Named after the creepy hotel room in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, this quirky indie documentary takes a left-field approach to film analysis. Stitching together footage from Kubrick’s considerable ouvre and recontextualising it to pick apart The Shining, various Kubrickites examine the supposed hidden messages contained in Kubrick’s terrifying tale of madness. It could be a recipe for disaster, but given the great director’s notoriety for poring meticulously over every little detail, it works surprisingly well.
Off-the-wall theories include one guy’s argument that The Shining is an apology from Kubrick for ‘faking’ the Apollo 13 moon landing footage. While that’s undeniably out there, more traditional analysis – like a look at how the director used shapes and fades to create patterns on the screen – are more difficult to rubbish, and provide a greater understanding of just how much thought Kubrick really did put into his celluloid masterpieces.
Despite the frequently outrageous claims offered up, there’s little room for mocking the theorists, and director Rodney Ascher is content to let them recite their hypotheses without judging either way. The result is a rich tapestry of ideas that speaks just as much about our continued obsession with The Shining as it does about film obsessives with too much time on their hands. Kubrick would be proud. And probably a little baffled. 4/5
Via Out In The City
The Pretty Gentleman is a fantastic read. Painstakingly researched and beautiful in its evocations of a bygone era, its tale of passion, corruption and vengeance grips from the first page to the last.
One of the boldest and most original films to screen at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Beasts of the Southern Wild picked up both the Grand Jury Prize and the Cinematography Award at the closing night ceremony after surfing a roaring wave of positive buzz. And we doubt it’s going to stop there – this most auspicious of enviro-fantasies is Oscar-bound, and when it lands it’s sure to cause as much wonton destruction as its impressive central storm scene.
As bright and likable as its titular lead, Ruby Sparks marks the triumphant return of Little Miss Sunshine co-directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, who’ve not made a film in the six years since Sunshine nabbed two Oscars and a legion of fans. With its quirky narrative, Sparks recalls the very best of Woody Allen’s oeuvre (not least his recent Midnight In Paris), etching away at the inner workings of its romantic leads just as much as it observes their numerous trials and tribulations.
David Koepp has been the brains behind some of Hollywood’s smartest action thrillers, having scripted everything from Jurassic Park and Mission: Impossible to Spider-Man and Panic Room. Premium Rush is the scribe’s fifth directing gig and a departure from his brainiest tension-ekers – as the film’s title suggests, Rush is less about the grey matter and more about the intoxicating adrenaline kick.
Short Cuts did it. Magnolia did it. Even the deplorable likes of Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve did it. Now there’s 360, the latest film to take the concept of jigsaw storytelling – one that follows the courses of numerous interconnecting lives – and run with it across the globe for a pleasingly transcontinental tale of passion and betrayal. Think of it as the anti-Love Actually; a smorgasbord of misery, love and pain that occasionally grips but never rivets.
Though it’s desperate to be the next Jurassic Park, there’s little Spielbergian bite to this low-budget Brit flick.
