Snow Set Movie 9: The Shining (1980)


I’m not going to hide it.  I’m a fan of Stephen King inspired stories.  In no way do I think that the execution is always the best that it could be.  I enjoy some much more than I enjoy others.  The Shining is one of those ideas that I think had one of the best executions of them all, both the novel and the Stanley Kubrick directed movie.

The movie version of The Shining stars Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, a man who agrees to spend his winter looking over a hotel that gets snowed in.  His wife Wendy, played by Shelley Duvall, and his son Danny, played by a kid named Danny, tag along and must now suffer the deteriorating mind of Jack.  As the winter goes on, things get threatening.

There are three main aspects of The Shining that make the execution as good as it is.  The first that I will highlight is the performance by Jack Nicholson.  As the movie progresses, you can see him become more and more unhinged.  I’ve seen few performances of insanity that were as good as Nicholson was in The Shining.  From what he sees, to what he does, to how he talks... It all combines into a force of a performance.

The next aspect to be highlighted is the visuals of The Shining.  Stanley Kubrick has always been a visually stunning filmmaker.  The Shining is no different.  Most people already know about the elevators that pour blood.  Watching that is a sight to behold.  What really needs mentioning is the layout of the hotel.  There are impossibilities in the layout of the hotel.  There are doors to rooms that can’t possibly be there.  There are hallways to outside.  There are windows that show outside but would actually be on the inside of the building.  This effect helps to skew the reality of the hotel which you are watching, and aids in the feeling that you experience of Jack Torrance going insane.

Stanley Kubrick also used sound to an amazingly large effect throughout The Shining.  From the silence of the abandoned hotel to the low hum of tension building within Jack’s mind, each sound means something.  Who could watch this movie and not feel the sound of the big wheel that Danny rides through the hotel.  The sound makes The Shining into what it is.

As you can see, I think that The Shining is at least a near masterpiece.  Everybody should give it a shot because the craft with which it was created deserves that much.

I completely ran into a wall with what I was writing.  I guess that’s my cue to stop.  So I’ll let you get back to your day.  The next and final movie of the Snow Set Movie Marathon is going to be another Stephen King adaptation.  Dreamcatcher is going to close the marathon.  You’ll see a write-up soon after I watch it.

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