Jack Torrance - a lesson to us all - the man was a writer like we folk at this here site - and just as we can get to be quite obsessive and addictive, then Torrance was a case in point - taking on a winter job as caretaker at an isolated old hotel so that he could have five months of peace to work on his latest project ...
Beware Op Writers everywhere ... for this can happen to you ... imagine in a year's time cutting your way in through the door to your wife and children with an axe, grunting out the friendly greeting "Here's Johnny."
Okay, I don't suppose I need to emphasise the point much more, I guess you get the picture.
Jack Torrance, played by the inestimable Jack 'Horny Old Devil' Nicholson, is the central character of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining movie, a truly horrific study of a mental breakdown (or ghost story, whichever way you want to look
at it). This is one of the most genuinely frightening and disturbing films of all time and is a truly remarkable and awe inspiring film, with even the gawkily ugly features of Shelley Duvall being somehow in keeping with the piece. She does fear terribly well, but has to take a very retiring back seat to a tour de force performance from Nicholson as the angry artist who suffers from his incarceration in the Hotel from Hell.
The Overlook Hotel was built in the early part of the Twentieth Century, ominously on the site of an old Indian Burial ground and has seen some bizarre happenings over the years. The place has a terrible effect on the Torrance family with both Torrance and son Danny being badly affected. The isolation and solitude tears at Torrance, biting into him, either awakening the ghosts in the place or in the back of Torrance's head.
I can't do full justice in words to the startling way this film develops, bringing a fearsome claustrophobia despite the wide open spaces of the hotel, so I won't even try. It's best if you discover The Shining for yourself rather than hear things second hand, so I'll stick to how the film makes you feel and the approach of Kubrick.
Stanley Kubrick has been involved in some of the most individual and unique films of all time and has always been a master film maker. He was operating at the peak of his form in this piece, with his scene setting, cuts across and oppressive silences creating an atmosphere which is genuinely chilling and disturbing. It's all very subtle and understated, with a regular excursion into the eyes of the child with the camera following the boy around the hotel at his eye level. The extended scenes where he is peddling his way around the Overlook on a tricycle with no background music, just the rumbling of wheels on the wooden floors, is extremely eerie, as is Nicholson's long range baseball throwing against the wall which becomes more and more obsessive as he avoids getting back to writing. The oddly shot wander of woman and boy through the maze in the Overlook's grounds is another scary interlude, and all the time the happy family domesticity is becoming more and more detached from Torrance and his troubles.
Kubrick's is a unique vision and approach to his work and in The Shining he probably produced his finest achievement, with some of the most terrible moments of psychological terror etched vividly across our minds' eye.
In Nicholson, Kubrick found a wonderful foil for his imagination and vision and Jack is wonderfully nasty and spiteful here as matters degenerate rapidly with the calm surface veneer of the strained relationship between man and wife being rapidly picked apart by the brooding atmosphere and Nicholson's irritability.
At the same time, Danny starts seeing dead people, with his 'gift', in a theme that was picked up and copied in The Sixth Sense, but was never as chillingly exploited as it was here by Kubrick in the backdrop of the creepy hotel with the evil force of Torrance and something nasty out there constantly stalking the new victims.
The Shining is an awesome, disturbing, frightening piece of cinema made by people at the peak of their form, nastier than nasty and as good as it gets...
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Stanley Kubrick'sThe Shiningis less an adaptation of Stephen King's best-selling horror ... more
novel than a complete re-imagining of it from the inside out. In King's book, the Overlook Hotel is a haunted place that takes possession of its off-season caretake...
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Stanley Kubrick'sThe Shiningis less an adaptation of Stephen King's best-selling horror ... more
novel than a complete re-imagining of it from the inside out. In King's book, the Overlook Hotel is a haunted place that takes possession of its off-season caretake...
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Recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) gets a job as caretaker at the ... more
deserted Overlook Hotel during the winter. He takes up residence with his wife, Wendy, and son, Danny, who experiences clairvoyant forebodings. As the bleak isolation of...
Think of the greatest terror imaginable. Is it a monstrous alien? A lethal epidemic? Or ... more
as in this harrowing masterpiece from Stanley Kubrick is it fear of murder by someone who should love and protect you - a member of your own family? From a sc...
Postage & Packaging: £0.00 Availability: 3-5 working days
![The Shining [DVD] [1980]](http://picnicb.ciao.com/uk/78525379.jpg "The Shining [DVD] [1980]")
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