Ugly

Rating: 7/10 (27 January 2004)

Kubrick is a great filmmaker. 2001 is among my favorite movies and I like most of his other movies. But no matter how much I think about the Shining I can't convince myself that it is a good movie. I have now seen it twice and to me it is nothing more than a different, but average movie.
What bothers me the most is the fact that it is boring. A family moves into a house and weird stuff starts to happen. But it all happens so slowly. What should have been a 90-minute movie has been stretched out to 2 hours. It has its moments. There is one scene involving a decomposing naked woman that frightened me just a little and flashing images of two murdered girls. Apart from that, nothing in the film scared me. That is not enough to make it a good horror movie.
Another thing I don't like is the visual look of the film. It's set in a hotel with too much white, poor lighting and not very nice carpets. That may sound silly to you, but visuals are very important to me and The Shining is just plain old ugly. Even the apartment the family is living in before they move into the hotel is white and horrible. Maybe the whole thing is intentional, maybe it's suppose to seem like an ugly place so you don't want to be there. But that would be like making an incredibly boring film and saying it's supposed to show boredom.
The characters are all annoying. I don't like any of them, I can't relate to any of them and none of them are very deep. I don't think Shelley Duvall deserved the Razzie nomination for her part. As annoying as she was, she was just doing her job. Kubrick probably didn't deserve a Razzie nomination for Worst Director, but I think he did do a pretty bad job.
There were a few things I liked. For example the way Jack treats his wife or the scenes in the ballroom. But that's not enough for me to say I enjoyed the film. Maybe the film is just to out of date to scare me. In which case it's a bad movie for not surviving the test of time. I give it Six out of ten.