Yep, it’s been awhile, but it’s finally time to renew our voyage through the most recent Sight and Sound Top 250 Movies of All Time list, this time around, it’s #156 on the list, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. And as always I’ll note that for those just joining us, you can find a full introduction to what the Sight and Sound Top 250 list is, and a look at the complete list of the movies on it, along with links to the ones I’ve already written about here. And, if you want to be sure not to miss any of these posts, just head on over to the Facebook page and give it a “like”or follow me on Twitter (both of those links are also in the sidebar) where I post anytime one of these – or anything else on the blog, along with just random other links and thoughts that may not make it into full posts – goes up. Trust me, if you’re not following one or the other (or both), you’re not getting the full Durmoose Movies experience.
There’s been so much written and said about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, it’s possible interpretations and influences – there’s even been a documentary, Room 237, exploring it’s different possible (though more than a little outlandish) meanings – that it’s tough to really know where to begin with it.
Therefore I’ll simply start with this declaration: for many, including me, The Shining is very possibly THE horror movie.
This film, the tale of a man – Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance – gone quite mad, very simply has it all. From the Stephen King book from which the story comes, through Kubrick and Diane Johnson’s screenplay, John Alcott’s cinematography, Kubrick’s direction, Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s score, and the rest of the cast and crew, this movie stands as one of the true masterpieces of horror cinema, very much deserves its place on this list.
One of the reasons this movie is so hard to write about is that it feels like one of those that pretty much everyone has seen and already has their own opinion about. I know that there are many – including Stephen King himself – who do not share my point of view on it. As a matter of fact, in the afterword of his sequel novel Doctor Sleep, King professed continued dissatisfaction with the Kubrick film writing”…of course there was Stanley Kubrick’s movie which many seem to remember — for reasons I have never quite understood — as one of the scariest films they have ever seen.”
At the same time, I know that there are going to be many out there who, though they may have seen images and clips from the movie, have never actually sat and watched the whole thing. After all, it was made in 1980, which means that an entire generation of movie-goers have been born and come of age since its release, and though foe a long time it seems as though one couldn’t turn on the television without it popping up on one cable channel or another, however, those days, I suspect are long past.
So, for those of you who haven’t seen it, rather than re-invent an already well-made wheel, here’s the plot summary from Wikipedia. It’s quite long and obviously spoiler filled, so I’m going to set it off as a blockquote. For those of you who don’t want to read the whole thing, or want to avoid the spoilers, simply meet me further down, below the indentation.
Jack Torrance arrives at the mountain isolated Overlook Hotel, 25 miles from the closest town, Sidewinder, Colorado, interviewing for the position of winter caretaker, planning to use the hotel’s solitude to write. The hotel, built on the site of a Native American burial ground, becomes snowed-in during the winter; it is closed from October to May. Manager Stuart Ullman warns Jack that a previous caretaker, Charles Grady, developed cabin fever and killed his family and himself. In Boulder, Jack’s son, Danny Torrance, while brushing his teeth, has a terrifying premonition about the hotel, viewing a cascade of blood emerging from an elevator door, before falling into a trance. Jack’s wife, Wendy, tells a doctor that Danny has an imaginary friend named Tony, and that Jack has given up drinking because he dislocated Danny’s shoulder following a binge.
The family arrives at the hotel on closing day and is given a tour. The chef, Dick Hallorann, surprises Danny by telepathically offering him ice cream. To Danny, Dick explains that he and his grandmother shared this telepathic ability, which he calls “shining.” Danny asks if there is anything to be afraid of in the hotel, particularly room 237. Hallorann tells Danny that the hotel has a “shine” to it along with many memories, not all of which are good. He also tells Danny to stay out of room 237.
A month passes; while Jack’s writing goes nowhere, Danny and Wendy explore the hotel’s hedge maze. Wendy becomes concerned about the phone lines being out due to the heavy snowfall and Danny has frightening visions. Jack, increasingly frustrated, starts acting strangely and becomes prone to violent outbursts.
Danny’s curiosity about room 237 overcomes him when he sees the room’s door open. Later, Wendy finds Jack, asleep at his typewriter, screaming in his sleep. After she awakens him, Jack says he dreamed that he killed her and Danny. Danny arrives with a bruise on his neck and traumatized, causing Wendy to accuse Jack of abusing him. Jack wanders into the hotel’s Gold Room and meets a ghostly bartender named Lloyd. Lloyd serves him bourbon while Jack complains about his marriage.
