Just saw The Shining for the first time - Page 2

It's scary as f**k...
It chooses atmosphere over fidelity to the source material for good reason...
Therefore, as a cinematic adaptation, it does its job in spades... making a great film that is both frightening, masterfully shot, and conversationally inspirational.

Hmmm, your interpretation intrigues me. That being said, a part of that equation is missing insofar as I never found it in my heart to feel sorry for her. Duvall is as over-the-top in her performance as Jack is in his. As Jack is infinitely more charismatic than Duvall, however, I find myself ultimately siding with him... which shouldn't be as this a Kubrick film and not the latest installment of The Elm Street or Friday the 13th flicks. We should be rooting for Wendy and Danny to escape, not rooting for Jack to catch up to them.

Couldn't disagree more, without her I'm not sure this scene would have been such a classic:

"Hmmm, your interpretation intrigues me. That being said, a part of that equation is missing insofar as I never found it in my heart to feel sorry for her. Duvall is as over-the-top in her performance as Jack is in his. As Jack is infinitely more charismatic than Duvall, however, I find myself ultimately siding with him... which shouldn't be as this a Kubrick film and not the latest installment of The Elm Street or Friday the 13th flicks. We should be rooting for Wendy and Danny to escape, not rooting for Jack to catch up to them".


That's part of the appeal of the film, you see things from Jack's vantage point. You really do see the problem he has with her, and though you may feel guilty about it, you begin to feel that an axe through Duvall's skull would be a pretty fine sight.

Not being a fan of King's, I've never read the book, but if the miniseries is the version that he's happy with, I've gotta question the quality of that particular read.

Kubrick's film is a fine, masterful horror film, The miniseries is eye cancer.

While the book is certainly pulpy and hamfisted (especially towards the end), it's capable of throwing some serious haymakers with those big hamfists.

I'll fourteenth the hate on the miniseries, though. It was on SciFi a couple of weekends ago and I was floored by how bad it was. Exhibit #1 of King's failure to see a difference between pacing prose and pacing screenplays.

Don't like the books? Or fear what some crappy director would do to these on the screen? I think the Talisman could make a great HBO series (ala Carnivale) if done right.

I wonder how Darabont's The Mist is going...

I think most of Stephen King's ouvre should be expunged from history.

An entire scene involving Torrance talking to an imaginary bartender about needing a drink, and then going into detail about how he broke his kid's arm, that strikes me as a fairly explicit indication that the guy's a mean drunk. Kubrick takes exactly what he needs from the book to craft a sublime horror film, and that's all. It strikes me that the majority of the people complaining about the film in this thread are either unhappy because Kubrick didn't spell everything out to them or wish he'd left their favourite parts of the book in the film. The 'moving topiary' scene was absolutely laughable in the book, it would have come across even worse on film.

And it did, if you watched the godawful "faithful" miniseries.

Some of you might like to read this interesting piece before commenting further on The Shining.

...or this one, which expands a bit on the above.

Oopsy, forgot about that part.

That's fine, as far as it goes - but "taking only what's necessary" begs the question of "why bother paying $$$$ for the source material if you're going to dismiss the bulk of it?"

The name "Stephen King" doesn't exactly hurt when you're trying to put asses in seats.

I'd always assumed the name "Stanley Kubrick" would do quite well on its own.

True, but when your source is hot, it's hot. The original story is unique enough that the haunting doesn't take place in creeky old mansion, and that it is pliable enough to be played more on a psychological level than a supernatural one, which is what Kubrick, in his wisdom, leaned towards.

It's a springboard with name value.

I don't agree with the suggestion that the film is badly cast, particularly the idea that someone like Jeff Daniels (?!) would have been superior.
Torrance had to be angry already, that's the true power the spirits draw from, i think. It may be Danny's Shining that they use as an initial battery charge, but the Hotel Spirits have a kindred contained malevolance shared with Torrance that they draw from and exploit. Like him, the hotel contains a seething violence within that has been held back for some time. Nicholsan 100% succesfully conveys that same sense of innner hostility that is held back by proper family values and decorum.
He isn't supposed to be just some regular Joe gone batshit, that's not the point.

Also- the mini-series is utterly ass. The moving Topiary idea was retarded in the book and it's even worse when you see it in action.

