THE SHINING (1980) *** Stanley Kubrick pulls out a lot more than Stephen King put in (based upon a partial reading in which I entirely lost interest). Jack Nicholson is ebuilliently deranged, an acid-based misanthrope mutation of Robin Williams; Shelley Duvall looks as strange as any woman in the history of celluloid, Danny Lloyd is a good long-haired kid in a tricky situation-which happened a lot in 1980 as I recall, and there's no reason not to accept Scatman Crouthers as a connisseur of voodoo huts. Still, the single most integral element is the scary music: Wendy Carlos' score, and perfectly affected representations of Bela Bartok, Rachel Elkind, Gyorgi Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki. It's much more psychological scary than monster-jump-out scary, perhaps because King cast such a broad net with the "shining" concept that anyone who remembers their dreams or at least pays attention when they're awake can buy into it. Jack...no actor's ever been better at conjuring the intrinsic powers of malevolence while creating the illusion that it's all perfectly balanced by wit and humour...the bathroom scene with Philip Stone in which the facade is removed, and Stone appears to swell in size without that actually happening, is incredible. So too, Kubrick's ability (with John Alcott) to maintain the illusion that a great deal is happening when it's not. For much of the film what we've got is a routinely dull family in an abandoned hotel, but the camera moves around (supported by the music) giving nearly limitless potentialities to shots of things like a grown man in jeans playing catch with a tennis ball and a wall. The shots of Lloyd riding his big wheel are my favorite representations of the phenomenon; a child riding a plastic toy across rugs and hard floors, down an empty corridor...shouldn't really intimidate the viewer like that, should it?
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