Room 237

Obsessing about movies is healthy.  I hope so at the very least.  But then there are some who take this natural and quite healthy obsession into uncharted territories.  Room 237, a playfully insane rumination of the hidden codes and agendas of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, goes well and above the realm of uncharted obsessiveness.  It's easy to get hooked, especially coupled with the sparsest of backstory of the famed auteur and his storied reputation.  Kubrick was a stylist, innovator and a meticulous showman whose exacting visual prowess pervades all of his work-- there could never for once be something in his films that was a mistake, right?  And on the surface of things, The Shining was his most linear work-- an adaptation of the Stephen King bestseller starring Jack Nicholson-- made and financed with the pretense of mainstream accessibility a few years after Kubrick threw everything to the wall for the ambitious, if lowly attended, period drama Barry Lyndon.  One piece of commentary that Room 237 articulates with clarity and verve is a sense that perhaps Kubrick was drained, or furthermore, even bored with filmmaking as he approached The Shining, and he just wanted to make the whole thing more interesting for himself.  And theories abound as to how we are supposed to read the whole damn thing.

It's interesting to note that The Shining, now regarded as a modern horror classic, received very mixed. if not down right, bad notes upon its release-- it even received two Razzie Nominations in their inaugural year including one for, shutter to think, Worst Director.  The puzzle and mystery of The Shining, an obsessive-worthy film if ever there was one, is that on most respects, the film isn't exactly scary, but an endlessly fascinating and utterly loopy labyrinth of a picture that twists itself in so many directions that had it not been so endlessly fascinating, likely would have completely fallen astray.  Stephen King was famously not pleased with the adaptation, which fair to say shares only the barest backbone of the novel.  Room 237 as a documentary is intended mostly as a lark, I assume.  Director Rodney Ascher assembles a rotation of talking heads who decipher and read the hidden clues and meanings of the film, but those heads are never seen.  It's all voice-over as segments of The Shining are played (usually ultra-slow, frame by frame); it plays like a warped and thoroughly entertaining, conspiracy theory-laden special episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.  It doesn't much matter that the commentators themselves feel mostly anonymous, the film powerfully plays to a cinema-obsessed cult of geeks and weirdos whose impression is left as nerds freeze framing their well worn VCR cassettes in their parents basements.

What's fascinating is what they come up with.  Kubrick, allegedly, took a great interest in the visual cues of suggestion that were commonly used by advertisers in the late seventies and early eighties, which may have signaled playful gags and setups of subliminal messaging.  Something like this certainly feels valid when you consider the mastery filmmaker at work, often for years at a time.  Every motif, hung piece of art work, color scheme, character movement must have been exactly choreographed.  Right on...I'm on board that Stuart Ullman walks in front of his desk to greet Jack Torrance and an exactly positioned paper weight on his desk gives the impression that he has a hard-on.  Well played.  The trick and thrill and allure of Room 237 is the way it sucks you in on the onset, just as the madness ups the ante.

Perhaps The Shining really was a grand metaphor for the genocide of the Native Americans, or a pointed commentary of the Holocaust (a subject that Kubrick apparently wanted to tackle as a subject for a film dead-on, but never did.)  Or best of all, and this where the full-tilt warped mechanics of Room 237 go all in, is the theory that The Shining was Kubrick's apologia for staging the moon landing.  It's the sort of conspiracy theorist gone batshit, aha moment that makes for grand entertainment.  The trick and further allure of Room 237 is that the arguments are compelling and crazy enough that you turn your head and buy into it, just for the quick quivering moment you might start to think...could this all really be true?

Of course, rational sense comes back shortly thereafter, but that's it's trick, it's odd Kubrickian Da Vinci Code power-- an idea transfixing and out-of-this-world enough that it can tease your senses into accepting it as reality.  Some of the commentators in Room 237 may well be certifiable, but that it's so easy to accept their seductive theories makes a case in the hopeful evolved status of film geekdom.  For one thing that is an absolute certain after an experience like Room 237-- The Shining is a nutty movie...it makes no sense and it is almost a necessity to bring whatever you would like to the table as there isn't quite a wrong answer.  And while many of its peculiarities may well be simple continuity errors, or such mundane things like that, what would be the fun in that.  Room 237 is a nuthouse, funhouse celebration of cinema, and obsessive-worthy in its own right.  A

Room 237 is currently playing in New York and will expand throughout the coming weeks.  It is also available on VOD and iTunes.     