Wow, this thread, if nothing else, has corrected my up-till-now flawed view of the film. See, I always thought it was the hotel that turned Jack into what he was. I didn't really get a sense of Jack already being a wingnut when he got there but that the hotel was making him that way - which in a sense it was but I never really saw that whole angle of the hotel feeding off of Jack before. It was vice verse for me - almost like Jack had been possessed. It all made sense to me when it shows the picture at the end with Jack in the center - I always saw it as the hotel had changed the picture to include its latest victim.

Holy shite was I wrong. Granted I haven't seen this movie in quite some years but wow - thanks for putting in perspective, fellas.

A CHUD discussion a couple of years back helped change my perspective on the film too, JGButler. I'm not a fan of Stephen King's books (other than Needful Things) so I came into the film with an blank slate. I too had thought the hotel changed Jack but it makes sense that it's the other way around, especially when Jack is traveling through the hotel near the end of the film.

Good to see film discussion back on these boards. Keep it up, guys/gals.

To go back to the source material, Jack IS a devoted, loving family man - flawed, with a few issues in his past - but doing his best nonetheless. Now, whether or not he'd have snapped anyway is up for debate, but it was quite clearly the hotel pushing the buttons of his worst impulses. That's where the casting of a more everyman-type actor comes in.

The film goes the other way, where Jack only needed what appeared to be a mild push to go batshit.

Ignore the source material.
Only evaluate what is in the film.
They tried that everyman thing with the mini series, and it just didn't work.
i will confess that some of that may be due to the fact that the character has become a film icon, it would be like someone in a few years trying to portray Hannibal Lector in a mini-series, but i think it's just the wrong line of thinking when casting this part, for that movie.

Lots of things didn't work in the mini-series.

I wasn't to clear on that post. I don't think Jeff Daniels could do it. I was just being facetious. Nicholson was the best man for the job.

And on the everyman note, I think Kubrick was trying to say that every man has that primal rage lurking in his soul. It's the state of humanity that's fucked. The evil in the hotel complemented that. Jack was in the wrong place, in the wrong time, as everything came together to let everything happened as it did.

Nicholson and Duvall are perfectly cast. Kubrick was trying to use archetypes.

The key to Jack's entire character is in ONE LINE. The scene where Wendy brings him breakfast and talks to him about taking a walk with her so he can get some ideas for his book. Her tone and manor make it seem simplistic, like all a writer has to do is take a walk and he'll come up with a brilliant idea. She boils art down to a formula and it infuriates Jack. Jack looks at her and without missing a beat, says...

"Yup, that's all it is."

One line, but so much subtext is delivered by Nicholson, I don't know if any other actor could have done it as effectively. It's obvious that the family dynamic is a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. It's evident in the book, but King has plenty of time to explore the transformation, Kubrick does not and that's why he cast Jack. He seems totally sincere in wanting to make things work with the family, but that makes him even angrier for putting up with it. There are subtle hints about this sewn into the narrative, which is what makes it a great movie and great casting.

Kubrick was basically trying express archetypes.

Juan23

i was specifically responding to the idea put fourth in this post:
i just mentioned Jeff Daniels because it was the only named mentioned as an alternative, wasn't having a go at you for mentioning him.

Awesome. No worries dude (or mate,).

Actually, I think Jeff Daniels would have made an amazing Jack Torrance. Obviously, a different interpretation from Nicholson's (which I agree is a bravura performance, for what it was), I just prefer the book's version of Jack vs. Kubrick's.

This looks like a nasty case of "That's not how it happened in the Book"-itis. A good friend of mine has the same problem. He completly hates the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy, based purely on deleted sections, modified sequences, and completly new material deviations from the books. No amount of "female demographic" arguments will ever sway him from accepting the romance between The Vig and Liv Tyler. That's not how things happened in the book, so it should not have been in the film.

The problem is, the mediums are different. Not everything that happens in a book translates well to film, nor are all film elements interesting narratively. A film's writer(s) job is to create a story interesting as a film, not to adhere to the exact prose and concepts of the original work's author.

Kubrick didn't pay for the rights. It was a project offered to him by Warner Bros and he took it, and turned it into his own thing.

