I never grow tired of this movie and think it is a complete masterpiece. I feel like I'm on another planet when people don't like it. And most people don't like it. :)
It's such a bizarre wonderful dreamworld of the human psyche that Kubrick created. Like if Kubrick made a Fellini film.
I hated it on first watch, when it came out, due to expecting something different. Now I absolutely love it. I get why people don’t like it, like how Tom Cruise goes around almost but never actually having sex, the movie always hints at a satisfying wrap up but never delivers it, which is totally intentional. It works with many different interpretations, you can read it through cultural, psychological, and probably other lenses. Still I’m wary of talking about it since it’s probably too effective at portraying a paranoid mindset.
> Kubrick was perhaps the world's most successful maker of mainstream art films.
I'd had a vision of Kubrick as the Thomas Kinkade of the 7th art, which luckily was quickly dissipated by:
> He found a way—like few before him or since—to make interpretive movies that are commercially successful in popular culture while simultaneously appealing to cult film audiences, intellectuals and academics, cinephiles, critics, artists, and fellow filmmakers.
> It's such a bizarre wonderful dreamworld of the human psyche that Kubrick created. Like if Kubrick made a Fellini film.
Of course The Shining shows that what Kubrick makes of a novel is not necessarily what the author made, but it's probably worth giving some credit for the dreamworld to Schnitzler—the novel is literally called, or so Wikipedia tells me it translates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Story), Dream Story.
The atmosphere of the movie is amazing, as you say. But the storyline in the end seems not to tie together, and not in the intentional way like, e.g., a David Lynch movie would mess with the story on purpose, but in the sense that "we had this much footage when the director died, so we had to put together what we had and call it a day".
Still one of my favorite movies though.
Yeah, will definitely rewatch. I vaguely remember that it felt a bit arbitrary in the end what happened with the pianist "nick nightingale".
I read in Roger Ebert's review, that he would have enjoyed a twist in the end, where Bill would notice the body of nick being pushed out on a bed on a hospital corridor, adding some more doubt about what has really happened. (I vaguely remember some bigshot has promised Bill that Nick was fine.)
I don't want to give things away, but we know Nick gets taken by the bad guys. I'm not sure what visually confirming that would do. Regardless, imo, the point of the movie isn't really to factually confirm those various issues, but how rattled Bill is from it all. If you read the article they place on the screen twice, it's filled with these double words and sentences, all clearly referential to elements of the film. I used to think it was Kubrick "trying to tell us something" but these days I take them more as Bill's incoherent approach to the world around him as he's on day 3 of his bender, i.e. the words and phrases are doubled up because he can't see straight anymore, his dreams are blending into his life (just as his life blended into his dreams).
I will have to watch it again. I only watched it once when it came out, at a time when Clockwork Orange was my favorite movie.
I remember it being beautiful and interesting visually(and of course the incredible backwards opera music ritual scene) while missing the plot so completely after reading this article and some of the comments.
It's such a bizarre wonderful dreamworld of the human psyche that Kubrick created. Like if Kubrick made a Fellini film.