VHS and Betamax You Have Recently Rented

[chokeout]

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Pure madness that got close to falling apart towards the last 20 minutes. The fact it is in anyway coherent is a testament to the directors. Everyone puts in a cracking shift with Ke Huy Quan especially fantastic. I genuinely broke out in a massive smile when he said his first line, it's been nearly 40 years and his voice was unmistakable. 

Now ill be gutted if he doesn't get at least a cameo in the new Indy film. Him and Ford interacting will legitimately break me. 

[Devon Malcolm]

1 hour ago, chokeout said:

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Pure madness that got close to falling apart towards the last 20 minutes. The fact it is in anyway coherent is a testament to the directors. Everyone puts in a cracking shift with Ke Huy Quan especially fantastic. I genuinely broke out in a massive smile when he said his first line, it's been nearly 40 years and his voice was unmistakable. 

Now ill be gutted if he doesn't get at least a cameo in the new Indy film. Him and Ford interacting will legitimately break me. 

It's a shame they laboured over the final stages because it was almost perfect. But yeah, Ke Huy Quan was incredible - imagine being out of the game for that long and then producing *that* performance.

[ReturnOfTheMack]

For reasons I can't explain I voluntarily watched Senior Year on Netflix. I didn't hate it, and found Rebel Wilson genuinely quite likable for the first time. 

I assume I'm ill

[LaGoosh]

On 5/12/2022 at 2:22 PM, BomberPat said:

I watched Doctor Sleep last night.

I still don't really know what I made of it. I haven't read the book, which from what I gather is far more explicitly about alcoholism, coming to terms with past trauma (not "pasta trauma", as I just typed), and so on. Elements of that are obviously present in the movie, but they never feel like they're at the heart of it at all - Ewan McGregor isn't bad as grown-up Danny Torrance, though I'm not convinced he ever felt like he was actually a grown-up version of the kid from The Shining, just a different character with the same name.

The main thing that made this interesting is that it attempts to thread the needle of being an adaptation of a book that's a sequel to Stephen King's Shining, while also acting as a sequel to Stanley Kubrick's Shining. Problem is that, in order to do that, they need to commit a cardinal sin of cinema - never remind the audience of a better film that they could be watching. To that end, there's good and there's bad - I got chills at the opening credits using Wendy Carlos' main theme from The Shining, loved the amount of callbacks to the long shots of winding forest roads, and all but shot-for-shot remakes of the drive up to the Overlook Hotel. There's other nice touches too - when Danny is offered a job at the hospice, the doctor's office he's in is very clearly modeled on the manager's office at the Overlook. 

It's where that subtlety disappears that it all gets a bit harder to like; when it's all axes, typewriters and hedge mazes, you could very generously make the argument that it's about reliving past trauma or the cycle of abuse, and especially when a (bad) portrayal of Jack Torrance shows up. But mostly, it feels like clumsy attempts to make the movie better by association with a much, much better film.

The more it went on, the more I realised the strength of The Shining was in how much Kubrick stripped away all of the most "Stephen King" elements of Stephen King's book. By making the ghosts of the Overlook literal, quantifiable entities, and adding in a greater array of magical nonsense, pseudo-immortal villains, and really bad depictions of psychic conflict, while still trying to act as a sequel to Kubrick's film, where it's kept ambiguous to what extent any of that stuff is real, it just serves to undermine not only The Shining, but the central conceit of Doctor Sleep being, on some level, about alcoholism and familial trauma. The strength of The Shining (which, if you hadn't guessed, is one of my favourite films) is in its ambiguity, and this is a film tasked with removing all of that in support of a much weaker narrative.

In spite of all of that, I think I still sort of enjoyed it as a very Stephen King romp, albeit a far too long one

I couldn't get along with Doctor Sleep at all. Like most of Mike Flanagan's output, it looks like a cheap TV movie with below average acting, drawn out uninteresting plotting, no atmosphere and commits the cardinal sin of all bad horror movies - it's not scary in any way. For someone who mostly does horror you'd think Flanagan would have worked out how to be at least slightly good at it or how to do something remotely interesting, original or creative.

The absolute worst part is that the villain is just Rebecca Ferguson being really annoying while wearing a stupid hat. 

As for the original Shining, I love it. I love both the book and film. I think an actual movie based properly on the book would be pretty terrible although I love the gradual build up of the book and how Jack's alcoholism plays into it. In the film it always frustrates me slightly watching it that Jack is basically already psychotic from the start and it jumps straight in at the deep end. Seriously, even on the family drive up to the hotel at the start Jack looks like he's desperate to murder them.

Edited May 18, 2022 by LaGoosh

[Factotum]

I liked DOCTOR SLEEP a lot. Seen it a few times now. The last act is not great, but they kind of rescue it. It was a brave swing and it pulls it off.

14 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

it's not scary in any way.