And the story is still recognisably "The Shining". He just did what all great adaptors of material do - he stripped away the fatty prose and boiled everything down to the bare essentials of what he considered to be the core theme of the story.

And Kubrick didn't see the core theme as How An Evil Hotel Turned A Nice Man Nasty. He saw a tale about a man wrestling with his own inadequacy (as a father, as a husband, as a writer) and how he turns that self-loathing into resentment - and eventually violence - aimed at his family.

The supernatural stuff just makes a story about domestic abuse a more enjoyable and palatable movie experience for the masses.

I don't agree that that was the film Kubrick made. If it was (and it's pretty much how I read the book) I'd be much more of a fan. That subtext might be there in the film, but in my opinion it's buried under strange acting choices by Nicholson. Some might call it subtle, but not me - I call it vacant line reading.

Before everyone jumps on the "You must be a Kubrick hater" bandwagon, believe me, I'm not. It's just that this particular film strikes me as dry.

Let me expand on what I'm talking about. The book, for all its flaws, lets you into the Torrance family. Jack's messed up, but he's doing the best he can. Wendy is much stronger a person in the novel than in the film. And Danny is quite a charming and intelligent little kid.

Not so the film. In the film Jack's a vacant parent, a vacant writer (we have no idea what kind of writer he is in the film - for all we know 'All work and no play..." might be the best thing he's ever written), and a vacant husband. No offense to Shelley Duvall, but they couldn't have picked a worse actress to play her. Sure, maybe the intent is to say "No wonder Jack went apeshit, look what he married," but again, if Jack is supposed to be a normal guy before the hotel got him, he would have never married... that. And Danny is a sympathetic character until he turns into Twitchy Finger Kid.

Maybe I'm reading too much into these characters and Kubrick was trying to create archetypes of the broken American family. But I need someone to care about in a film like this, or it's all meaningless. You can say that that's not what Kubrick does, but I don't agree. In a weird way, Kubrick summons sympathy for Alex DeLarge. He may be laughing as the world burns in STRANGELOVE, but I think there's also some sympathy there too. I definitely cared about Pyle in FULL METAL JACKET, and even Joker too. And for me, I need more than just an archetype in horror. I need to have someone I'm willing to journey with when the shit goes down or I'm just watching terrible things happen to someone I could care less about.

In UNITED 93, with just a few brief strokes Greengrass gives you a multitude of characters that you're willing to go to the rack for. I bring up Greengrass here because I very much felt while I was watching it that Kubrick would have very much appreciated UNITED 93, its streamlined mode of storytelling, the clipping of all the bullshit that surrounds movies like that. And Greengrass makes completely sympathetic characters here with very little dialogue and screentime. We have a long time with Jack, and when all the shit goes down at the end of the film, I'm not watching anything that engages me on more than a technical level, because I've long stopped caring about who I'm watching.

There's a lot of great horror imagery in Kubrick's film. The hedge maze, room 217, the blood, the flash cuts, the eerie camerawork. But it doesn't add up to anything that really, truly affects me.

Hmmm, interesting. Kubrick's The Shining as a metaphor for Manifest Destiny and the historically ill treatment of Native Americans. Wait a second! Hedge Maze? Or Hedge Maize? My God, that's the Native American term for corn. It's all a rich tapestry!

Sadly, that's better evidence for the 'genocidal subtext' argument than 3/4 of "Family of Man."

I think Duvall does a fine job portraying the desperation and isolation, not just from the outside world but also from her husband, that would lead her to agree to Jack taking this job in the first place. The family dynamic of the book should have no bearing on how you view the family in the film. This is clearly a family that is struggling to stay together, and all that Jack needs is a catalyst to drive him to reject that family and resent them for what he feels they have made of him.

The compelling nature of the character to me is not how he turns from a normal man into a raving lunatic, but it's his total inability to take responsibility for his own failure in life.

Instead of confronting that, he projects his own flaws onto the people around him and ultimately is repelled by what he sees. That's why his innate racism comes out in the words of Lloyd the bartender, his misogynism is reflected in the encounter with the woman in room 217.

My $0.02:

I loved the book when I read it as a kid. The sequence with the lady in the bathtub literally made me jump out of my chair. I can't say how I'd react to it at this point in my life.

