The Shining Movie Review
The 1997 miniseries may have had Stephen King's seal of approval, but nothing beats the eyes and ears of a world-class filmmaker. As I was nearly driven into a coma while Steven Weber and Rebecca DeMornay had a LOOONG chat about whether or not they should have sex, I knew that this would never happen in the original Stanley Kubrick movie starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. They won't let us conk out on them. They grab our attention and they keep it for, okay, nearly two and a half hours. Yeah, that's a generous running time, but at least they have a legitimate claim on our interest the whole time (which is more than I can say for the remake). The quality that audiences have always responded to in Jack Nicholson is that he gives a role everything he has; that guy never reigns it in. When he loses his mind, he doesn't fool around. When he turns homicidal, he puts all those HOW TO BE SUBTLE instruction pamphlets in the shredder. And Shelley Duvall (although it is difficult imagining the two of them doing anything together that would result in the birth of Little Danny) is the ideal foil for Nicholson and his what-the-hell style. She lives in her own little world until her antibodies start warning her about life-threatening danger and then there's no stopping her; she knows how to fight! The Shining is not a movie about restraint or about an ordinary family battling the forces of darkness in the lonely Overlook Hotel. It's about three oddballs, one of whom was born to wind up in a haunted setting like this one, and the other two who will fight their apparent destiny to the death. The one flaw is Dick Halloran's (Scatman Crothers) exhaustively illustrated flight to save Danny. Crothers is excellent in the part, but we don't want to leave the hotel to watch a guy on a plane or a receptionist or a forest ranger. We want to see Jack and that weird bartender and those odd little twins in the hall and….
1980 (R) 143m/C Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, Danny Lloyd, Joe Turkel, Barry Nelson, Philip Stone, Lia Beldam, Billie Gibson, Barry Dennan, David Baxt, Lisa Burns, Alison Coleridge, Kate Phelps, Anne Jackson, Tony Burton; D: Stanley Kubrick; W: Stanley Kubrick, Diane Johnson; C: John Alcott. VHS, LV, Closed Caption