I don't know. That bit with the kid in the baseball kit is pretty fucking dark. More horrifying maybe

[BomberPat]

yeah, I never got any sense that I was meant to be scared by Doctor Sleep, so I never really treated it as a horror film, just a weird fantasy flick. I saw a review that said, "like The Shining, it eschews jump scares". Yeah, by eschewing scares altogether.

I agree with your (and Stephen King's) criticism that The Shining is meant to be a story about how circumstance can drive any man mad, yet in the movie it's pretty clear that Jack was a dangerous psychopath before he ever set foot in the hotel. Where I think the movie does an incredible job of salvaging that is in its use of tension - rather than your standard horror (and very Stephen King) approach of starting with normality, introducing gradual elements of the uncanny until everything unravels, The Shining begins with the tension about as high as it can possibly get, and never really lets up from there. Everything - the music, the set design, the camerawork, the long, slow fades - is in service of that tension, and I can't think of another film bar maybe Eraserhead that manages that, and it's what makes it one of my favourite films.

I love Room 237, the documentary looking (uncritically) at some of the madder theories about what it all means, and all the work that's been done to look into the meanings of all the patterns and symbols that recur in the film, why Kubrick changed the room number from 217 to 237, why the physical geography of the hotel is so confusing, and so on. My pet theory on all of that is that it's meaningless, but consciously meaningless - that Kubrick recognised the importance of recurring patterns, and used it as a means to further illustrate either Jack's mental decline or the uncanniness of the hotel, but that the numbers and patterns themselves don't mean anything beyond that, it's enough for them to repeat and recur throughout the film to get people noticing them and questioning it, without them having any underlying meaning beyond that. And, again, I think that's part of the genius of the film, and attempting to make a sequel to that film that only visually apes the more iconic scenes of that movie rather than attempting to play around with the same ideas, is kind of doomed to fail.

[chokeout]

I love The Shining, its an amazing film but I hate the mental gymnastics that some fans will go through to add layers to it and refuse to believe that some things are just what they are. 

The obsession over the layout of the hotel by some is the peak of it (Not you Pat) You're building a set that has to look bigger than it is in a big shed in the middle of the UK and it needs to contain all the rooms connected because the director is obsessed with using his new glidecam and you've got people saying the windows are in the wrong place for reasons! I'm 100% convinced that the managers office is where it is because that's where it would fit. 

 

[Devon Malcolm]

I thought Doctor Sleep was fantastic and the best thing that Mike Flanagan, who's usually really good, has done so far. I was impressed by the fact he didn't shy away from The Shining and instead embraced parts of it into the story here, where it was necessary. It didn't all work and it is too long but given the circumstances I thought he did about the best job he could have.

[Chris B]

1 hour ago, BomberPat said:

I agree with your (and Stephen King's) criticism that The Shining is meant to be a story about how circumstance can drive any man mad, yet in the movie it's pretty clear that Jack was a dangerous psychopath before he ever set foot in the hotel.

I think this is absolutely key to why King hates the film so much - I think Jack is the most explicitly autobiographical character King's ever written, and that's despite the long line of writers with addiction problems he's written (and I don't think it's a coincidence that he's written about being an abusive alcoholic parent and Joe Hill has written a couple of times about children of abusive alcoholic parents - I don't think he broke Joe's arm, but I think his being a parent was a big part of the original interventions). The whole point of Jack is his redemption. that he can sink as badly as he does due to his weaknesses, but his love for his family is the one thing that saves him.

Kubrick absolutely jettisons all of that shit and portrays Torrance as the primal beast, who never even attempts at redemption.

I think that's to the detriment of Doctor Sleep overall. I tend to try not to be too annoyed when a book simply isn't what I wanted it to be. Everything seemed to be setting up Abra getting lost in Danny's nightmare memories, mixing his own trauma and guilt, and him having to go into all of that to save her, knowing that he's responsible for all of it, and she sees who he really is... and none of that ever happens. 

The film playing around with the iconography at least got me in the door.

Talking of The Shining, I've signed up for this Kickstarter - I loved their They Live book. 

 

[BomberPat]

38 minutes ago, chokeout said:

I love The Shining, its an amazing film but I hate the mental gymnastics that some fans will go through to add layers to it and refuse to believe that some things are just what they are. 

The obsession over the layout of the hotel by some is the peak of it (Not you Pat) You're building a set that has to look bigger than it is in a big shed in the middle of the UK and it needs to contain all the rooms connected because the director is obsessed with using his new glidecam and you've got people saying the windows are in the wrong place for reasons! I'm 100% convinced that the managers office is where it is because that's where it would fit. 

Sorry to say that I am completely on-board with all the stuff about impossible windows and spatial impossibility - partly because it works in the context of the film, and partly because we know Kubrick as a director was obsessed with detail. So things like tracking shots that take you around different areas of the hotel being contradicted later on, or hedge mazes that seem to grow in complexity, I think are absolutely intentional, designed to disorient the viewer and make them feel a little uneasy or less anchored in a real, physical space, to reflect the mind-altering nature of the Overlook itself. The direction and the camerawork around it all is so prolonged and deliberate that I just can't accept certain elements of it as a continuity error rather than by design.