I loved the movie when I saw it as an adolescent, and I love it today. "Come play with us, Johnny - forever!" Is the scariest thing I've ever seen on a movie screen.

I love this more than both of them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z11B9...search=shining

The way I interpret the final shot is that Jack gave his soul to the Overlook. Once dead, his ghost has joined all the others and he's now been absorbed into its history.

But, the part that I bolded is the point of the book. The ghosts subtly, at first, push Jack into insanity and it also has a subplot that Jack was abused as a boy too.

Kubrick took a lot out, but the themes are very much the same.

Did anyone see The Fog? The ending with the direct lift from The Shining was painful.

What's interesting to note about Shelly Duvall's performance is that before this, she was mostly just in Robert Altman movies (Robert Altman discovered her when she was just a salesgirl), and if I recall correctly, Robert Altman gives his actors incredible leeway (spelling?). This is the exact opposite of Kubrick's insane perfectionist style (doesn't this movie have the record for largest non-documentary footage shot to footage used ratio?).

It's well known that Kubrick messed with her psychologically to get the reactions he wanted on film, but I wonder if the fact that she was mostly used to such a different filmmaking experience made these mindgames even more effective and if Stanley was aware of this when casting her. I once wrote a short story for a writing class on the subject, and stumbled upon this idea while researching.

He would ignore her complaints, and be generally nasty to her and make her do tons of takes. He made everyone do tons of takes but she couldn't really take it as well as Jack. You add that to being away filming for months and it's mentally taxing.

You can see his general attitude towards her in the behind the scenes footage shot by his daughter, which is the only special feature on my copy of the DVD.

It's pretty clear that Kubrick doesn't think much of Duvall as a person in that doco.
Duvall doesn't come across very well either. She fakes an "Episode" at one point to get some attention from the crew. It's quite embarassing.

Kubrick was hard on all his actors in every movie. Some could take it better than others. Some he would be hard on in an obvious way (yelling at them, impatient), some he would just torture with endless retakes.

I haven't seen that doc in awhile, but I do remember that he was brutal to her, but I also seem to remember that after she got it right he hugged her or something - basically let her know that it wasn't personal, he was just trying to get the right reaction.

Am I remembering that correctly?

The sequence in which he notices the camera (his daughter’s?) and then 'asks' Duvall if she’ll join him in a private conversation is pretty uncomfortable viewing. You know she's about to get the mother of all trashings. It's the type of thing the tryrant-boss at work does.

Duvall says she made her peace with Kubrick, but I'm not sure. Her weird kind of fawning gratitude to the man strikes me as the kind of thing a person with low self-esteem manifests after he's been knocked senseless by a bully. Kick a dog often enough and it'll exhibit the same behavior. He treats me this way because I deserve to be treated this way and all that.

If I'd been Duvall's husband/partner on set I'd be torn between punching Kubrick on the nose and doing everything in my power to get my wife off the project.

I'm not certain about that. One of the many motifs in the movie is the mirror. Mirror images. Doubles (Danny looks into the mirror in his first scene. He sees the redrum message in the mirror. We see Jack through a mirror when Danny enters the room in the ‘I’d never do anything to hurt you’ scene etc.) In the context of the final photo this ties in neatly with the 'history repeating itself' explanation. As Grady says - Torrence, or the mirror image of Jack Torrence, really was the caretaker. He's the caretaker again. He's making the same mistakes again.

A similar story follows Grady. Remember, there are two Gradys (Delbert and Charles). The latest Grady is the one who "chopped up his wife and kids" in Ullman's tale. The Grady in the toilets (the waiter) is the earlier - his double, or reflection - who also committed a similar horror. "Grady" and "Torrence" seem to be following each other inexorably through time - damned to the same fate. Perhaps the earlier Torrence was the provocateur for the later Grady.

I'm not entirely sure about this but I think Grady always refers to Jack as Mr. Torrence. It's quite possible the earlier Torrence wasn't called Jack, just as there are two Gradys, but with different first names.

At least he treated the kid well, not letting him see any of the scary stuff. (Like at the chase at the end, he told the kid it was a game and he needed to run as fast as he could )