WHO PUT 'DOCTOR SLEEP' TO SLEEP?.....AND A LOOK BACK AT "THE SHINING"

The Shining (1980)   BQ doesn't make any great claims here about box-office prognosticating...(is that a word?)......but it doesn't take a marketing genius to figure out why the World War 2 via CGI "Midway" mopped up last weekend's receipts.........leaving the Stephen King "Shining" sequel.....well, un-illuminated........

                  "Midway" arrived at its perfect time, the Veteran's Day weekend......."Doctor Sleep" wandered into theaters the week after Halloween.... (say whaaaa?).......and sadly now, by the last week of October, poor little Halloween's getting nudged out of existence by the Christmas marketing juggernaut.......(studios will have to start rolling out their booga-booga movies by Oct. Ist)

                    Which brings us to a long overdue re-visit to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining".....famously unloved by Stephen King, but over the years, establishing itself as a horror movie monument.......

                    Yeah, we get why King hated it. The novel was a slow build-up of two very ordinary normal people driven to madness and terror by the assorted ghosts running rampant through the Overlook Hotel.......

                     No slow buildup for Kubrick......Jack Nicholson behaves like a snarky psychopath from the first scene on, his ever-arching eyebrows silently mocking the hotel execs and sneering at the  simple innocence of his gentle, intimidated wife. (Shelly Duval). Once he and his family are left alone in the hotel, he's on full wack-a-doodle duty......

                     And it's an ongoing mystery why generations of moviegoers find "The Shining" frightening........personally, we spent the the film's 2 & 1/2 hours too busy being dazzled by Kubrick's visual splendors........the wonderfully floating steadicam, the spectacular production design, the scientific calibration of the camerawork.......(and of course, Nicholson's all-out mega-madman performance, a grand opera of loony tune overacting....)

                      As expansive and sprawling as the Overlook appears, in its own Kubrick-ian way, it's as arid, alien and claustrophobic as Keir Dullea's '2001' 17th century bedroom.  And just as strange.

                   Stephen King finally got the "Shining" he wanted when he produced his own scrupulously faithful TV movie version in 1997.......we defy anyone to remember a single thing about it......or any actor in it.

                    King may not like it, but it's Stanley Kubrick's film, which warped, twisted and bent the novel to its director's will and whims, that stayed forever in everyone's minds and memories.  And that's show biz, kids......

                     We still can't stay it scared us, but that 150 minutes of Kubrick's unique, meticulous cinema genius fills us with a sense of dread and unease like no other film can.  And still remains a
3 star (***) horror movie milestone.......