A.I.: 10 Years Later

Ten years ago almost to the day (I'm a bit late, the exact day was June 29), Steven Spielberg unveiled A.I. Artificial Intelligence.  I remember frantically rushing off to theater that early Friday morning, I was the first show of the day.  The nervous tension of a long awaited idea, first concocted by the great Stanley Kubrick realized by Spielberg opening in the year 2001, was unbearable.  I remember my first reaction was a gentle awe, only to be stymied when exiting the theater hearing my fellow moviegoers ripping it to shreds.  This, of course, would be the reaction I was going to have to get used to.  Come to think of it, few big summer blockbusters in waiting since have had such a popularizing reaction; many have been out-and-out panned, but few have been as heavily analyzed, with a sense of judgment looming on both sides of the love-it or hate-it line.  I only saw the film once, and don't think I could bear to watch it again...for I was instantly smitten with the story of a robotic boy and his search for love and purpose in such a beautifully textured cruel, dark universe.  The melding of Spielbergian hopefulness and Kubrickian dystopia created an unusual and soaring hybrid.  It's perhaps not the masterwork anybody was expecting, but I have always felt A.I. Artificial Intelligence was all the stronger because of it's flaws, because for the first time in a long while it felt that Spielberg was almost unafraid of going somewhere new and dark and unexpected.  There was, and still is, a mysticism and danger in thinking back.

The first part of the film is quiet and serene in and definitely more infused with Spielberg's instincts with familial pleasures.  The middle section is nearly all Kubrick-infused-- violent, aggressive, but soulfully beautiful in its ambivalence (it's also, I believe the strongest section of the movie.  The ending, which probably killed it for many and is and will always be the troubling area, where the darkness is coalesced into that of a fairy tale, and the mixture of the two cinematic giants looming generated an awkward undercurrent of diminished returns.  But in a film so complicated, not just in origin, but in design, it's forgivable that the destination isn't nearly satisfying as the journey itself.  And even if a great sense of hero worship was on display in every shot, the hero is Stanley Kubrick...there's a full circle effect this summer with the love adorned on Spielberg with J.J. Abrams' Super 8.

What's best remembered and hopefully enshrined are the amazing production values, inventive effects, and two of the best performances a Spielberg film have ever provided.  Haley Joel Osment, two years after The Sixth Sense, and a few years away from becoming unnoticed gave David, the artificial child robot who learned to love, the perfect blend of innocence and creepiness and made the story credible right from the start.  The second performance I'm personally more fond of, and feel that it should the classic character of the piece: Jude Law as Gigolo Joe, another artificial being made to love.  Law's bravado and unabashed sexuality is the separator from Spielberg yin and Kubrick yang; Gigolo Joe springs A.I. from youthful innocence to adulthood depravity, and either serving as comic relief or surrogate father (both to David and the audience, unfamiliar to the rules of the game), Law's presence grounds the movie with spectacular depth and unyielding charm.  He deserved an Oscar nomination-- the film received two pity nominations that year for Best Visual Effects and for Best Score, a token slot reserved for John Williams-- I kid, I'm sure it was a great score.

While ten years ago, movie patrons may have laughed or been taken off guard but what they just saw, I have faith in the cinematic universe that a film so singular and scary will have a lasting legacy.  If not now, then later on because it deserves it, and ambitious think-pieces, even those that are wrapped with familiar genre flourishes nearly always take time to be properly admired.  That was a staple throughout Kubrick's career; none of his films were out and out celebrated upon arrival-- many of them are still heavily contested in the most aggressive of film battles, but they were notable, as A.I., easily the most ambitious sci\fi story made since Blade Runner with few to rival on terms of scale or heart.

An Homage to Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick - a filmography - from mwoutisseth on Vimeo.

Simply beautiful.  What's your favorite Stanley Kubrick film.  I'm torn between Lolita and A Clockwork Orange, and on other days, Dr. Strangelove.