Room 237 (15)
Directed Rodney Ascher.
Featuring Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Juli Kearns, John Fell Ryan and Jay Weidner. 102 mins.
Russell Brand is, in many ways, a weaselly and reprehensible piece of celebrity slime but he is the utterer of one of my favourite movie lines of recent years. In Get Him To The Greek he and Jonah Hill are running down an unfeasibly long hotel corridor. Hill says, “Gee, this is a really long corridor.” Brand responds, “Yes, it is positively Kubrickian.”
This is a nutjob appreciation of Stanley Kubrick’s classic horror film. Five unseen weirdoes/ academics offer up their interpretation of the film and its hidden meanings while we watch a (sometimes rather random) selection of film clips taken not just from Kubrick’s work but also from such unrelated fare as Demon 2, All The President’s Men and Satyricon.
Their views range from the insightful to the crackpot – it is about the Holocaust, the genocide of the Native Americans, it is Kubrick’s admission of guilt for his role in faking the Apollo moon landings. After a while is it isn’t always clear which are the insightful ones and which are the crackpot.
The idea of carefully examining the design of the carpet or the searching the background of a scene and concluding that the positioning of a particular brand of baking soda has deeper meaning may strike you as insane but with Kubrick you can never be sure. By 1980, he was firmly in his mad, reclusive genius period: making the whole film on a giant set at Elmstree, shooting for the best part of a year and demanding up to 80 takes for a single scene. Surely for such a rigorous film maker nothing can be accidental? So continuity errors are poured over for their meanings: a chair that disappears from behind Nicholson in a scene or the way his typewriter changes colour halfway through the film.
Room 237 is a conspiracy theory without a crime or a cover up. Part of me thinks that, as with any conspiracy, if you subjected any mundane film or situation to the same intense scrutiny you would dig up just as many mysteries and inner meanings. But the film’s notion that The Shining’s power derives from it being an accumulation of all human evil is a persuasive one. Because, looked at rationally, the film has a power, and a hold over our imagination, way beyond what the events on screen should have any claim to.
Directed Rodney Ascher.
Featuring Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Juli Kearns, John Fell Ryan and Jay Weidner. 102 mins.
Russell Brand is, in many ways, a weaselly and reprehensible piece of celebrity slime but he is the utterer of one of my favourite movie lines of recent years. In Get Him To The Greek he and Jonah Hill are running down an unfeasibly long hotel corridor. Hill says, “Gee, this is a really long corridor.” Brand responds, “Yes, it is positively Kubrickian.”
This is a nutjob appreciation of Stanley Kubrick’s classic horror film. Five unseen weirdoes/ academics offer up their interpretation of the film and its hidden meanings while we watch a (sometimes rather random) selection of film clips taken not just from Kubrick’s work but also from such unrelated fare as Demon 2, All The President’s Men and Satyricon.
Their views range from the insightful to the crackpot – it is about the Holocaust, the genocide of the Native Americans, it is Kubrick’s admission of guilt for his role in faking the Apollo moon landings. After a while is it isn’t always clear which are the insightful ones and which are the crackpot.
The idea of carefully examining the design of the carpet or the searching the background of a scene and concluding that the positioning of a particular brand of baking soda has deeper meaning may strike you as insane but with Kubrick you can never be sure. By 1980, he was firmly in his mad, reclusive genius period: making the whole film on a giant set at Elmstree, shooting for the best part of a year and demanding up to 80 takes for a single scene. Surely for such a rigorous film maker nothing can be accidental? So continuity errors are poured over for their meanings: a chair that disappears from behind Nicholson in a scene or the way his typewriter changes colour halfway through the film.
Room 237 is a conspiracy theory without a crime or a cover up. Part of me thinks that, as with any conspiracy, if you subjected any mundane film or situation to the same intense scrutiny you would dig up just as many mysteries and inner meanings. But the film’s notion that The Shining’s power derives from it being an accumulation of all human evil is a persuasive one. Because, looked at rationally, the film has a power, and a hold over our imagination, way beyond what the events on screen should have any claim to.
