Movies
Knowing
“Blemishes aside, this is not the typical “end of the world” disaster movie, by any stretch. Some might balk at the revelations and conclusion, but I found it refreshingly unique and ballsy.”
I feel for Nicolas Cage. I really do. He’s had some rotten luck in the past decade, with movies like Ghost Rider and Next making everyone forget that he is a solid and interesting actor. He is accused of just saying yes to everything that comes his way, but in reality, you gotta look at the details. Sure, Ghost Rider turned out pretty lousy, but he’s been dreaming of playing a comic book character for the past decade, and his options are getting pretty limited. Wicker Man? Personally I think the movie’s fine entertainment (if not as intended), but can you blame him for wanting to work with Neil LaBute? And as for Next… well, I got nothing there. Julianne Moore, I guess?
His over-the-top performances in those (and several other) films over the years gives Knowing the unique challenge of having an actor act serious enough to buy the rather silly plot – a sheet of paper with a seemingly random series of numbers is actually a code to place the date and location of every major tragedy over the past 50 years is discovered by Cage and his son (Chandler Canterbury) – so that the audience can believe in it. So it’s interesting that Alex Proyas would cast the increasingly gonzo Cage, as he turns out to be the most grounded character in the entire movie. You keep expecting him to “Cage out”, maybe toss on a bear suit or demand that bunnies are put back in their boxes.
(Hilariously, he actually DOES tell his son to put his pet rabbit away at one point, and you could tell which audience members were well-versed in Cage lore by the intermittent chuckling.)
Cage’s underplayed performance isn’t even the biggest surprise here, though. That belongs to the fact that the film got a PG-13 rating. It’s not a particularly action packed film, but there are two disaster sequences that are depicted in a much more realistic manner than usual, even in R rated films. When a subway car hurtles at top speed into a human being, that person will more or less explode into body parts and red mist, and that is exactly what we see here. Top notch effects and camerawork (the plane crash and aftermath is depicted entirely in one shot) aid in creating some truly astonishing and brutal sequences, putting similar scenes in the 2nd and 3rd Die Hard films to shame.
And being a Boston native, I got to give props for making an admirable fake Massachusetts. Some shots were obviously filmed in Beantown (the Museum of Science!), but the bulk of the film was shot in Australia. It’s not always perfect, but the geography of small towns like Lexington, Westford, and Groton in relation to Boston proper is spot on. I know this takes little more effort than looking at a map and guessing the amount of time it would take one to drive from one place to another, but most movies (or shows – the Boston set Fringe is particularly lax with realistic travel MA) don’t even bother with that much.
It’s also surprisingly scary at times. There is a group of people who are seemingly trying to interfere with Cage’s attempts to stop impending disasters, and the scenes of them stalking or simply watching him and his son are admittedly freaky. One might recall the “Low Men” of Hearts of Atlantis, but suffice to say that their motives and origin are hardly cliché.
On that note, the film’s biggest problem is that of familiarity. Various disaster and prophecy films of the past (particularly Signs, right down to the fact that the hero has lost his faith due to the death of his wife)) will come to mind as the film unfolds, and the human dramas are fairly generic as well: Cage is a single father, his son is wise beyond his years, the pseudo love interest (Rose Byrne) thinks he’s crazy, then come around after a tragedy proves he was right, etc. In his first scene, we see Cage cooking for the son, and thus we know instantly that the mother is dead, due to the cinematic shorthand that has simply been done to death. In a normal movie, such things wouldn’t bother me, but Alex Proyas’ Dark City is one of the all time best examples of non-traditional storytelling, and I expect a bit more out of him.
Another issue is that the scene in which Cage realizes the numbers are a code is clunky as hell. Given its importance to the plot (and the audience BUYING said plot), they should have come up with something a bit more clever than Cage awkwardly placing a coffee mug on the paper (he actually leans out of his way to put it there), and then seeing 911012996 in the residue circle. And despite the fact that this sequence is in the middle of a bunch of other numbers, he still goes through a trial and error process with these specific numbers before realizing that it stands for 9/11/01, 2996 (victims). Since the tragedy that took his wife is also on the paper, it would have made more sense for that to be the number sequence that catches his eye, as he would likely have it burned into his memory.
(I will ignore the idea that an astrophysicist would take half the movie to figure out that the eight numbers following the date/body count is the latitude and longitude of the respective disaster).
Blemishes aside, this is not the typical “end of the world” disaster movie, by any stretch. Some might balk at the revelations and conclusion, but I found it refreshingly unique and ballsy. Proyas has been openly dismissive of his experience working with FOX on I, Robot, and seems to be much more at ease with (the smaller) Summit. There’s no way in hell this film would be made as is at a major studio, with or without a big star like Cage, and therefore I have nothing but respect and admiration for both men for delivering such a risky denouement to an ultimately satisfying thriller.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
You must be logged in to post a comment.