Nov 20, 2015

One of his best. Seeing it on the big screen was nice.

 

Nov 20, 2015

We totally didn't lift this shot from The Omen lol.

If God can be a big black slab from outer space, why can't the devil be a bartender named Lloyd? Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror movie completes the cosmology begun in 2001 by turning a specimen (Jack Nicholson) loose in the inner space of a deserted, snowbound hotel. He, too, is reborn--not as a space baby, but as a grinning, wisecracking ax murderer. (Dave Kehr)



Kubrick delivers this uncertainty in a film where the actors themselves vibrate with unease. There is one take involving Scatman Crothers that Kubrick famously repeated 160 times. Was that "perfectionism," or was it a mind game designed to convince the actors they were trapped in the hotel with another madman, their director? Did Kubrick sense that their dismay would be absorbed into their performances? (Roger Ebert)



It took nerve, or maybe something like hubris, for Kubrick to go against all convention and s---t most of the gothic in broad daylight. Probably he liked the idea of our waking into a nightmare instead of falling asleep into one. And, having used so many night shots in A Clockwork Orange and so much romantic lighting in Barry Lyndon, he may have wanted the technical challenge of the most glaring kind of brightness. . . . There isn't a dark corner anywhere; even the kitchen storerooms have a flourescent boldness. But the conventions of gothics are fun. Who wants to see evil in daylight, through a wide-angle lens? We go to The Shining hoping for nasty scare effects and for an appeal to our giddiest nighttime fears -- vaporous figures, shadowy places. What we get doesn't tease the imagination. Visually, the movie often feels like a cheat, because most of the horror images are not integrated into the travelling shots; the horrors involved in the hotel's bloody past usually appear in inserts that flash on like the pictures in a slide show. (Pauline Kael)