"Heeeeere's Johnny!" (and then some)

Rating: 7/10 (11 July 2011)

As much as I love Stephen King, his novel "The Shining" just never really did anything for me. And as much as I love Kubrick, he can't really get me into it either. I mean, of course "The Shining" is a good movie. The cinematography is breath-taking (just check out the marvelous opening credit sequence), the acting is great and the multi-layeredness of the screenplay is perfect. But alas, it just doesn't move me. The elevator doors opening, the identical twins, the "REDRUM" scenes, I just don't find them as creepy as I should. That's kind of a problem, because the actual plot moves quite slow. Once Jack Nicholson (here cleverly named "Jack") finally turns crazy he sure as hell delivers, but it takes him a while to get there. The last half hour of this movie is the part most people remember, before that a lot of the scenes seem too stretched out and in some cases just plain redundant. "The Shining" is a classic, just not one I'm particularly fond of.