Ep.22 The Shining
www.mollymovieclub.com
Episode details
10 comments
Welcome to a new month, and a new movie theme! We’re starting our Spooky Movie Month with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
We both think this movie is amazing. Kubrick brings together brilliantly shot scenes, disturbing music and sound design, and a great story. There’s a reason this movie is a classic. We spend most of the podcast gushing over how good this movie is, but we also discovered that we both have the same minor criticism.
Thanks for listening to this free episode! The schedule for the rest of the month is:
October 14th - Psycho
October 21 - The Witch
October 28 - Halloween
Until then, we’ll see you in the comments!
Ep.22 The Shining
Doctor Sleep (2019) might be a fun movie for this podcast. It didn't perform very well, in part because its premise sounds like a total disaster (Ewan McGregor is an adult Danny who uses his powers to fight a cult of vampires, and the movie tries to split the differences between the book and movie versions of The Shining to be a sequel to both of them). But while it's definitely not Kubrick level, I was pleasantly surprised by it. It does a good job taking this movie's scattershot ideas and re-contextualizing them into something more cohesive, tying them into elements of the original novel that Kubrick cut out.
I have a feeling Casey will hate it, but that can be fun in its own way :)
This movie is extremely well made and has tons of incredible scenes, but I always find it frustrating. I think it’s wildly unfocused and never coheres into a whole as good as its parts. I also think the last act is a huge disappointment, beyond what you called out in the episode.
For example, there are good scenes showing Jack gradually losing his grip on reality, and there’s the great “All work and no play” scene that shows Jack has been crazy this whole time, but those scenes don’t feel like they belong in the same movie. They undercut each other. If Jack’s been crazy all along, then the scenes in Room 237 or the bar don’t feel like meaningful inflection points. They’re just weird things that happen.
The titular Shining feels out of place and comically underdeveloped. It’s not clear if it’s related to the hotel’s influence or completely unrelated (people without the Shining have also been affected by the hotel!), and it’s too literal to be symbolic. The payoff for making it so literal is that it magically summons the chef… only for him to get killed in five seconds. Then it’s never mentioned again. It’s such an abrupt anticlimax that it feels like a joke.
In the last act, Jack Nicholson gets so outrageously over-the-top, Shelly Duvall contorts her face into a series of caricatures, and it’s just the broadest, least subtle thing in the universe. After so much gradual, creeping, oppressive horror, the punchline has no psychological depth at all. We just run away from a crazy guy with an axe.
I haven’t read the book, but I have read other Stephen King, and he’s not the most focused writer. And I think Kubrick taking bits and pieces from his book, changing so much else, then trying to leave the result open to interpretation just left it completely disjointed. So the movie ends up with a ton of different elements in play (alcoholism, domestic violence, isolation, insanity, a magical haunted hotel built on an Indian burial ground, a bunch of very specific things that previously happened in the hotel, supernatural telepathy…), but no clear sense for how they fit together or how to pay them off. It’s still a good movie in spite of that, but it’s never really clicked for me the way it did for you.