Thighs Wide Shut

Room 237
Overlook Overlooked
Official Website | New York Film Festival Page
NR | 102 min

Movies are the best.  If anyone says otherwise, they must not have eyes, or have way too much time to read things called ‘books’.  The best movies make us think, about things and stuff, and the even bester of the best movies make us think so so so dang much that they make us want to investigate each and every frame of the actual movie, to find not only surface meanings, but to find below the surface meanings too, and even below the below the surface meanings too too!

Stanley Kubrick’s entire catalog is worthy of this type of over-investigation, and in turn, his films attract all kinds of peoples searching for meaningless meaning, and in turn, them peoples offer up endless theories and hypotheses on things that are there and things that aren’t, and things that totally aren’t, and the ‘findings’ are always interesting, no matter how far fetched they are.  You could spend days on end on YouTube just looking and listening to these stuffs!!  You really should, cause it’s fun!  And things!

Rodney Ascher was intrigued enough by the endless blather surrounding The Shining, that he collected the crackpot ideas of 5 such theorists and gave them a voice in the form of a loosely formed documentary that will give you a splitting headache, but make you smile at the same time, juss like that dude in The Shining!  We never see these interviewee peoples’ faces, and this pseudo-anonymity makes it even better, more crackpotier!!  Like we said, any of these ideas, no matter how crackpot they is, are interesting.  Sure, The Shining could totally be a metaphor for American Indian genocide or the Holocaust, or even a big big wink wink at Kubrick’s involvement in the fake moon landing, but it could also juss be a Stephen King novel freely adapted by Stanley Kubrick as he saw fit

But The Shining really aint juss a straight forward movie.  You know this, but Room 237 points out this weird stuffs even more – a typewriter changes color, a chair that appears in one scene disappears in the next (same with a Dopey Disney dwarf sticker!!), that impossible window, the carpeting that changes pattern.  And what’s the story with that Bill Watson character?  Why?  WHY???  There are no answers, and that’s OK, but after watching & listening to 100+ minutes of whying why, you’ll fill like you’ve always been the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel too.  Crazy, but worth it.  Check in, and don’t check out

Hope there’s a doc like this made for each and every one of  Stanley’s dandies

Verdictgo: Jeepers Mos Def Worth A Peepers

Room 237 has a vacancy at the NYFF October 4 & 8th, and opens in 2013

oh, yeah, was a taaaaaaaaaad disappointed that Room 237 failed to do one very important thing – try to find meaning behind THAT ONE SHINING MOMENT!!!

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…