The Shining

"Kubrick's strategy is to show Jack's frustration over writer's block, and the "shining" over the hedge maze can be seen as the hotel's giving him a "first taste" of being a visionary -- or a madman. The later shot of a catatonic Nicholson could be seen as his regression into his own brain, fed by the hotel's fantasies."

"One fact about Kubrick's work habits has fueled a lot of interpretative theories; his obsessiveness over detail and planning. All who have worked with Kubrick report that he lives to gather information, synthesize it, and use it as effectively as he can. Every detail of his films is planned out carefully, usually in pre-production to keep the actual production costs low. Therefore -- and this is where the theory-fuel comes in -- everything in Kubrick's films has deliberate significance."

"Within the thematics of the film, the tension between the desire for popular success and acceptance and that for artistic expression finds itself symbolized, almost as a cruel joke on Jack's behalf, in the figure of the typewriter. Originally invented to increase speed and legibility of written documents, the machine functions against itself in the course of the film. Jack's opus, pounded out day after day on its keys, is an exercise in futility and illegibility. The ten words of his mantra, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" become, in their stupefying repetition, divorced from meaning and context, and float freely within what Emerson would in his late essay "Nature" call a "system of approximations." Jack's attempts at self-expression, the holy grail of Modernist art, are stymied and coagulated into incomprehensibility by virtue of their own purity and lack of intercession or explanation. His creative endeavor becomes more meaningless and unapproachable than the worst potboiler or cheapest exploitation. "

"Unlike more straightforward works, and I'd even place 2001 in that category with regard to The Shining, I would argue that this film beckons to us to help it out. Kubrick's strategies involve a radical and extreme involvement on the part of the audience. At every crucial point in the film we as audience members are given moments to reflect, to question, and to disagree. The most apparent of these is when Jack leaves the locked pantry in which Wendy has confined him. The unexplainable nature of the escape he manifests calls into question nearly everything we've seen so far. Are the ghosts he sees, then, real, and he not mad? The Shining practically begs us to ask questions of it, and to demand answers back. And the film is prepared to provide us with a meaningful dialogue. The pace is certainly more leisurely than horror films are "supposed" to be. We're prejudiced into thinking that horror = gore + no time to think + catharsis. The film undermines each of these. We're given only sporadic bloodshed, a puzzling and contradictory ending, and, most upsetting of all, much more time to think on our own than we feel we ought to have. This is far from a 'roller-coaster ride of terror.' "

"Kubrick again and again asks us to look at why we came to The Shining and to feel ashamed. How small, how petty we are, to expect to be entertained by watching an abusive alcoholic terrorize his enabling and confused wife and disturbed son (whom we know he has a history of beating). How pathetic of us that we would imagine spooks and spirits to be scarier than a man who attacks his wife with an axe. There's very little gore, but there's enough to make very certain we're thinking about how little blood there is in the film. Think of how soon it is after we see what Tony is showing Danny about the elevators that we enter into the meat locker. During the tour of the kitchen Hallorann gives to Wendy and Danny, the cook turns to open a large metal door, saying, "Now right here is our walk in freezer." The film cuts to a shot from inside the freezer looking at the opening door, which is now being pulled open with its hinges now on the other side of the doorframe. "Now here," Hallorann says to his captive audience, "is where we keep all of our meat." Winking at us, the narrative has made a direct connection between the players in the film and the carcasses of dead beasts that the hotel keeps inside its walls. When you add this moment to Danny's vision of Grady's dead daughters the emphasis placed on physical consumption that abounds in so many scenes, such as the early discussion about the Donner Party, the implication is clear: Kubrick knows that we have come expecting to be scared in part through the making visible of guts and organs, and he laughs at us. "Oh, really?" we might imagine his disembodied voice cackling; "this place is so scary, they eat the gore." After the film is over, with its final images being those of repetitions and broken closures, the cycle of the film feels more like its gearing up for another round than ending. As far as catharsis goes, as far even as explanation goes, we're left after the film without a sense that either took place for us, but should have, that somehow, we missed 'it,' or didn't get 'it.' "

