All work and no play makes Jack Nicholson far from a dull boy in THE SHINING
THE SHINING (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
March 20-28
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
All work and no play makes Jack a not-so-quite dull boy in Stanley Kubrick’s classic horror story, based on the Stephen King novel. One of the all-time-great frightfests, The Shining is a truly scary movie about a writer named Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson at his overacting best) who has agreed to become the caretaker of the old Overlook Hotel in Colorado during the snowy winter when the enormous mountain resort closes down for the season. He is joined by his perpetually nervous wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their young son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), who seems to have brought along his invisible friend, Tony, who speaks through Danny’s finger. Between taking care of the Overlook and working on his novel, Jack finds a whole bunch of other folks to hang out with, people who have populated the place during the ritzy establishment’s golden age, including a strange woman in room 237. Kubrick plays with horror conventions as he seeks to scare the crap out of the audience, something he accomplishes time and time again as Jack grows more disturbed, Wendy’s shrieks become more and more ear piercing and annoying, and Danny’s visions get more and more bloody. No matter how many times you’ve seen it, it still gets you, even when you know exactly what’s lurking around that corner. Only those who went to the film during its opening weekend, as we did, got to see the two-minute finale that Kubrick cut out immediately thereafter, which involved the iconoclastic director riding his bicycle to various theaters, armed with a pair of scissors. A DCP projection of The Shining is being shown March 20-28 as part of the IFC Center series “The Films of Stanley Kubrick,” which is screening every one of the Bronx-born ex-pat’s feature works in preparation for the March 29 theatrical release of Rodney Ascher’s Room 237, which delves into the many metamysteries surrounding the making of The Shining.