Just perfect...

Fresh and Exciting

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

For being a documentary about one of my all time favorite movies, I think that this is a fairly made one. The reason is because it does not only give me more and more hints and understanding of what The Shining means other than just being a classic horror film about a family that spends the majority of the time inside an isolated hotel, but I also learned new things about the movie that I have never ever thought about or discovered until now. If you have watched the actual movie a dozen times just like I have, you will probably go into it with all these new layers in your mind and with all the footage you have seen in this documentary. I am in awe of how massive the fanbase have become over the decades with all of these conspiracy theories, speculations, and confessions ect. I am not really able to explain how much this movie has impacted me, because everything I witnessed on the screen for the very first time is something that I probably will never forget. Overall I think this is a pretty decent and watchable documentary for everyone that have watched this movie multiple times and even more for that matter. It also contains some footage of Kubrick's other popular films like 2001 for instance, in which The Shining has some cool and interesting similarities with that movie. I expected a little more out of this documentary though, and feel like it could have been much more.

Awful 1 out of 10 stars would go negative if could, dumb commentary with nothing to do with the shining.

This film is an epic thesis on storytelling, adaptation, and film-making. If you have read the King novel, then you know that a key component to the story is the Minotaur theme. It's not an accident that Kubrick invented a hedge maze scene for the final act... the book manifests Danny's clairvoyant visions of his mad father as a Minotaur stalking him in some contrived labyrinth of hallways in the Overlook hotel.So, that said; the moon landing stuff is trash, but nonetheless entertaining; Any claims about Kubrick being involved in some sort of conspiracy have been more than debunked. However, we know that Kubrick is always trying to tell us more than what's on screen...The theory that Kubrick's The Shining is a metaphor for the genocide of American natives seems absurd at first, but I believe it is absolutely borne out by facts raised in Room 237. It is verifiable that King was not pleased with the screenplay adaptation, and the film actually expresses this by emphasizing the *yellow* bug that is trashed roadside, instead of the red bug in the book. But if we take out the moon landing crap and assume that Kubrick is approaching this project from the native American angle, so many pieces fall into place.Room 237 exposits this concept ad nauseam, but let's simply consider the most iconic scene of the film, where Jack is taunting Wendy as she threatens him with the bat: the camera takes great care to ensure that the aboriginal tapestry that serves as decoration for the great hall stays framed as Jack ascends the staircase (where the shot is a peculiar over-the-shoulder 1/3 take). So we're left to simply ask, *why* was this Kubrick's approach? (and this is exactly the type of question that Room 237 engages emphatically) All of this is to say: Room 237 provides enough insight regarding the themes of the book (Minotaur/labyrinth) while illustrating Kubrick's own departure from the source text (aboriginal genocide). It is hard to reconcile the changes made from the book to film without these interpretations.again, CAVEAT:The moon landing stuff is bizarre; I think this can be explained by confirmation bias of those intrigued by Kubrick's proficiency in filmmaking, being contemporaries of breakthrough techniques used during the filming of 2001. It's unfortunate the filmmakers felt compelled to include this aspect, as it obfuscates what I consider to be serious narrative themes suggested by Kubrick.So, I'm proffering an 8/10, given that the viewer has both seen the original film and read the novel... And as someone who is a rabid fan of both, Room 237's peculiar allure has stayed with me for months after viewing.

Other hidden meanings in "The Shining": 1. In the gin commercial, the ice cube to the right clearly shows the Secret Service man driving JFK's limo in Dallas turning around and shooting the president. 2. A frozen-frame blow up of the poster to the left of the faux skier one reveals a photo of the box where President and Mrs. Lincoln were watching "An American Cousin" on the night the president was assassinated. To the extreme left you can see a myopic 2nd assassin firing a Derringer that missed Mrs. Lincoln, the second must-have target. 3. In the opening credits of "The Shining", as soon as Stanley Kubrick's name scrolls upwards out of the frame, in addition to his airbrushed photo skillfully placed in the clouds, and to its immediate left, is the right earlobe of Jon Voight, Kubrick's first choice to play Jack. 4. The original sneak prevue release, shown in a theater in Honduras, had Danny carrying a ripe banana as he fled into the maze. He gets corned by his homicidal father and obsessively eats the banana, tossing the peel in front of him. His father raises the ax, steps forward and slips on the banana peel, hitting his head fatally on a partially obscured obsidian bust of Stephen King. This ending was booed by the attending Hondurans who subsequently burned down the theater to protest the racial profiling of bananas. Kubrick then re-shot the ending we all know. 5. As a movie running 1 hour and 42 minutes, the laughs for this commentator stopped coming after 20 minutes. Picture was far too long to sustain a light-weight comedy.