The Big Tang Theory

Room 237
You Don’t Know Jack… Torrance
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
NR | 102 min

You may not have put much thought into The Shining, besides thinking about how awesome it is, but plenty of others have, way too much so, but in a good way, cause why bother over-analyzing politics or the Kardashians or other pointless garbage, when one can try to decipher why Stanley Kubrick put Calumet Baking Powder + Tang canisters behind Scatman Crothers in the Overlook Hotel’s kitchen closet (see above).  Apparently everything has a reason, and meaning, and the answers are simple – the Calumet canister = a symbol of Native American suffering, and the Tang canister = a nod to Kubrick’s own participation in ‘faking’ the moon landing in a TV studio.  OK, so maybe the answers are complex, and maybe not even answers, more like crackpotted babble, but I never want to stop listening to these leery theories!!!

Rodney Ascher‘s Room 237 focuses in on 5 of these crazy diamond Shiners, and lets them spiel their spelling outs of what they’ve seen after watching The Shining… for the 50th time.  We’re never shown these peeps’ faces, as footage from the actual movie is heavily poured on + random archival stuff (love the footage of the people watching a movie in a mostly empty theater) + some Eyes Wide Shut-edness.  Ascher does the viewer/listener a huge favor – deftly edits these scatterbrained-hot breaths into to something watchable/listenable.  For example, one of his talking heads is Michael Wysmierski, a man who strongly believes that Kubrick did indeed help the US government fake the moon landing, and used The Shining as a way of admitting his guilt and shame (the Tang canister!  Danny with his Apollo 11 sweater!).  You can struggle to sit thru Wysmierski’s 79 minuted Babylon of babble, called The Shining Code 2.0, like we did, or you can let Ascher act as his editor, and to the 4 others, getting to the point of the pointed pointlessness, and in turn, crafting a piece of work that’s possibly even more mesmerisng and scarier than The Shining itself!

We saw Room 237 back in October at the New York Film Festival, appreciated what Ascher attempted to do, but was left a little too dazed and confused by it all.  Well, since then, we’ve seen The Shining again (you will too if you see Room 237), which made us only want to see Room 237 again (which we did), which now makes us want to see The Shining again (which we will), and so on and back and forth and so forth.  It’s an endless maze that leads to nowhere, but we’d rather go there than anywhere else.  It’s up to you if you want to believe.  BELIEVE IT!

Verdictgo: upon further review –  Breast In Show

Overcooked Hotel: the internets is overloaded with Shining madness, but the best caretaker of it all is The Overlook Hotel, where they have such delicious morsels like this photo of the faux Torrances, who actually shot the 2nd unit footage of the VW bug driving up in the mountains

Room 237 has a vacancy in NY & on-demand this Friday, and elsewhere elsewhen

 

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…