Wendy later tells Jack that Danny told her a “crazy woman in one of the rooms” tried strangling him. Jack investigates room 237, encountering the ghost of a dead woman, but tells Wendy he saw nothing. Wendy and Jack argue over whether Danny should be removed from the hotel and a furious Jack returns to the Gold Room, filled with ghosts attending a ball. He meets the ghost of Grady who tells Jack that he must “correct” his wife and child and that Danny has reached out to Hallorann using his “talent.” In Florida, Hallorann has a premonition that something is wrong at the hotel and flies back to Colorado. Danny starts calling out “redrum” and goes into a trance, referring to himself as “Tony”.
While searching for Jack, Wendy discovers he has been typing pages of manuscript repeating “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” She begs Jack to leave the hotel with Danny, but he confronts her, and threatens her before she knocks him unconscious with a baseball bat. She drags him into the kitchen and locks him in the pantry, but she and Danny are trapped at the hotel; Jack has sabotaged the hotel’s two-way radio and snowcat. Later, Jack converses through the pantry door with Grady, who unlocks the door…
Actually, I think I’m going to cut the plot synopsis short there, because I really want to encourage you to watch the movie yourself. SO if you want to know how it all ends, well, you know what to do.
Ultimately, The Shining (and I suppose I should make it clear that I am only talking from here on about the movie, and not the book or the later TV adaptation) is an ambiguous movie. Is it a ghost story? Is it a haunted house movie? Is it a movie about possession? Is it perhaps a story about spiritual if not physical reincarnation? Is it the tale of one man’s descent into madness or is Jack Torrance already slightly mad even before hr and his family move onto the Overlook? Perhaps what happens is simply the fulfillment of his destiny. Or perhaps he has been another ghost all along.
And in the end, do any of the above possibilities matter? No, not really. Because it is this ambiguity that largely gives the movie it’s power. It is, in large part the not knowing, the continuous pulling the rug out from under the viewer that makes the movie not just frightening but unsettling in a way that so few horror (or actually I would call this a terror movie) movies old or new really seek to be and even fewer actually accomplish. What Kubrick pulls off here is a spot-on definition of the term “masterwork” in that it exemplifies a master of his craft bringing every bit of his skill and everything that he has learned about the art of filmmaking to bear in the telling of what could otherwise have been – as we have seen in so many other films that have come before and since – merely another mundane film about a family (or any other group of people) trapped in a lone place with a killer (or at least potential killer) on the loose.
And, like most of the best stories, be they told in film or otherwise, the end result for each viewer is as dependent upon what they bring to and invest in the movie itself. That’s why, once again, I’m going to refrain from much more commentary and simply recommend that you watch the movie for yourself. If you’re a first time viewer, I think you’ll find that you’ve uncovered a gem, and even if you’ve seen it before, I think you’ll find that it rewards repeated viewings.
Here’s your trailer:
To say that I am not a fan of Black Friday could really be the definition of the word “understatement”. I’m not going to get into all the reasons for that here, because if you feel the same way I do, then you already understand most of them, and if you’re a huge fan of the day who was out there at 2am waiting for the stores to open, well… as always, if that’s your thing, more power to ya.
The Blaxploitation movies themselves were initially made specifically for urban audiences, but after a while, they moved beyond that and gained at least a certain amount of appeal with a broader audience, reaching beyond racial and ethnic lines. One thing that I will note for my younger audience is that this occurred during a time before the huge megaplexes when different neighborhoods would have their own local theaters in which they would show movies that they felt would appeal to the audiences that were close to them, as opposed to today when it seems like almost every movie is made in a way that it needs to reach as broad an audience as possible. Of course, that’s a generalization, and there are still certain movies that are made in order to appeal to a specific demographic, but today those are more the exception than the rule.
Now, of course, I haven’t actually seen the movie yet, and I really shouldn’t call it a turkey until I have, but really, was anyone crying out for a Frankenstein movie told from the perspective of Igor?
Well, that was a surprise! Woke up this morning to find out that the trailer for Captain America: Civil War had miraculously dropped out of the sky. I had heard we’d probably be getting it sometime this week, but I wasn’t expecting it last night.
For those of you who don’t know me personally, I’ll let you in on a secret that really isn’t a secret. I’m a white guy who shaves his own head at home. Yep, I regularly just pull out the same kind of razor that most guys use for their beards and take it to the top of my head. I started doing this a while back when I noticed that my hair was starting to thin some and I decided it was time to go with a different look. And while there is a part of me that misses the dark wavy locks that I used to sport, I do think the new look works in a different way.
