The Shining (1997)

Just perfect...

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

I've been putting off this series for years... and I wish I still did. It may be close to the book in terms of the full story, but the live-action rendition is god awful. The acting is SO bad that I couldn't even get through it all. I actually laughed at some of the scenes where Jack was supposed to be angry, and Danny was supposed to be crying, because both were completely unconvincing. Don't even get me started on the actress who played Wendy...Please, Mr. King, stick to what you do best: writing. Leave the movie-making to those who are trained to do so.

I just re-watched what I will call the "real" movie (even though it wasn't the Stephen King authorized version) and then watched the miniseries version the next day. Wow, the miniseries was an amateurish joke with no comparison to SK's version (I don't care that it departed from the book, since we are talking about movies here).The TV version was flat, cheesy, overdone with the ghosts (which took away their effect). The series just seemed like it was going through the paces to get the plot elements on screen as quickly..The ghost in the black tuxedo was pathetic and the one in the white one wasn't much better. The hotel was not spooky in the slightest and the hedge animals were as scary as Jar-Jar Binks. There was no atmosphere to the location and there was no feel or mood to the scenes.. it was just so one-dimensional in comparison.The actors for the two male roles were also not suited to them IMO. I know people complain about Jack Nicolson being too crazy from the outset, and this departs from Stephen King's version, but I am OK with that after having seen it done both ways.. In the TV version, he never gets there and you can tell he isn't capable of getting there. And the boy: OMG so annoying and flat. The conversations between him and mom with dialog like "it's not dad, it's the hotel..." unconvincing and no true fear, just cold and robotic.The Danny Loyd version was chilling and the TV one was annoying and formulaic.Shelly Duval also did an awesome job of conveying the fear and despair of Wendy's predicament- very believable.I could go on, but won't.... suffice it to say, I was embarrassed for the TV miniseries creators after seeing it.

Absolutely no way on earth should this have a rating of 6. This is a really well scripted, shiveringly atmospheric, thoughtfully created, beautifully produced miniseries which in my opinion, is far greater than the better known movie version.Two things make this version better than The Shining movie. Firstly and most importantly, the characters are actually developed. We get to see the family in their everyday struggles before they move to The Overlook, we understand their motivations, their fears, their idiosyncrasies, their relationships with each other, so that when they reach the hotel, we have already been drawn into their lives enough to empathise with their situation and isolation. By the time the haunting begin, we feel every bit of the characters' fear with them. The same is said for Danny who, although seemingly suffering from a really annoying cold for most of the movie, is again a properly developed character who we get to know and understand.By contract, the old Shining movie throws the whole family straight into the hotel without really showing their relationship, their life before the hotel, their motivations or anything about them. The kid doesn't even speak! Secondly, the setting in King's version is perfect. He shows us the landscape, the vast mountains, the hotel in all weather conditions, we as voyeurs are invited privately into rooms, suites, bars and receptions as the first signs of haunting take place, so that it's as if we're there experiencing the apprehension along with the other characters.Another thing I love about King is his fascination with snow, winter and themes of being isolated and cut off from help, which is beautifully exemplified in Storm of the Century but not as well as it is in this. You feel like you need a huge winter jumper and a big mug of chili hot chocolate while you're watching this, it literally makes you shiver! The ultimate transformation from Jack's Vermont persona of a teacher trying to control anger outbursts and alcoholism and doing the best he can for his family to a wild, reckless, paranoid monster at the end of the film is mind blowing.In the movie version, Wendy hasn't been fully developed as a character and we're not really compelled to identify with her, so when Jack goes crazy in the famous 'hammer through bathroom door' scene at the end, I kind of thought 'So what?'. We don't have enough of a connection with her character to feel fear or sympathy. Whereas in this version, Wendy has already been developed as an outwardly vulnerable, inwardly strong, caring and supportive wife and mother. So when Jack turns on her in the end, we truly feel the terror of her predicament.Yes it's long - that's King films for you. But there's no better way to spend a cold winter's Sunday afternoon than curled up on your sofa watching this chilly tale unfold!

I am not going to compare this piece of rubbish to Kubrick's film; too many viewers have already done that.In my opinion, "The shining" is one of King's few novels worth reading. Some parts of it are slow-paced and boring, with the usual long descriptions of the characters' past and misfortunes in which King always likes to indulge himself for dozens of pages. That is the most irritating thing about his books. It is OK if you are writing "War and Peace" or "Gone with the Wind", but not for a horror flick. You should stick to the main story instead of creating sub-plot family melodramas.Anyway, "The Shining" is not an easy book to adapt, and only a very competent screenwriter who knows his trade and a film-maker equally effective can deliver a good movie out of the book. Kubrick, who was both things, did it, and that was it. They could try and make a dozen remakes of the story in the next one hundred years and they wouldn't get it any better. I re-read the novel very recently, and then I watched King's only approved and much blessed official adaptation in order to see how true to its title is. I felt pity. It is more faithful to the book than Kubrick's, I gave it that, but still it is not as faithful as the title and all the publicity initially promise, and that is cheating the spectator. All right, it shows Jack's alcoholic past in flashbacks, but was that really necessary in order to understand what happens later at the hotel? Also it shows Tony, and what for? In the book Danny only sees him once or twice and always from very far away, a blurred shadow. Why turning him into a character that is popping up in the screen every half an hour? He can't help Danny at all but only keeps telling him he shouldn't have come to the hotel, so what's the point? It is bloody irritating, and the actor looks silly!Then, there is the topiary. I laughed at the ignorance and ingenuity of many viewers who rave about this remake and put Kubrick's film down only because it doesn't show the hedge animals... Dear cultured critics: back in 1980 CGI was still sci-fi fantasy, and the only way to have shot that sequence would have been by combining live action with animation (go and check "Mary Poppins" to see what I'm talking about if you don't follow me). So Kubrick did very well by leaving the episode out instead of making a silly thing that would have looked laughable in what is supposed to be a a horror chiller. And that is precisely one of the biggest follies this adaptation has, and even the CGI is cheap and badly done and brings more laughs than shivers because the animals look like bird droppings on the snow!Then the cast is terrible. Someone mentioned that a monkey with a telephone book would have done a better casting, and he is right. The actors seem like they never bothered to read the book in order to understand what the story is about and get to know their characters. The kid was just that, so we can't blame him. But Rebecca de Mornay and the fellow who plays Jack (who is he, by the way?) are as plain as cardboard cut-outs, and the same goes for the guy doing Grady, who instead of looking menacing he is a total duck. And Van Peebles looks like he just popped out of a Busby Berkeley musical, I was expecting him to burst singing and tap-dancing any second. The only one of whom it can be said gives a decent performance is Elliott Gould, who plays Ullmann as the cynical, sarcastic, tight-fist snob who thinks of "his" hotel as the greatest thing on earth, just as described in the book. And as for Stephen King's surprise cameo as the orchestra conductor, I didn't know whether to laugh or to be angry because he looks like a Loony Tunes caricature of Xavier Cugat.And then, the director of this mess seems to have thought himself to be a new Stanley Kubrick and tried to imitate the master's trademark of slow tracking shots that precede key events. Didn't he have any self- respect? And the ending... so happy-ever-after that is laughable, and so overloaded with syrup that it could kill a diabetic just from looking at it. This multi-million dollar egotistic heap made only to satisfy King's ego is just a waste of time, money and celluloid.