Now, I don't stretch that as far as some, who point out the difference between the exterior and interior shots of the hotel, or how the hedge maze isn't visible on the exterior establishing shots - that's all just the reality of film-making on location, and there are people who obsess over the placement of doors or props to support the theory, much of which is going a bit too far. Nor do I think any of this has any deeper meaning or is signifying an underlying message to the movie - it's just there to make the viewer feel confused without them necessarily recognising why.

I went to a Kubrick exhibition a couple of years ago, and the one thing in there I really wish I could get a proper look at was that they had, under glass, Kubrick's actual copy of The Shining, absolutely covered in notes and annotations. There's bits of it here - Stanley Kubrick’s copy of Stephen King’s 'The Shining' (faroutmagazine.co.uk) - but to get a proper sense of what he took away from the book and why would be fascinating.

[Jesse]

Through the 'Just King Things' podcast I've recently learned of the existence of a The Shining opera.

https://vimeo.com/197345508

[chokeout]

There's 2 points I always go back to when people mention Kubricks attention to detail as if everything he did was intentional. He either makes mistakes or he doesn't and the Shining shouldn't be held on a pedestal on its own. 

1 is that his films are full of unintentional mistakes, usually continuity because his shoots got longer and longer and his obsession with performance being exactly how he liked it took priority over everything else. I know it's easy to pick on Eyes Wide Shut and it was later in life and a mess of a shoot but he left the entire crew in a shot in reflection. Full metal jacket swaps locations for its key scene when Pile kills himself between angles. Alex switches hands with the drawer between shots in CO (an almost identical error to The shining coming out of the freezer but that one is just seen as a fuck up rather than a mind fuck) , Crew members in shot, errors in period and props, clapper loaders visible in the transition in Lolita. They aren't the actions of a man who's commitment to detail goes down to obsession and doesn't make mistakes. I get the motif of mazes and 100% believe the carpet and it's patterns are there to represent it but I'm convinced the layout is purely practical. 

2 at no point does the crazy layout play into the film. We never take the same journey and end up in a different location. There's no intentional jumping the line or continuity breaks except for maybe the car nearly hitting them on the way into the hotel (like Shutter Island for example that are obviously intentional but are so jarring that they are highlighted as mistakes, almost the opposite of what people do with Kubrick). Fans will cry subtletly but If they are indeed intentional they are so insignificant that they weren't picked up on for 30 years and are only referenced by fans with hindsight and the Internet. 

Sometimes great films have mistakes. 

Edited May 18, 2022 by chokeout

[Chris B]

1 minute ago, chokeout said:

They aren't the actions of a man who's commitment to detail goes down to obsession and doesn't make mistakes.

These aren't contradictory points, though. I tend to think of Kubrick as someone who got ludicrously obsessed with some things and didn't care about others. The first time I saw it, the first thing I spotted was the helicopter shadow during the opening shot, which didn't worry him. But he did repeated (to the point of abuse) takes with Shelley Duvall.

I don't think many of the other theories around The Shining are true, and I also do think there are mistakes in there. But some of the layout stuff is absolutely genuine and it's meant to screw with us. Just look how Danny's cycle around the building switches floors, while also trying to make clear that he hasn't stopped cycling at any point.

[Keith Houchen]

When Jack is being interviewed and answers about his family, he replied with “Sounds perfect for a child”. Not my boy, our child, or Danny. Right there you know he ain’t right, he’s always been the caretaker. 
 

I can’t remember who told the story but on Clockwork Orange, they shot the scene where the minister for the interior meets Alex. Someone said cut and Kubrick asked what was wrong, they said how the guy playing the minister had a right cockney accent and not the Received Pronunciation a minister would have. Big Stan didn’t have a clue what he was on about and had to be told how the minister would’ve had expensive education his whole life. 

[Hannibal Scorch]

On 5/17/2022 at 5:49 PM, chokeout said:

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Pure madness that got close to falling apart towards the last 20 minutes. The fact it is in anyway coherent is a testament to the directors. Everyone puts in a cracking shift with Ke Huy Quan especially fantastic. I genuinely broke out in a massive smile when he said his first line, it's been nearly 40 years and his voice was unmistakable. 

Now ill be gutted if he doesn't get at least a cameo in the new Indy film. Him and Ford interacting will legitimately break me. 

I have never seen a film like it. Like a film created by dumping a load of ideas from other films, sticking them in a blender and your left with juice. Visually stunning, amazing cast. I had seen a trailer but felt it spoilt nothing. One of the funniest films I have seen in years and glad I saw it with a fairly packed screen. Early contender for film of the year. The real Multiverse film to see (and Dr Strange 2 was top tier Marvel for me)

Spoiler

I mean, the Racoon-Tooie and The Two Rocks bits alone were hilarious