And for the most part, that’s true. Though I do remember back in the day going with my dad to a place called “Wayne’s Barbershop” on a regular basis. Now I have no idea why my dad started going there, but back then we were regulars, and while it may not have really been a neighborhood hangout, it was the kind of place that people would go into and spend some time not just getting a quick impersonal cut, but interacting with Wayne, sharing neighborhood gossip and talk and just catching up.
Anyway, this time I thought I’d use this column to take a look at what is probably the most famous run of comics involving Arrow’s protagonist The Green Arrow. One thing that makes this run interesting, though is that it didn’t actually take place in the Green Arrow’s own book. If you take a look at the logo above you may notice that what it actually says is Green Lantern co-starring Green Arrow. I noted last time when writing about Frank Miller’s Daredevil run that if it had taken place today, the title very well might have been started over with a new #1 issue signalling the new direction the book was taking. This is even more true with Denny O’Neil and Neal Adam’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow. However, since the prevailing thought at the time was that books with higher numbers sold better because it made casual readers and collectors both feel as though there was a legacy to the characters, and emphasized their longevity. Plus, while this run definitely introduced a change in tone for both of these characters compared to their previous adventures, those changes were built very strongly on what had been previously published and simply built on, rather than ignored, what had come before.
So what was it about these two characters and their integration into one book which made this run a classic? Well, for one thing, while up until this point they had not really clashed in any of their interactions (both had been members of the Justice League of America, so this was far from their first meeting), this run from the very start made it clear that they were coming from different sides of the political spectrum. Green Lantern was actually part of a galactic police force, the Green Lantern Corps, which was charged with upholding both Earthly and galactic law while Green Arrow, while not an anarchist, was definitely seen as much more liberal in his political views and more on the side of the “common man”. And from the very first O’Neil and Adams used these differing viewpoints both as a point of conflict between the two heroes and as a way of motivating the adventures which were to follow.
Honestly, this was a tactic which worked quite well at times, and which didn’t at others. The years during which these comics were being published were definitely tumultuous ones for the U.S., and there was certainly a lot of fodder for the creators to draw upon. And though they did, for the most part, do a good job at reflecting what was going on in the country at the time, there were also times when the attempt to constantly make these stories “relevant” went a bit overboard and the result was more than a little ham fisted.
This was truly a coming together of writer and artist in a collaborative way that seemed just as natural – and just as effective – as the combining of the two heroes they were writing about.
Still, this is a run which may be one of the most reprinted in comics history and which has been rightly celebrated as one of the best of all time. Yet since it deals largely with issues that were a part of the political/economic/social landscape of the time, it definitely can come off a seeming date, However, if you really look at it, many of the issues and conflicts that the characters face are ones that are still relevant even today, sad though that may be. They are issues which were never fully settled then, and which may never truly be, making these stories both very much of their time and timeless.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show – which I’m guessing would be most of you out there – Hee Haw is probably best described as a cornpone comedy/variety show. Set (as much as it can be said to be set anywhere) in fictional Kornfield Kounty, it was pretty much just an excuse to share a whole lot of backwoods/hillbilly jokes and as a showcase for both classic and up-and-coming country music stars. I suppose in a way you could also compare it to Saturday Night Live, except that instead of sketch comedy it focused on piling in as many one liners as possible in one show.
Hee Haw actually only lasted for two years on CBS, from 1969-1971. CBS dropped the show in July 1971 as part of what became known as the “Rural Purge”, along with fellow country-themed shows The Beverly Hillbillies, Mayberry R.F.D. and Green Acres because the network felt that those shows skewed too far outside the younger demographic they were trying to draw in. After that, the show moved to syndication where it lasted for 20 more years. Personally I’d say that the move was the right one for the show, as I doubt that it would have lasted anywhere near as long on a network.
Of course, a lot of this has to do with the status of the book in question at the time. In late 1979, Dardevil was on the verge of cancellation. The book had been reduced to bi-monthly publication which was one of those “the writing’s on the wall” signs. Remeber, this was a time when the distribution system was quite different than it is now. There were no (or at least very few) “comics shops”, and most comics were sold in drug stores, on news stands, and at other places like that. And there was no direct market. Instead, comics were fighting for rack space with each other and with other magazines and everything else for reader’s dollars (or actually, at that time, reader’s 40 cents). At the same time, the companies were less likely to be so qick to cancel books or restart them with new ##1’s than they are now, with the prevailing thought being that for the new/casual reader, a higher issue number indicated the kind of longevity that would appeal to them.
durnmoosemovies.wordpress.com 