Movie Review of The Shining

Movie Review:

The Shining: Stanley Kubrick

            In the movie The Shining, Stanley Kubrick does an amazing job with the architecture and landscapes he chooses to include to create the overall discomfort the movie portrays.  The opening scene alone creates the needed idea of the beauty of it all but also the isolation.  {He furthers this feeling of discomfort with the dialogue later on between the main character Jack Torrance and his son Danny speaking about the Donner party which could be seen as foreshadowing of the insanity that will come about later. }  One example we viewed in class, showed how smooth his editing is, even when he is breaking the 180 degree rule, which normally creates confusion.  However, in that particular scene the changing of the angles from the former hotel caretaker to Jack creates a mounting tension that reignites throughout the movie.  This tension grows more and more as he includes shots of the house and its occupants very cleverly pushing Jack to an already present insanity, without this, the final breaking point of Jack and the discovery of his insanity by his wife and the audience, would not have the same intensity.  MY favorite shot of the film was not of the famous shot of Jack Nicholson breaking through the door with the axe or of the  beautifully shot blood cascading out of the elevator but rather the extremely simple shots of Danny in the hallways, the sound and lack of sound and designs of the carpet and wall paper and to me are amazing.  Not to mention, or sound like a broken record but, having him race around the corners with the audience knowing that there is something evil present but never knowing around which corner it will show itself creates so much tension and anxiety in the audience that one forgets they are watching a movie.  One of the only editing critiques that I could notice after watching the film several times is in the opening scenes if one looks closely when the camera is going over the lake and the mountain you can actually see the helicopter blades, it is something extremely small and due to the time period there was probably no other way to avoid it.