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The Shining Customer Reviews (13 - 15 of 131 Reviews)

while i love stanley kubrick and am a big fan i can't say just because he has made great films that this JUNK is his best work
with this film i have made more people mad because i just don't get why everyone thinks it's so great! first off they butcher the novel and just slap a story that sounds like it origanal, and then while i love jack nicholson and love his over the top acting sometimes, it is out of tune and place here and really shuts the movie down as in the book the creepyness is due to the fact we follow him as he sinks into madness,but here he's nuts from the word go and that makes you never care for him nore do you feel the creepyness of the slow slide.
and just because mr. kubrick was a great director doesn't mean that everything he did was good,this is the worst job i think he ever did directing a movie!!!!! he has taken a personal horror story(ghost story really) and turned it into an inpersonal story of madness and empty space!
from the talent here this should have been the greatest ghost story ever filmed,but what we got is the greatest bore story ever filmed!!!!! if i could give no stars i would

6.000.000.000 fans can be wrong
The next few comments have been screamed out aloud by me for many many years, from the outer regions of the universe, from the rocks and the deserts, from the rooftops of the highest buildings, but did anyone get it? Isn't there really anybody out there who agrees with me that "The Shining" is one big boring turkey? A flaw, dull, badly made movie with one Jack Nicholson in his most cheesy, routined and most over-acted performance of his entire carreer, and made by one Mr. Kubrick who, in my book, is the most overrated director ever to emerge on the surface of this earth?

Chopping away with an axe, grinning into the camera and crying out "Wooohaaah!" with extended arms and grabbing fingers is not scary to me. The fact that all this is done by a man who once was a loving father and devoted husband, is, however. So, if this is the case, the main theme of a film which has somebody like this walking around and through the sets, must be the journey into madness this guy involuntarily must undergo. Questions arise: what makes a decent father and husband into a axe-yielding maniac, on the brink of madness and on the very moment of killing his beloved ones? What has triggered him, what are the hidden secrets that lie behind his thin facade of quietness?

And in the case of "The shining", what is the role of the enormous Overlook Hotel in all this? Does it merely contribute to this journey by profiding giant empty hallways as chilly, desolate background? Or are there underlying secrets too, locked away behind doors that hang tightly in there hinges?
The downward spiral, and for the audience to be a witness of it without having the chance to intervere, to put things straight, is what would make tension build to almost unbearable extremes.

But for some reason Kubrick skips this very thing that gives the movie its potency and the possibility to become the next "Repulsion" or "Rosemary's baby". And talk about modern films which use these senses of paranoia within apartment bildings and the likes, take a look at the original "Dark water", the Japanese movie in which a damp, chilly appartment building has some terrifying secrets to reveal too, and does this so with much less obviousness and far more subtleness than "The Shining" - the result: real tension to be felt throughout the haunted place, and the haunted movie for that matter, and one scene filled with suspense and unease after another.

I know all this, but apparently not many others. I feel like a little kid telling things that really matter but which no one in the adult worlds bothers to listen to.
Hey, do I hear somebody say REDRUM?


Stanley Cubric's Best Movie
I went to see "The "Shining" in the movie theater back in 1980 when it originally came out. At 13 there were some parts of the plot I couldn't grasp at the time, but even then I knew a great movie when I saw it. The movie, like the book, takes place in the heart of the Rocky Mountains of Colorodo. As an Oregon native, however, I immediately realized that the shot of the outside of the Overlook Hotel was made using Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood in Oregon. The inside shots were filmed in England I believe. Trust me, though Timberline Lodge is a beautiful place, it doesn't look like the inside of the Overlook Hotel.

The movie deviates some from the book. The 1997 miniseries version is much closer to the book. Kubrick and the writers use so many great suble tools to make the movie effective. The characters are interesting enough. Jack Torrence is a former school teacher who is insecure (we see in the movie he fears having to work in a car wash). He is also a recovering alchoholic. There are hints that he left the teaching profession under duress and that he is an abusive father. Still, the Jack we see for the first half of the movie is a steady person. It is during the second half of the movie that the more sinister parts of his character start seeping through.

The Shining reminds me of The Ring in some aspects as it uses quick but powerful images to direct the movie. As you see the movie more times, you pick up on more subtle details of the movie that you missed before. Therefore it is definately worth owning. Some details of the movie remain a mystery to me. What did Mr. Grady mean when he told Jack that "you have always been the caretaker here"? This idea is apparently revisited at the end of the movie when we see him in a photograph at a New Year's Eve Party from early in the century. Though the movie leaves many mysteries behind, it is a modern masterpiece and is definately worth buying and adding to your library.

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