The Shining: Novel was Great, Movie SUCKED!

[Southern Blueneck]

Sorry to bother you at this late hour, but there's been yet another YouTube video "analyzing" this cinematic "masterpiece" posted just yesterday. I did not click on it. Nor will I tell you its title that you might search for it. But I have to vent my spleen here! Otherwise, I won't be able to sleep tonight.

The Shining is the most overrated horror movie I have ever seen! Stephen King's FANTASTIC novel was butchered and pissed on by Stanley Kubrick, the second-most-overrated director of my lifetime, surpassed only by David Lynch! SK's excuse for a horror film was more flaccid than Jack Torrance after he sees that he's making out with a corpse! This abortion on celluloid doesn't deserve analysis, but rather an ANAL CYST, which would be an honest assessment of what it truly is!

[dweller]

1. the movie

is never better than the book ...

ymmv

✌🏼

[Laffy Kat]

2. Well don't hold back,Southern Blueneck.

I do agree with you, though. There was another re-make, I can't remember the year, but it wasn't very good either.

[wcmagumba]

3. Well...

[lillypaddle]

13. I liked it

I liked the book better, but I liked it.

[Downtown Hound]

4. Stanley Kubrick's filmography:

The Killing
Paths of Glory
Spartacus
Lolita
Dr. Strangelove
2001: A Space Odyssey
A Clockwork Orange
Barry Lyndon
The Shining
Full Metal jacket
Eyes Wide Shut

Most directors would be thrilled to ever make even one of those iconic movies. But that's all Stanley Kubrick made, iconic films that leave a lasting impression on popular culture. Second most overrated director ever? LOL. Let's just say you're in the extreme minority in that opinion. The Shining movie does NOT suck. It's just Kubrick's spin on the story, and it ultimately was way better and far more effective than that Stephen King produced miniseries in the 90's that was much more true to the book. I get why King had issues with it, because ultimately it wasn't the same story that he told in his novel. It was a different story with different themes that shared the same characters and location, but they were radically different. That does not mean the movie sucks. Both are excellent in their own way. I love the book and the movie. And I really enjoyed Doctor Sleep as well, both the movie and the book. And the movie does a great job at bridging the universe between King's book and Kubrick's movie.

If you like the book, read the book. If you want an adaptation that's more faithful to the book, watch the miniseries. If you want to see how one of cinema's greatest artists took Stephen King's source novel and turned it into a masterpiece of claustrophobic terror, watch the film.

[Paladin]

11. Well said, Downtown Hound. (nt)

[Aristus]

12. I agree.

Even one of Kubrick's less iconic films, Paths Of Glory, is still a masterpiece that any other director would have given his right arm to be associated with.

[Harker]

14. Kubrick and John Frankenheimer

might never have created any seamless masterpieces, but they both made a lot of terrific movies in which even the flaws seem to contribute something worthwhile.

I'd put Martin Ritt in that category, too.

[gratuitous]

17. Kubrick was a tinkerer and a pioneer graced with incredible patience

His work on 2001 was groundbreaking cinematography, and the psychedelic sequence where David Bowman goes through the star gate was all his work, painstakingly dragging a camera across the colored strips that form the top and bottom of the passage. In Barry Lyndon, Kubrick ground his own lenses to allow him to shoot in the dim candlelight of the time period.

When he was making The Shining, the technology for the steadi-cam had just been invented, and he immediately hired Garrett Brown, the inventor, to shoot the sequence where Danny goes rolling through the hotel on his Big Wheel. Forty years later, the scene is pretty la-de-dah, but at the time, nobody had ever gotten such "you are in the movie" footage before. It took a Kubrick to appreciate and understand the possibilities of the new technology. He harnessed the steadi-cam to Brown and made him run after Danny through the hotel lobby and halls (never mind how Danny rides his Big Wheel from the main lobby to the second floor to encounter the creepy twin girls), lugging sound equipment to catch the sound of the wheels going from carpet to bare floor and back to carpet. It's nothing short of amazing, and required incredible patience and trust from all concerned to achieve what Kubrick wanted to achieve.

I didn't care for the movie at first, either, having read and enjoyed King's novel several times. But after some time, I came around to the position that the movie wasn't made to be a 100% adaptation of the book. Once I broke that connection, the movie showed me Kubrick's vision, and I gained an appreciation for that along with my enjoyment of King's prose.

[Midnight Writer]

5. I just watched a documentary where a team of researchers mapped Kubrick's Overlook Hotel

They analyzed the film, made maps of the locations inside the hotel and on the grounds, and came to the conclusion that the map doesn't square up. There were discrepancies in some scenes of where the location could be mapped to.

in other words, in Kubrick's film, as shot, the Overlook Hotel is an impossible construction.

Instead of deciding, well, it's just a movie and most movies would not stand up to this kind of scrutiny, these folk came up with the explanation that Kubrick purposefully made the locations inconsistent in order to add a sense of weirdness, even though these inconsistencies could not possibly have been perceived by the viewers.

Besides, the movie is so overwrought as to be laughable. It is an impressive production, but it is just not scary.

[canetoad]

6. Yup

Vomitting smileys always point to a well considered review.

[hlthe2b]

7. Book may be better (usually are) but any movie that gives us this...

can't be all bad.

[walkingman]

8. You have to put it in perspective. I thought it was a great movie IN IT"S DAY! Remember that 1980

was 40 years ago (although doesn't seem like it) and things have changed a lot in the movies since then. IMO it was scary in it's day.

[TexasBushwhacker]

9. FWIW Stephen King isn't fond of the movie

He felt that Jack Nicholson was pretty much nuts from the beginning whereas in the book, he slowly becomes crazy.

[MissMillie]

10. There was a TV version (a mini-series)

that was truer to the book than the Kubrick version.

It still wasn't very good.

[JuJuYoshida]

15. It wasn't THAT bad man. Relax, a LOT of people liked that movie.

myself included

[NewJeffCT]

16. On a side note

we traveled out of state last year and booked a family run hotel for our stay. Because of flight delays, we arrived at the hotel a little after midnight. There was a sign on the door to call the caretaker at XXX number to let you in the door after 11pm.

A few minutes after we call, the caretaker answers the door...and he was a spitting image for this guy. A bit freaky to me, but neither my wife nor my daughter had seen the movie.

[wnylib]

18. WOW, SB. Don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel.

I liked the book better, but I didn't think Kubrick's film was that bad. Unlike a few posters here, though, I did like King's movie version (the miniseries) better.

I liked King's movie version better not just because it was more faithful to the book, but because it conveyed a different meaning and purpose for the story. Kubrick emphasized horror for its own sake. King's version told how a well meaning man sank into himself and his own ego when left isolated without social checks and balances. The horror genre was merely the setting for the story, according to King, because that's his writing style.

I read the transcript of an interview with King about the book and the Kubrick movie version. It was very personal to King, which is why he objected to the movie. King had an alcohol addiction, like Jack Torrance. The downfall of Jack was King's self-assessment and recognition of his own failings to himself and his family in a self-centered, ego-driven addiction. The story was an autobiographical allegory. The Kubrick film conveyed none of that. The King version did.

[VOX]

19. Nicholson's performance is so shamelessly over the top that he owns that film.

“New Yorker” film critic Pauline Kael described it as “Jack Nicholson plays Jack Nicholson very badly.” (May not be verbatim, but it’s close.)

The film has some serious flaws, but it’s weirdly watchable. The tracking shots of Danny riding his tricycle through the hotel are fantastic, as is the accompanying sound: wheels first on hardwood floor, then area-rug, then floor, rug, floor, rug, etc.