The movie starts out as if it is going to be about the psychic powers of a little boy with an imaginary playmate named Tony nesting in his mouth and transmitting messages to him through his index finger. Before long, however, an irreversible shift from the boy's powers gets underway as Jack Nicholson, the boy's father, begins hogging the limelight, hamming up a mental breakdown, and mingling in the society of ghosts at a Gilded Age resort hotel. Stanley Kubrick dawdles so long in his deliberately banal, slice-of-life dialogue and so long in appreciating his capital assets (the ornate hotel, a garden maze styled after the one in Laurel and Hardy's <em>A Chump at Oxford</em>, tons of studio-manufactured snow that doesn't look much like snow but at least looks like a pretty penny — and particularly one spectacular set-up of a snowdrift that climbs two stories high and conveniently comes to a peak directly beneath the window through which somebody happens to need to escape) that the horror potential shrivels up and dies. And there is no reviving it at the climax by having a madman chase after his wife and child with an axe, limping like the Igor character out of Frankenstein movies. The easy mistake to be made about this movie is to conclude that the material must not have been worthy of Kubrick. The truth is vice versa. With Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, and Danny Lloyd.
I first saw The Shining when I was 15. My brother and I were trying to find a scary movie, and my mom suggested it. I remember being hesitant because I assumed it would be some corny movie my mom thought was scary “back in the day.” To this day, I’ve never seen a creepier movie. I think the combination of Stephen King’s writing and Stanley Kubrick’s directing is all that was needed to create a cinematic masterpiece.
The Shining (USA/England) 1980, Warner Brothers
List price: $19.98
Director David Fincher, loaded with don't-try-this-at-home ideas on how to prove yourself a man and not a mouse, traces a course of anti-Establishment insurgency, from small acts of personal liberation (peeing in the lobster bisque, splicing a frame of male genitals into the middle of a kiddie film) to organizing an underground bare-knuckle boxing club ("How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?") to masterminding a large-scale terrorist operation code-named Project Mayhem. (Brad Pitt, in loud shirts and spiked hair, leads the way for white-collar, buttoned-down Edward Norton, a loquacious narrator: "I wanted to open the valves on oil tankers and smother all those French beaches I'd never see.") A cheap-trick plot turn -- a mind-blower for the gullible -- pulls the rug out from beneath an already unbalanced movie: all attitude, no brains. The photography is all green. With Helena Bonham Carter and Meat Loaf.
If you haven’t seen Fight Club, I’m jealous. I wish I could re-experience it for the first time. This would probably be my stranded-on-a-desert-island movie. There’s just too much to say about Fight Club. You have to see for yourself. Easily one of the best films of all time. Also, it’s one of the only movies I can think of that is as good as or better than the book.
Fight Club (USA) 1999, Twentieth Century Fox
List price: $19.98
— Reviewed by Randy Conner, Artist, facebook.com/randyconnerpaintings
The movie starts out as if it is going to be about the psychic powers of a little boy with an imaginary playmate named Tony nesting in his mouth and transmitting messages to him through his index finger. Before long, however, an irreversible shift from the boy's powers gets underway as Jack Nicholson, the boy's father, begins hogging the limelight, hamming up a mental breakdown, and mingling in the society of ghosts at a Gilded Age resort hotel. Stanley Kubrick dawdles so long in his deliberately banal, slice-of-life dialogue and so long in appreciating his capital assets (the ornate hotel, a garden maze styled after the one in Laurel and Hardy's <em>A Chump at Oxford</em>, tons of studio-manufactured snow that doesn't look much like snow but at least looks like a pretty penny — and particularly one spectacular set-up of a snowdrift that climbs two stories high and conveniently comes to a peak directly beneath the window through which somebody happens to need to escape) that the horror potential shrivels up and dies. And there is no reviving it at the climax by having a madman chase after his wife and child with an axe, limping like the Igor character out of Frankenstein movies. The easy mistake to be made about this movie is to conclude that the material must not have been worthy of Kubrick. The truth is vice versa. With Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, and Danny Lloyd.
I first saw The Shining when I was 15. My brother and I were trying to find a scary movie, and my mom suggested it. I remember being hesitant because I assumed it would be some corny movie my mom thought was scary “back in the day.” To this day, I’ve never seen a creepier movie. I think the combination of Stephen King’s writing and Stanley Kubrick’s directing is all that was needed to create a cinematic masterpiece.
The Shining (USA/England) 1980, Warner Brothers
List price: $19.98
Director David Fincher, loaded with don't-try-this-at-home ideas on how to prove yourself a man and not a mouse, traces a course of anti-Establishment insurgency, from small acts of personal liberation (peeing in the lobster bisque, splicing a frame of male genitals into the middle of a kiddie film) to organizing an underground bare-knuckle boxing club ("How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?") to masterminding a large-scale terrorist operation code-named Project Mayhem. (Brad Pitt, in loud shirts and spiked hair, leads the way for white-collar, buttoned-down Edward Norton, a loquacious narrator: "I wanted to open the valves on oil tankers and smother all those French beaches I'd never see.") A cheap-trick plot turn -- a mind-blower for the gullible -- pulls the rug out from beneath an already unbalanced movie: all attitude, no brains. The photography is all green. With Helena Bonham Carter and Meat Loaf.
If you haven’t seen Fight Club, I’m jealous. I wish I could re-experience it for the first time. This would probably be my stranded-on-a-desert-island movie. There’s just too much to say about Fight Club. You have to see for yourself. Easily one of the best films of all time. Also, it’s one of the only movies I can think of that is as good as or better than the book.
Fight Club (USA) 1999, Twentieth Century Fox
List price: $19.98
— Reviewed by Randy Conner, Artist, facebook.com/randyconnerpaintings
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