"Even as The Shining elbows us in the ribs and mocks us for seeking after those easy, cheap thrills, Kubrick's genius makes it such that if we stop looking at the film from outside, but actively try to get inside its head as much as it is in ours, it becomes, in addition to a critique of the horror genre, a genuinely emotional and horrifying experience. Scarier than being rushed into a situation is being dragged kicking and screaming into it. The most pivotal moment of legibility is when Wendy finally and suddenly decodes Tony's muttered "redrum," by means of a mirror (hardly a passive object in this film) into the word, written in blood-red lipstick, "murder." Bartok's music swells suddenly, as we see fear explodes across her face, and we hear a loud thump. Jack is chopping down the door with his axe. The conventional move in this case, in order to keep the audience on its toes, at the height of emotions, would be to stay with Wendy and Danny, to follow them as they try to escape from the noises, and to gradually reveal their source by glimpsing Jack through a hole he has newly made in their door. Instead, the film negates the surprise potential of the scene by cutting immediately to a shot of Jack outside the apartment, chopping away. While an ordinary horror film might have the axe suddenly rip through the door with no warning, The Shining shows us in detail what's about to happen. The pacing and editing of the film almost guarantee that we're picturing within our minds not just the axe going into the door, but what Jack's going to do once he gets in there with Wendy. (9) And while the surprise of a regular film might have given us a thrill, the horror of knowing that Jack is chopping up the door behind which his wife is cowering in order to kill her in the most violent manner available to him in the hotel is much more acutely felt and moving. We feel for Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode when we don't know where Michael Myers is hiding, waiting to kill her. We feel with Wendy when we know much more than we want to know about where Jack is coming from. "

The Shining

If we gazed at the instruments of Stanley Kubrick, may we say, in a slightly off beat effort to disregard the magnate for a split second I would clap my hands for Shilley Duvall who gave a bees knees' performance. Most surprisingly, and in a very telepathic way that emulates the movie's, I stumbled upon a comment of hers that complains of how indifferent critics were towards her performance "as if she wasn't there". I don't know why but throughout the film I was impressed by none as I was by her sincerity as she walks the Via Dolorosa watching her son and her husband running amok.  The Shining is Stanley's attempt into unanimity by choosing a crowd pleasing genre like macabre but weaving still his own elements into the fabric of which, thus producing a piece that serves both parties; the audience's and his. Despite the conventional veneer, a director with the complexity and eclectic perfectionism of Kubrick wouldn't smuggle profundity for a trite thriller, he creates something as simple as a "lemon squeezer" but asserts nonetheless that his "juicy was not meant to squeeze but start conversations".  
The deliberateness with which Kubrick nitpicks all his films is very manifest that where it sounds prosaic for hasty viewers it proposes a non-erroneous air like that of HAL, later in his Odyssey, the computer that mocks "human imperfection" in a bitterly pungent tone. The orchestration between the psychological and the supernatural is carried out in such a manner so as to cause perplexity and like the hedge maze it stays away from the straightforward. Why would someone be straightforward and why in the first place people demand the straightforward, if life already has the lion's share of it? When Torrance is told in one of the most genius scenes "you're the caretaker, sir, you've always been the caretaker" by the cabin-fevered Grady, it is as if the viewer is absorbed into the deeper fathoms of the movie. To tell the truth, I was beginning to feel more than once that the film is just another threadbare and well-worn horrify-er when all of a sudden I'm proven wrong by the extra-layered scenes as vast as hotel Overlook annexes. The mysterious picture that looms obliquely in our minds by the end of the movie is a token from Kubrick; one last trail he gives us to follow the whirling smoke of perception so that however common the ghastly must be, Stanley's will always be the finest, never smeared by commercialism. 

The Graduate

The Graduate veers away from like-minded films by giving us a totally rebellious end. The handsomely swath-skinned Dustin Hoffman here plays the role of Benjamin who has just graduated. In the honorific party his parents have groomed, he withdraws into his room appalled by thoughts of his future. In his attempts to procure a moment for himself, the svelte Mrs. Robinson (played by the superb Anne Bancroft), a longtime acquaintance of his parents, emerges pretentiously looking for the bathroom but bizarrely seducing him by first insisting that he drives her home, accompanies her to the bedroom, and unzips her dress. There is a sense of quirkiness about the situation as a whole given that the pace was too direct maybe with a certain rush that is forgiven as it gives us something different than what we grew accustomed to. An older lady alluring a younger man is not anymore something shocking in its turpitude, no more than the disappearance of poetic justice in the treatment of faux pas in this film particularly or maybe because we haven't really sympathized with Mrs. Robinson who is dour, blanch, and a perfect planner. Maybe we haven't sympathized with Mrs. Robinson as there wasn't but a vapid conversation between them, only silent copulation. Even when Ben brought the subject up for discussion, lamenting a prosaic communication that made it all the more easy for him to be conscious-stricken, Mrs. Robinson expressed a desire to forgo a past she rued and a present she detested. Thus there is no vividness to be empathized with or sad for until Elaine her daughter appears and the lack of sympathy transforms into an increasing contempt for the nefarious deformation of innocence carried out by the older woman. Especially when she forces him to promise that he may never ask her daughter out. When Ben takes Elaine out, forcedly, and they talk, we could see clearly the possibility of a brighter future hadn't it been mired in the besmirching immodesty that turned a naïve young man into a rascal. The film's end which shouldn't be revealed here is amusing, different and makes it worthwhile to watch. Plus the sublime music of Simon and Garfunkel that was played and replayed all over the film. All in all, the film's unpredictability serves the film's right to be listed amongst best films thanks to Mike Nichols and Charles Webb.