ll of Stanley Kubrick’s flicks – be it ‘ The Killing ’ or ‘ Eyes Wide Shut ’ – demand to be seen on a big screen. They’re about people trapped in huge, indifferent machines gone awry, from a pinch plot to a spaceship, and only the huge incuriosity of the cinema does them justice. In ‘ The Shining ’, the machine is a haunted house, the Overlook Hotel, created by Stephen King and turned by Kubrick into a crazy terrain in which internal stability, supernatural spitefulness, and the sense of space and time shimmer and underpin to terrible effect.
The story sees Jack Torrance( Jack Nicholson) drag his woman Wendy( Shelley Duvall) and psychic son Danny( Danny Lloyd) up a mountain to be the hostel’s downtime caretaker. effects go poorly. This is the original 1980 US interpretation, 24 twinkles longer than the one familiar to the UK cult. On the downside, it fleshes out the family’s megacity life and includes an interesting television-watching motif; on the strike, there are some daft dread shots and it didn’t ever exactly feel short at two hours. Still, a masterpiece.
