2. The Shining (1980)
Kubrick is perhaps my all-time favorite director, and this movie is mind numbingly perfect. It’s done in a very old fashioned story telling way. There are many moments in this film that make me think there is another movie entirely going on, sort of a subtext of another topic entirely. But I’ll stick to the general plot, which is Stephen King’s classic story. The hotel in this movie is every bit as much a character as the actors. The building is haunted with a history that engulfs its longtime companion Jack Torrance upon his return. A place Jack can never really escape from, not even in death. I have never seen an actor as possessed by a role as Jack Nicholson was in this movie. It’s a transformation you rarely see in film and the stories of Kubrick’s perfectionism overshadow everything else behind the scenes. There is a tremendous amount of detail in this movie, details that are meant to unsettle the mind subconsciously, from the typewriter changing color – white to black the more Jack became enraged with thoughts of massacring his family – to the continuity mistakes of chairs missing and reappearing frame to frame, which I think Kubrick did intentionally to create tension subconsciously in the mind of the viewer. The ending is bone chillingly perfect. “The Shining” is one of the greatest films ever made in any genre.
