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copyright ©1999-2002
DigsMagazine.com.
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Plot synopsis
When writer Jack Torrance gets
a job as the out-of-season winter caretaker for the Overlook, a grand
resort hotel nestled deep in the Colorado mountains, he thinks it’s
going to be the perfect opportunity for him to get some good writing
done. Far, far from the nearest town, and accessible only by a long
curvy drive along a narrow mountain road that’s virtually inaccessible
during the snowy months, the Overlook completely shuts down between
October and May – the caretaker alone lives out there with his family
to take care of the building and property. Peace and isolation sound
like just what Jack needs, and besides, he’s crazy about the hotel
itself from the first moment he steps in for his interview: he’s so
comfortable in its long hallways and grand rooms that it already feels
like home. He’s sure his wife Wendy and young son will enjoy the
experience as well, and eagerly accepts the position – even after the
hotel manager warns that all that solitude can be a dangerous thing for
certain folks, like the caretaker decades earlier who went nuts from
being cooped-up, and ended up hacking up his wife and kids before
killing himself as well. As Jack and family settle into the Overlook,
only Danny, who possesses a mysterious sixth sense (or
"shine," as the hotel’s similarly gifted chef describes it),
is able to sense that the hotel holds something dark and terrible in
store for them all.
Review
The scariest movies for me are always the
one’s where you don’t actually see all that much blood and guts and
gore: psychological terror, the anticipation of something terrible
lurking around every corner, seems so much more real and frightening to
me. Now, I’d been putting off seeing Stanley Kubrick’s horror
classic for ages -- not because I was chicken, mind you, but because it’s
been my personal experience that Kubrick films have a tendency to bore
the bejesus out of me. But in The Shining, the slow, drawn-out
mind-game works beautifully: the fact that you’re constantly waiting
for something to happen, and that most of the time nothing does, and
that when it does you can’t quite even figure out what it means, is
exactly what keeps you on the edge of your seat. Sure, the few really
graphically gory images we see in the film are very vivid and very
creepy, but it’s all that kind of quiet stuff in between that really
gets you tense – the long meandering shots following Danny as he
cruises the empty hallways on his Big Wheel, or Wendy and Danny walking
hand-in-hand through the hedge maze, or that beautifully foreboding
opening sequence with the helicopter view of the winding mountain road
leading up to the hotel. (Granted, much of the atmosphere comes from the
spooky score, which is perfectly manipulated to make your skin crawl
even when you’re watching a seemingly mundane scene unfold on-screen.)
Of course, Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance is a man so clearly
on-the-verge of homicidal mania – it’s a deliriously over-the-top,
almost camp performance, and a lot of fun to watch – that it’s never
a question of what if, but only when and how. It’s the frequent
almosts and that long, long wait to find out exactly what’s finally
going to send Jack over the edge that makes The Shining so eerie
and unnerving to watch. —reviewed by
Y. Sun
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