Word: kubrick
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT it was safe to go back into a hotel, walk down an empty hallway into a furnished room and draw a warm bath comes Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, a brilliantly precise and demanding film that turns horror into art and art into horror. With obsessive simplicity, Kubrick manipulates the pieces of an ordinary world--a family, a kitchen, a bathroom, a television--to create an extraordinary image of terror and death...
Script and crypt have always crept menacingly side by side in Kubrick's imagination. This latest film explores the death of love in post-war (and pre-WAR) America. It depicts the horror of a people who watch their own bloody past on TV, paint a bloodier future in books and movies Kubrick's included), and sit nervously waiting to be swallowed by an inevitable, self-destructive evil...
...horror movie should be about jumping out of your seat and gagging on popcorn and clutching the stranger next to you in a bear hug. In this regard, The Shining is strangely flawed. Kubrick's film contains more than two hours of intellectual horror, too much suggestive fear for those audiences hoping for a bood and guts creature form the black lagoon/omen/jaws/prophecy, or even those expecting Hitchcock-like suspense. It demands patience, a susceptibility to delicate suspense, a relish for the ounce of boredom that wafts through a hallway before all hell breaks loose. And even with these allowances...
...KUBRICK'S FAVORITE THEME of man seeking his own death weaves its way subtly through this nasty plot. Jack Torrance is a man who has always allowed his drinking and his temper to overwhelm his reason, a man who sets his own roadblocks and then tries to run them in a battered Volkswagen. He stands as a crazy metaphor for the world in Kubrick's eyes: the rational progress we make always seems to be a step behind the torture we inflict on the earth and the nuclear apocalypse we plan for. In the end, we will be limping after...
...that this is a canonical work, something that only those who find Stanley Kubrick to be one of the world's great living film artists will respond to. By taking a book by an author who is at the center of the craze for the supernatural, and turning it into a refusal of and subtle comment on that loopy cultural phenomenon, Kubrick has made a movie that will have to be reckoned with on the highest level...