: THE SHINING * * * *
The Shining(1980)
CAST Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, Danny Lloyd
DIRECTOR Stanley Kubrick
Imagine...what would be the most terrifying thing you can think of? Would it be going to hell? Maybe being abducted by aliens? Prisoner of war? Or, as Stanley Kubrick sees it, being hunted in a large haunted hotel by your crazy axe wielding father? Yeah, that sounds the most horrific. And its pulled off with excellent precision and mounting suspense.
Jack Nicholson stars as Jack Torrance, an ex-schoolteacher who aspires to write for a living. So, he takes a job as a caretaker for a Colorado resort hotel. He brings along his wife Wendy(played by Duvall) and his five year old son Danny(played by Danny Lloyd).
Danny has a supernatural power which allows him to see the past and future. He has an imaginary friend Tony, who in Danny's words is "the little boy who lives inside of my mouth". Tony shows him things and tells him things about The Overlook Hotel which makes him afraid of the place. As time goes on Danny has visions of two little girls who have been brutally murdered inside the hotel. Jack and Wendy are increasingly drifting apart as Jack grows more and more irritated about his writing and with his wife.
The relationship between Wendy and Jack cripples slowly in front of our eyes. There is a scene in which Wendy wants to take a peek at what Jack has working with his writing. Jack tries to be nice in the beginning but he winds up getting outraged at Wendy. This scene is tense and shows a glimpse of whats to come for Wendy.
Jack Nicholson is perfect as Torrance. A man who is increasingly driven insane by visions and ghosts that haunt The Overlook. The movie paces itself perfectly in building the suspense and terror as Jack eventually winds down a road of utter madness. Kubrick's direction once again is flawless. The photography is unparalleled and breath taking and haunting. This movie will leave you emotionally and physically spent as you cascade through the different stages of Jack's pure psychosis. Based on the master Stephen King's novel "The Shining".
Good, concise review. Don't hate me for correcting your diction, but I think you meant to say "Jack Torrance....aspires to write for a living."
I do not think that The Shining is a very good film. I love Stephen King's novel, and it's one of my favorites; I highly doubt Kubrick even read the novel.
The changes are many and drastic. This wouldn't necessarily bother me...I mean, I loved Spielberg's Jurassic Park, and it changed a lot of the elements in Crichton's novel. But Kubrick's take on The Shining takes a poignant, emotionally resonant father/son relationship story fraught with supernatural peril and psychosis, and dissovles it into a heavy-handed cabin fever thriller with an oh so over-the-top Jack Nicholson at his hammiest.
The key elements are essentially the same: Jack is a writer and a recovering alcoholic, Danny has a strange alter ego, the hotel is big and filled with ghosts, and Jack eventually hunts down Wendy and Danny. But it's the context that Kubrick puts these elements into that so irrevocably changes them. There are so many needless and pointless alterations made. Stephen King has said publicly many times that he hates this film. I wouldn't say I hate it, or even dislike it, but it's not also one that I like very much. It is entirely mediocre.
Ironically, the 1997 mini-series version penned by King is still worse, however slightly.
(How King hates this film and approves of Lawrence Kasdan's raping of Dreamcatcher still boggles my mind, though.)
You got to be able to seperate the two mediums of entertainment here and take the film on face value. The two are very different, just try watching the film again and forgetting it was based on a novel at all, see if it stands up better for you.