Hello!

As forwarded by correspondent-advisor “B”, there’s a good new Variety article by Owen Gleiberman on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.  I can’t say I was talem by other articles, featurettes and even a feature film or two devoted to analyzing hidden meanings perceived in the Stephen King adaptation. Gleiberman’s appraisal won me over by saying what we felt from the beginning — The Shining has plenty of brilliant things going for it, but it never seemed all that scary. The article is

A Documentary Meditation on Stanley Kubrick’s Rooms of Fear.
The article focuses on a short documentary ‘made in cooperation with the Kubrick estate’ about the creation of the sets and the use of locations for the movie. We always found the settings for The Shining to be 1,000% effective, mood-inducing and hypnotic: all those vast rooms with just a couple of people in them are the exact opposite of an ‘Old, Dark House.’

The docu is only 25 minutes long — no Cinema Bloat here — and filled with excellent footage of the filming seen nowhere else. I’m just a causal Kubrick booster, and it grabbed me right away. It’s on YouTube:

Shine On — The Forgotten Shining Location
They have the actual BTS shot for one of the late Shelley Duvall’s crack-up scenes, synchronized with the movie sound track. It’s really impressive.

 

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When Michael McQuarrie said he had a link to a video about the movie  Grand Prix, I thought he was talking about an old MGM promo. No, this is a brand new item, and it’s about a lot more than that one movie …

The Insane Realism of the Film That Invented the Modern Car Movie
It incorporates a lot of footage from car-related pictures, including Charlie Chaplin’s first appearance as The Tramp. The creator is Patrick H. Willems… who has an entire stack of YouTube video shows online.

 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson