Room 237

[mae]

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/movies/room-237-documentary-with-theories-about-the-shining.html

WHEN “The Shining” was released in 1980, many viewers, including the critic Pauline Kael, left theaters mystified by what they had just seen. Expecting a standard frightfest based on a Stephen King best seller, they got an unexplained river of blood surging out of hotel elevators, a vision of cobwebbed skeletons and a weird guy in a bear suit doing something untoward with a gentleman in a tuxedo.

Three decades on, scholars and fans are still trying to decipher this puzzle of a film directed by Stanley Kubrick. To them it’s only ostensibly about an alcoholic father, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) going more than stir crazy while his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and son, Danny, try to cope in an isolated hotel, the Overlook. Mr. Kubrick was famously averse to offering explanations of his films — “I have found it always the best policy to allow the film to speak for itself,” he once wrote — which has led to a mind-boggling array of theories about just what he was up to.

The hotel’s hedge maze, many Kubrick authorities agree, is a reference to the myth of the Minotaur; others have drawn convincing connections between the Overlook’s well-stocked pantry and the confectionery cottage in Hansel and Gretel. The more one views the film — and many of these scholars admit to viewing it hundreds of times — the more symbols and connections appear.

“Room 237,” the first full-length documentary by the director Rodney Ascher, examines several of the most intriguing of these theories. It’s really about the Holocaust, one interviewee says, and Mr. Kubrick’s inability to address the horrors of the Final Solution on film. No, it’s about a different genocide, that of American Indians, another says, pointing to all the tribal-theme items adorning the Overlook Hotel’s walls. A third claims it’s really Kubrick’s veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings.

When Mr. Ascher first began discussing the project with his friend Tim Kirk, who would later become the film’s producer, the two were simply hoping to find enough fans and theories to flesh out a series of short films, maybe something to post on YouTube. “On paper it seems like a very specific niche,” Mr. Ascher said, speaking at the oldest standing Bob’s Big Boy, in Burbank, not far from a campus of the New York Film Academy, where he teaches a class in editing. “The Secret Meanings of ‘The Shining’ — we should be able to wrap that up pretty quick. But the thing kept growing and growing.” By the time the two were done, “Room 237,” which had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday, was nearly two hours long.

What they had stumbled upon was a subculture of Kubrick fans that has been expanding over the last several years. The group includes professors and historians, fanboys and artists, many of whom have posted their theories online accompanied by maps, videos, and pages-long explications pleading their cases. The Liverpudlian filmmaker Rob Ager’s video analyses of “The Shining” have garnered hundreds of thousands of YouTube hits; the voluminous online essays of Kevin McLeod, a k a “mstrmnd,” range from the film’s marketing materials to its many uses of artificial light.

“The initial reception by journalists of most of Kubrick’s films was negative,” said the film scholar Julian Rice, author of “Kubrick’s Hope: Discovering Optimism from ‘2001’ to ‘Eyes Wide Shut.’ ” “But as time went on, his films were taken more and more seriously, and now people are redefining him in terms of all of the contemporary postmodern theories. Many of the current critics think in different terms than Kubrick thought when he was making those films. They think in a different vocabulary, and they have different concerns.”

Among the topics of discussion are the many liberties, large and small, that Kubrick took with the original novel. Mr. King, who declined to comment for this article, has never concealed his dislike for the film and the way the director changed and discarded scenes, themes and details. In the book Jack’s Volkswagen is red; in the film it’s yellow. No big thing, until one discovers that King’s red VW actually did make it into the film, crushed underneath an overturned semi.

But that’s not the only kind of symbolic moment “Shining” buffs are interested in; they have much bigger themes in mind. To one of the subjects of “Room 237,” Geoffrey Cocks, a history professor at Albion College in Michigan and author of “The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust,” the film is full of references, some subtle, some less so, to the Final Solution. There are the film’s many references to 1942, the year the Nazis began their extermination of Jews at Auschwitz: a 42 appears on a shirt worn by Danny; “Summer of ’42” is playing on the Torrances’ television; Wendy takes 42 swings with a bat at Jack. And then there’s that gusher of blood. “That’s as good a visual metonym for the horror of the 20th century that has ever been filmed,” Mr. Cocks said in an interview.

When Bill Blakemore, a veteran ABC News correspondent and another “Shining” theorist in the documentary, noticed cans of Calumet baking powder emblazoned with an Indian chief logo in “The Shining,” he knew immediately what Kubrick had in mind. “I told my friends, ‘That movie was about the genocide of the American Indians.’ ”

In 1987 Mr. Blakemore wrote an article for The Washington Post, noting the film’s use of Indian decorative elements (in one scene Mr. Nicholson hurls a tennis ball repeatedly against an Indian wall hanging), the Calumet cans and the Overlook’s location on an old Indian burial ground. “It’s about ghosts and memories and how we put together our sense of what has happened in the past,” Mr. Blakemore said in an interview. “ ‘I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel over the years, and not all of ’em was good.’ He’s talking about the way the human race does it, and has done it over and over again.”

The documentary’s biggest leap of faith comes with Jay Weidner, who posits that Mr. Kubrick helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings, then used “The Shining” to both confess his involvement — and brag about it. Mr. Weidner is at work on a DVD about the Kubrick-Apollo connection, his second, and cites as evidence a sweater worn by Danny with “Apollo 11” on it, and the hexagonal design on the hotel hallway carpet pattern, which he argues is a dead ringer for the aerial view of the Apollo launching pad. “The entire substory of ‘The Shining,’ ” Mr. Weidner said in an interview, “is the story of Kubrick making the Apollo footage and then trying to hide it from his wife, and then her finding out about it.”

Despite the scope of the film, which uses scenes from the 1940 “Thief of Bagdad,” “Spellbound,” Creepshow” and F. W. Murnau’s silent “Faust” to illustrate different hypotheses, Mr. Ascher said he only scratched the surface of the vast number of “Shining” theories. Why so many? The film “is a compelling work of art that acts as a kind of mirror, especially for thoughtful people, who see aspects of themselves that are among the most precious things they have experienced,” Mr. Rice said. “That’s in the best sense. In some cases it might also be a paranoia that they want to expurgate in some way.”

“Room 237” — the title is a reference to a haunted room in the hotel — ends with no clear consensus on just what “The Shining” actually means. How could it? But there’s no denying the filmmakers had a pretty serious, cerebral bunch to work with.

“This isn’t ‘Trekkies,’ ” said Mr. Kirk, referring to the 1997 documentary about the glorious excesses of “Star Trek” fandom. “We don’t have guys having ‘Shining’ weddings, or driving around in yellow VWs with ‘ROOM 237’ license plates. There were no conventions to go to.”

[Heather19]

I posted about this down in gem theater the other day. I'm dying to see this! Some of the stuff sounds absolutely crazy though :lol:

[mtdman]

Some people take things a bit too far, imo.

[mystima]

Yeah was thinking the same thing, especially with the whole "He helped fake the moon landing" part...that is just crazy...lol...to each their own. I just think it was his way of bringing the story to life in his own way.

[George at C-Springs]

The actual hotel that King stayed in, The Stanley Hotel, is only 2 hrs 30 minutes from where I live, straight up I-25 and then bang a left into the Rocky Mountain National Park. Need to get up there and stay sometime!

[Bev Vincent]

Sundance 2012 Review: Fascinating ‘Room 237′ Will Forever Change ‘The Shining’ For Audiences (http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/film-festivals/sundance-2012-review-room-237-kkell.php)

[skyofcrack]

I'm looking forward to this as well as the new horror anthology V/H/S (also at Sundance)

http://i508.photobucket.com/albums/s323/skyofcrack/room237smaller2__span.jpg

[mtdman]

Go to imdb and look on the boards there for some of the commentaries on Kubrik's Shining. People really do take that movie waaaay too seriously.

Frankly, I didn't think it was very good compared to what King wrote.

[Stockerlone]

Tomorrow and next week again in my Hometown....
Hope i have time.

Room 237
USA 2012 | 104 min | OF mit dt. UT | Farbe / s&w | FF 2012

http://www.filmfesthamburg.de/de/programm/film/Room-237/8434

Für die einen ist Stanley Kubricks Film Shining ein Meilenstein des Horrorfilms, für die anderen ein Schundwerk weit unter den Möglichkeiten des Meisterregisseurs. Dazwischen blühen Verschwörungstheorien von Leuten, die in dem 1980 veröffentlichten Klassiker geheime Botschaften vermuten. Fünf dieser etwas anderen Kubrick-Exegeten kommen in Room 237 zu Wort. Der Film gleicht ihre skurrilen Mutmaßungen mit Originalszenen aus The Shining ab – und geht noch weiter: Er dringt in ihre Köpfe ein und visualisiert ihre Bewusstseinsströme. Ein abgefahrener Trip durch ein Labyrinth ohne Ausgang, in dem die Grenzen zwischen Wirklichkeit und Fiktion fließend sind.


Zu sehen beim FilmFestHamburg

Vorstellungen:
Sa, 29.09. 22:00
Studio 1
Bernstorffstraße 93-95

Fr, 05.10. 21:30
Abaton Groß
Allende-Platz 3

http://room237movie.com/

[mae]

http://www.wordandfilm.com/2012/10/deconstructing-stanley-kubrick%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98the-shining%E2%80%99-welcome-to-%E2%80%98room-237%E2%80%99/

By the time the conspiracy theory about director Stanley Kubrick faking the Apollo 11 moon landing is floated, the titters have become audible. And yet, after the dorm room pot haze dissipates, Rodney Ascher’s latest documentary about crackpots orbiting the expatriated American maverick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s bestselling third novel leaves its audience feeling like Danny Torrance, the five-year-old central to both book and film, whose telepathic ability dubbed “shining” allows him to see things that aren’t there.

In order to tackle Kubrick’s embed of everything from Native American genocide to the Holocaust, Ascher assembles a rogue’s gallery we never actually see. “The talking head shot in a room is a little mundane,” Ascher explains after his film screens for press at the 50th New York Film Festival before its March theatrical release. “It’s the world we all live in and I wanted this movie to be off in outer space or ancient Rome, not an office or hotel room.” In fact, Ascher calls his first cut a radio version. “We did all the interviews audio-only. I mailed people inexpensive, digital audio recorders I got on Amazon, then talked to them on the phone as they recorded themselves and then mailed it back to me.”

ABC News correspondent Bill Blakemore posits the film’s dense, Indian imagery as an apology to Native Americans while history professor Geoffrey Cocks seizes on the film’s repetition of the number forty-two as the closest Kubrick came to parsing the Holocaust on film. Playwright Juli Kearns complies elaborate, 3-D maps of the Overlook Hotel while musician John Fell Ryan details booking an experimental cinematheque to project the film running both backward and forward superimposed on the same screen before falling down the rabbit hole wherein his life came to eerily mirror that of unhinged hotel caretaker Jack Torrance. But it’s conspiracy hunter Jay Weidner who knocks it out of the park with his moon landing theory, which initially garners laughter until Ascher cuts away to Danny wearing a whimsically knit sweater emblazoned with the Apollo 11 rocket.

Both Ascher and his producer Tim Kirk also came to the film through deception. “I snuck into it during its initial release,” Ascher admits, bolting from the theater during the opening helicopter shot accompanied by the macabre shrieking of Transylvanian-born composer György Sándor Ligeti’s 1967 composition Lontano. “The overwhelming quality of that music at the top chased me out,” Ascher says, “but I was a budding young horror aficionado so very soon after its release on VHS, I revisited it again and again. As young kids, it’s very natural to identify with Danny, but now that we’re at another stage of our lives and have young children, we’re absolutely watching this movie through the eyes of Jack and seeing him as a very bad cautionary story.”

“I saw it at its matinee premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre,” Kirk, who also lives in Los Angeles raising a three-year-old daughter, adds. “I got an older friend to buy me the ticket, but I watched it on Cinemax my freshmen year of college and would spend too many hours late at night just watching it over and over down in the basement of my dorm. I root for Jack to go crazy because he’s such a phony at the beginning of the film, but it really is about fatherhood and not being a terrible dad.” Ascher agrees, adding, “This film was made largely between the hours of nine PM and three AM. I was sitting at the keyboard typing away not sure if what I was writing was meaningless gibberish or something people could understand so it’s very easy to see Jack as a worst possible version of oneself.”

Source author King felt similarly, dedicating the 1977 novel to his son, “Joe Hill King, who shines on.” The autobiographical story was a result of King uprooting his young family to find a setting that differed from the native Maine depicted in his first two novels Carrie and Salem’s Lot. They arrived in Boulder after King opened an atlas on his kitchen table, randomly placed his finger over the Colorado town. A Halloween break in an adjacent resort at the foot of the Rockies had the Kings checking into room 217 as sole guests of the Stanley Hotel. Of course, Kubrick famously changed that room number to 237 in his film, which Holocaust theorist Geoffrey Cocks suggests is because 42 is a multiple of those digits while Apollo 11 theorist Jay Weidner extrapolates the phrase “moon room” out of the arcane abbreviation “room no. 237″ on the red key dangling from the ajar door of the haunted hotel’s sexualized epicenter.

Weidner can’t resist adding the moon is 237,000 miles from earth and suggests all of Kubrick’s alterations to King’s novel point to Apollo 11 fakery, but Kubrick went about making the story his own with aplomb. The Volkswagen Beetle the Torrances use to travel to the Overlook shifts from red in the book to yellow on-screen. Certainly within the aegis of a painterly colorist like Kubrick, but what of the red Volkswagen Beetle the family rubbernecks as it sits crushed beneath an eighteen-wheeler? King recently told The Writer’s Digest it’s the only film adaptation he can “remember hating” – a huge statement considering the Christine or Cujo adaptations – and King went onto pen his own three-part miniseries corrective that aired on ABC in the spring of 1997.

Ascher was always clear about focusing on his five experts and the film traffics in the post-modern tenet that author intent – either King’s or Kubrick’s – is beside the point, “but certainly now that it’s wrapped up, Stephen King is on the top of my list as someone whose two cents I’d love to get,” Ascher says, while Kirk puts Kubrick’s screenplay collaborator Dianne Johnson on top of his. Ascher adds that King’s sequel, a return-to-form horror entitled “Dr. Sleep” tracking Danny as an adult hospice worker, is due out next September and calls it “one of a thousand coincidences we couldn’t have imagined when we started this thing, before I spent too much time in front of my keyboard trying not to be too much of a jerk if any family members needed some attention.”

[killbourne]

I'm looking forward to this as well as the new horror anthology V/H/S (also at Sundance)

http://i508.photobucket.com/albums/s323/skyofcrack/room237smaller2__span.jpg

Seen VHS..the beginning of the movie was so shaky that it gave me a headache. Most of the individual stories were good...it did bother me at times how stupid the characters behaved.

[mae]

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-207_162-57522220/n.y-film-festival-check-into-room-237/

Some pundits scratched their heads when filmmaker Stanley Kubrick - whose resume boasted such innovative and ahead-of-the-curve classics as "Dr. Strangelove," "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "A Clockwork Orange" - announced he would direct a film version of the Stephen King horror novel "The Shining." Kubrick? A horror movie?

Of course it was more than that: A story of a devolving marriage, isolation, domestic abuse and maybe even reincarnation, as a caretaker and his family spend an eventful winter holed up at an isolated hotel high in the Rocky Mountains. Technically, it was a floating dream of unsettling cinematic precision.

In the years since its 1980 release, "The Shining" has not only haunted moviegoers - it has inspired viewers to look for hidden meanings within the film's labyrinthine plot and sets.

Unlike other films that might be burdened by continuity errors - changes in set dressings or costumes between shots, shifted furniture, awkward edits - a Kubrick film carries the weight of the director's reputation for leaving no detail untouched. They can't possibly be mistakes! And so a cottage industry has arisen of "Shining" enthusiasts who seek answers to tantalizing "clues" or "discrepancies" within the film, especially those that were added to the source novel by Kubrick and co-writer Diane Johnson.

"Room 237" - named for ground zero of the Overlook Hotel's creepy history - captures not only a fan's love for the Kubrick classic but also an obsessive's love for solving riddles, even if those riddles are imparted onto the film by a viewer's own reading of it. The film, which debuted at Sundance, is screening at the New York Film Festival in advance of its March 2013 theatrical release by IFC Films.

For example, do the many references to Indians (including a burial ground, wall hangings and cans of baking powder) convey the genocide of Native Americans? And what about those props that may refer to the Wannsee Conference and the Nazis' "final solution" against European Jews? What are they doing in a Colorado hotel?

And those who question whether Man really made it to the Moon ask: Had Kubrick been hired by NASA to clandestinely "film" the lunar landing, only to drop hints of his collaboration into a little boy's sweater?

As they say in "The X Files," the truth is out there!

For director Rodney Ascher (who snuck into a screening of "The Shining" when he was a kid and fled in terror after 20 minutes), a lifetime's obsession has been tamed only after corralling the penetrating thoughts of several "Shining" devotees: journalist Bill Blakemore; historian Geoffrey Cocks; playwright-novelist Juli Kearns; musician John Fell Ryan; and author Jay Weidner.

He then weaves their musings about the director's obsessions (and their own) into a spiral of imaginings that could make a film professor's head burst, but which any fan of Kubrick can appreciate as a kind of worship of the master's skill and dramatic genius.

"Room 237" becomes as twisting and colorful as the Overlook's carpeting . . . as manic as Jack Nicholson's performance. It is ultimately as mysterious as its subject, which in turn makes "The Shining" an even greater source of fascination and re-viewing.

Case in point: To demonstrate the symmetry of the film, a special screening of "The Shining" ran the film simultaneously backwards and forwards, creating an ingenious synchronicity of overlaid imagery. You don't have to have played "Dark Side of the Moon" during "The Wizard of Oz" to appreciate such irony.

[mae]

http://www.firstshowing.net/2012/first-teaser-trailer-for-shining-doc-room-237-doesnt-show-much/

Are you ready to return to Room 237? An early teaser trailer has finally been revealed for Rodney Ascher's highly acclaimed, much talked about documentary Room 237, about the deep "dark secrets" and numerous crazy conspiracies found within Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. The doc premiered at Sundance and has been playing the festival circuit all-around, including Cannes and Fantastic Fest, and will hopefully soon get released by IFC Films. This teaser, uploaded by Metrodome Film, contains nothing but critics' quotes and, if you listen closely, voiceover snippets from the film to create tension. There's not much to it, but it's a tease.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ0rVIS49Vs&hd=1

[mae]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-19789783

A new documentary, Room 237, explores the theory that messages are hidden in horror film The Shining. So what meanings do some people believe its director Stanley Kubrick secreted in the frames of his chilling masterpiece?

Kubrick's adaption of the 1977 Stephen King novel of the same name was released in cinemas 32 years ago.

The film follows recovering alcoholic and struggling writer Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, and his wife and their young son Danny.

They move into the Overlook Hotel after Jack is appointed caretaker of the imposing and isolated North American mountain retreat while it is closed for winter.

Tension mounts as Danny, who has psychic abilities, and his troubled and abusive father encounter the evil spirits that haunt the Overlook's deserted corridors and its sinister room 237.

In an interview with French film critic Michel Ciment, Kubrick said he hoped audiences would get a "good fright" watching it.

But some viewers believe The Shining is far more than a scary film.

They are convinced the characters' dialogue, their clothing and even the pattern of the Overlook's carpet are codes. Breaking those cryptic clues, they argue, reveals hidden messages about the genocide of America's indigenous people, the Nazi's Final Solution and even an admission the 1969 Moon Landing was faked.

Filmmakers and best friends Rodney Ascher and Tim Kirk, who are both huge fans of Kubrick's work, explore these theories and others in their documentary Room 237.

Ascher said: "I wasn't looking for messages myself.

"This project began because my friend Tim and I discovered that countless other people were doing so, and based on our love of Kubrick's films, and consciousness of the great lengths he went to make them, the idea that The Shining was littered with these signs and symbols was totally plausible to us and something we wanted to know everything about."

He added: "As I discovered more and more of them, it actually became a little frightening, as if I was opening up a book of forbidden knowledge - doing most of the research between the hours of 10pm and 3am made the experience especially eerie."

Room 237's interviewees include Michigan-based history professor Geoffrey Cocks, who believes The Shining is about Nazi Germany's extermination of Jewish people.

Prof Cocks, who wrote the book The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust, points to repeated use of the number 42 in the film. Danny wears a baseball shirt with the number on the sleeves, and another scene a TV set shows the movie Summer of '42.

In 1942, Nazi officials met for the Wannsee Conference to plan the genocide of European Jews.

Other clues to the Holocaust theory include Kubrick changing the colour of the Torrance family's VW Beetle from the King novel's red to yellow - the colour of the star-shaped identification badges Jews were forced to wear.

Another interviewee, veteran US television journalist and former war correspondent Bill Blakemore, suggests The Shining is about the mistreatment of America's Native Indians.

Blakemore's evidence includes an explanation early on in the film that the Overlook was built in 1907 on an Indian burial ground. In 1907 the name Indian Territory, an area of land where the US government relocated North American indigenous people, changed to Oklahoma.

Later in the film, a frustrated Jack bounces a rubber ball off an Indian tapestry that hangs on a lobby wall. Meanwhile, in the hotel's larder are stocked tins of baking powder branded Calumet, the word for an Indian peace pipe.

One of the more startling theories is that The Shining is Kubrick's confession to helping the US government fake the Apollo 11 Moon Landing.

Author and film-maker Jay Weidner insists the signs are all there.

In one scene, Danny is playing with toy cars on the hotel's oddly patterned carpet. He sits inside a hexagonal shape - the same shape, says Weidner, as the launch pad area of Apollo 11. When Danny rises from his game, a rocket with the lettering Apollo 11 on it can be seen on the boy's jumper and he walks slowly towards room 237. According to Weidner, schoolchildren in the 1960s were taught that the distance from the Earth to the Moon was 237,000 miles.

Critic Ciment asked Kubrick why he switched the hotel room number from the book's 217 to 237. The director said the Timberline Lodge, in Oregon, which was used for the film, had a room 217 but staff feared no-one would want to stay in it after the film was released, so it was decided to change it to 237, a room number that did not exist in the lodge.

Matthew Leyland, reviews editor at Total Film magazine, is not surprised that people continue to be captivated by The Shining so long after it was released.

He said: "It's a scary film that still scares.

"Horror films can sometimes date terribly but apart from the bell bottoms and the odd hammy moment, Kubrick's film holds up incredibly well after 30-odd years.

"Most of his films - particularly the later ones - have a persistent sense of foreboding, of something truly ghastly about to happen, but this is Kubrick at his eeriest and most uncanny."

Leyland said Kubrick was fond of symbolism and cryptic vibes. He said the imagery and themes in his most famous film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, have invited endless speculation and interpretation over the years.

He added: "Given what a meticulous, painstaking, serious-minded director Kubrick was, it's probably likely that he intended The Shining to be more than just a story of a man going mad in a hotel, although I thought many of the theories espoused in Room 237 were more entertaining than credible."

After watching Room 237, Leyland reckons most viewers of The Shining will see it in a different light than they had in previous viewings.

For Ascher, the documentary's director, delving into the theories left him with some concerns about how he might feel when watching The Shining again.

He said: "I had a fear that in a way, by deconstructing the film, I may have killed this thing I loved.

"But happily enough, when I recently re-watched the film about a month ago with my mother-in-law who was preparing to watch 237, I was instantly able to fall under its spell again."

[mikeC]

I wanted to see this but missed it this weekend.
This is a pretty cool crazy concept. Why I think it works is b/c of Kubrick's narrative and shows just how great he was.
Still nuts, though
http://badassdigest.com/2012/10/01/fantastic-fest-review-the-shining-forwards-and-backwards/

[Bev Vincent]

Room 237 will play on IFC (http://www.ifc.com/) in March:

Fans of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining won’t want to miss the conspiracy thriller doc Room 237, releasing on March 29. “After the box office failure of Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick decided to embark on a project that might have more commercial appeal. The Shining, Stephen King’s biggest critical and commercial success yet, seemed like a perfect vehicle. After an arduous production, Kubrick’s film received a wide release in the summer of 1980; the reviews were mixed, but the box office, after a slow start, eventually picked up. End of story? Hardly. In the 30 years since the film’s release, a considerable cult of Shining devotees has emerged, fans who claim to have decoded the film’s secret messages addressing everything from the genocide of Native Americans to a range of government conspiracies. Rodney Ascher’s wry and provocative Room 237 fuses fact and fiction through interviews with cultists and scholars, creating a kaleidoscopic deconstruction of Kubrick’s still-controversial classic.”

[mikeC]

Room 237 will play on IFC (http://www.ifc.com/) in March:

I think it will be released in theaters and VOD in March. I just went researching
bc I figured if it was playing on cable in March it might be on VOD earlier and I was excited but I think they mean VOD/theater release is March.

[Lookwhoitis]

I was able to catch the film at Sundance last year!

I thouroughly enjoyed it. It is similar to the whole syncronicity thing with the dark side of the moon and wizard of Oz. I mean, some stuff seems to line up, but can it be because you have just been taking too many drugs? :D

I am a huge King fan and a Kubrick acolyte so this film was right up my alley. There are some crackpot theories (and characters!) but all in all it is a really cool look at a lot of the symbolism and supposedly "hidden" stuff in the film.

Kubrick was such a perfectionist and a psychological filmmaker that we will never know exactly what he wanted us to think or feel. He was playing with our minds.

Very interesting watch and I cant wait to be able to get a dvd copy to be able to sit down and watch the film and the doc in succession.

I am glad that the film is getting a release! The Producers were concerned at Sundance because of the huge amount of actual footage from the Shining that was in the film. The were unsure whether or not they could get clearance for the footage to distribute the film commercially. Kudos to the folks at IFC films for getting the deal done so all the rest of the rabid fans get to watch it!

[Bev Vincent]

See it now on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/59822710

[Merlin1958]

It seemed a little like a "crackpot" theory. I mean, correct me if I am wrong, but aren't there man made reflectors on the moon that you can bounce a laser off of? Also, Astronomers can see the flag, no? Can't belive this "theory" is still going around.

Now, the Pink Floyd/WOO thing is freaky!!! Well over a 100 points of synchronicity!!! LOL Also a heckuva lot of fun!!! LOL



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gXvVUg-VAE

[mae]

See it now on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/59822710

Looks like that was a pirate copy and has been deleted. Meanwhile, there's also this (not "Room 237"):


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0hOiasRsrA

:wtf:

[Bev Vincent]

My review -- Room 237: Sometimes a cigar is a Moon rocket (http://www.fearnet.com/news/news-article/news-dead-zone-room-237-sometimes-cigar-moon-rocket)

[Bryant Burnette]

I am torn. I am a Stephen King nut, and watch every movie associated with his work; for fuck's sake, I own the remake of Children of the Corn! ON BLU-RAY!

I'm also a big fan of Kubrick in general, and The Shining specifically. So you'd think Room 237 would be to me as catnip is to a cat. Not so much, though; everything I've heard about the film just annoys me. I'll probably watch it eventually, but with my teeth gritted the entire time.

[Coulrophobia]

Room 237 is available for pre-order from UK Amazon, but it is Region 2.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Room-237-DVD-Rodney-Ascher/dp/B009WQR7UO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1362740494&sr=8-1

[herbertwest]

I stopped half-way through it...

[Bev Vincent]

The first Kubrick defender has commented on my review!

[ChristineB]

Thanks for the review Bev, I'm thinking that is all I need to know about this movie, since I couldn't get that ~1.5 hours of my life back.
On a side note, the video about being able to fake the moon landing on video at the time was great I loved the line "global dick wagging contest". LOL

[mae]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/06/king-kubrick-shining-adaptation

At book readings, Stephen King sometimes tells a story about his "only preproduction discussion" for the 1980 film adaptation of The Shining. At seven in the morning, King was shaving in the bathroom when his wife ran in to tell him there was a call from London, it was Stanley Kubrick. Just the mention of the director's name was shock enough that when King went to the phone, he had a line of blood running down one cheek and the other was still white with foam. The first thing Kubrick said – and it's worth noting that King's growly impersonation makes him sound like a swamp creature – was: "I think stories of the supernatural are fundamentally optimistic, don't you? If there are ghosts then that means we survive death." King asked him about hell, how did that fit in? There was a long pause, then: "I don't believe in hell."

King tells this anecdote like a horror story, which I guess it is, since he famously hates Kubrick's adaptation of his book. We imagine Kubrick as the monster, a corona of wild hair around his pale face, laughing as he drags the novel into the depths of soulless art cinema. The director is turned into a character from a Stephen King novel as payback for having turned The Shining into a Stanley Kubrick film.

Six months ago, I was invited to curate the Page to Screen film festival, in Bridport, Dorset, which is dedicated to films adapted from books. I was thrilled to take part and was surprised, when I started looking, at just how many films start life in print – six of the nine nominees for best picture at this year's Oscars, for example. Many of the films we've chosen gleefully cheat on the books that inspired them. In Clueless, for example, Jane Austen's Emma becomes Cher Horowitz, Georgian Highbury becomes contemporary Beverly Hills, the horse-drawn carriage is a drop-top four by four, while all the bitching and romantic mix-ups remain pretty much the same, just with different slang. King has a neat theory about how an adapter's voice can force itself on a story. His version of The Shining "ends with the hotel burning, and [Kubrick's] with the hotel freezing" because he is a "warm and gooey" person while Kubrick was "the coldest guy in the universe".

One of the films we're showing is based on Barry Gifford's novel Wild at Heart, about a highly sexed, loved-up couple, Sailor and Lula. At the end of the book, once Sailor has completed another long stint in jail, Lula is waiting for him with their son, who has never met his father. After giving his son some life advice, Sailor walks away from his new family, feeling that he will only end up getting them into more trouble. Lula lets him go.

In Chris Rodley's book-length interview with David Lynch, who adapted Wild at Heart for the screen, the director says this ending "honestly didn't feel real, considering the way they felt about each other. When Sam Goldwyn [Jr] saw an early draft of the script he said, 'I hate this ending,' and I said – it just popped out of me – 'I hate that ending, too!' And so he said, 'Why don't you change it?' and I said, 'I'm going to change it, doggone it!'" Once he got started, Lynch changed a lot. He cranked up the ultra-violence, added a strand of screwy humour and, most significantly, draped the story of The Wizard of Oz on top. This is where it enters Lynchland. At the end of the film, while Sailor is lying in the middle of the road, knocked out, with his nose smashed, the good witch visits him in a globe of pink light to tell him to go back to his family. The witch with her magic wand may as well be David Lynch, the adapter, descending from the sky to give the story a happy ending.

Changing key plot points in a well-loved book can be risky. Hell hath no fury like a hardcore fan scorned. Often, the most hardcore fans of all are the authors. Anthony Burgess disowned both the film and the novel of A Clockwork Orange after Kubrick's version didn't allow Alex, the protagonist, redemption from his violent instincts. In 1995, a year after his novel Forrest Gump had been sanitised for the screen, Winston Groom published Gump and Co, a sequel, which began with: "Let me say this: Everybody makes mistakes ... But take my word for it – don't never let anybody make a movie of your life story." Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend has been filmed four times, and never to his satisfaction. After the most recent adaptation, he was quoted as saying: "I don't know why Hollywood is fascinated by my book when they never care to film it as I wrote it." I can understand why authors might be touchy about the sacredness of their text but, more often than not, it's worth ignoring them. Most great film adaptations have built their success on ignoring, or at least shunting, key elements of the source text.

In some ways, Mike Nichols' film of The Graduate is a very straight adaptation. The script is taken almost entirely from Charles Webb's excellent novel, which itself is sparely written and led by dialogue. According to both script and book, Benjamin Braddock, the protagonist, is a 20-year-old "track star" and "the kind of guy who has trouble keeping the ladies at a distance." On this basis, it makes sense that Nichols wanted to cast Robert Redford for the lead.

But the role also calls for Braddock to struggle with communication, find relationships difficult and see his parents' poolside LA life as grotesque. When Redford auditioned, being tall and dashing, Nichols wasn't convinced. Instead, the director called in a young stage actor who he had seen playing a transvestite in an off-Broadway play. Not many people believed Dustin Hoffman would be right for the role, least of all Dustin Hoffman. "I always felt that I had been miscast," he has said. "I expected to be fired, so the discomfort I felt was not just being new to movies. The discomfort was feeling that they'd made a mistake casting me."

The Graduate, particularly its use of music and Hoffman's performance, inspired Richard Ayoade's adaptation of my novel, Submarine. Hoffman plays Benjamin Braddock in constant physical distress, swallowing his lines, using "an often inflected delivery," as Ayoade puts it. "When you read the book, he sounds more sarcastic and snarky, closer to Holden Caulfield," he says, "but with Dustin Hoffman it feels genuinely rabbit-in-the-headlights."

For me, the book's version of Benjamin Braddock is a good-looking sociopath almost on the Patrick Bateman scale, compared to the film's uneasy non-hero. Comedies of awkwardness – from Rushmore to The Office to Curb Your Enthusiasm – couldn't exist without Hoffman's performance. He allows us to feel for Braddock, despite his selfish, privileged existence.

The Graduate is not unusual in softening its lead character for the screen. Sometimes film-makers are accused of doing this out of commercial concerns, to get a lower certificate or a wider demographic. That might sometimes be true – Forrest Gump, I'm looking at you – but there's also a difference in the way a film is consumed. "When you read, you half become the main character, there's a grey area between your voice and the one on the page," Ayoade says, "but in a film, when you see someone on screen who is obviously not you, there's a physical otherness – you sort of decide whether you enjoy being in the company of that person."

That physical otherness only increases when a lead actor is a star, someone we know outside the film as hugely famous, wealthy and with a complex love life. How much more work do we ask of an audience to emotionally connect with a character played by Tom Cruise? We are less forgiving of characters on screen, too. As Ayoade puts it: "I think there is still a puritanical streak in most films. Wickedness must be punished." As a rule, all actions on the big screen – wicked or otherwise – receive their appropriate reaction. Film-makers are not so easily allowed to use the literary author's get-out-of-jail-free card: letting the reader decide.

In American Psycho, the novel, we are kept aware that Patrick Bateman's murders could all be in his imagination. The ferocious sex-horror is either disturbing because it's real or because it's his fantasy. We only go along with the book's violence because there are the safety valves of unreliability and chapter-long digressions about Whitney Houston. In the film, we meet a considerably mellower grade of psychopath. This seems like a sensible decision since, in film, ambiguity is harder to sustain. Christian Bale's character is never as deranged or as complex as the book's. At the end of the film, we are offered a way out – was it all in his head? – but that moment feels like a cheat rather than a real question.

Alfred Hitchcock's 1950 film, Stage Fright, was criticised for what became known as its "lying flashback" – a long flashback about a murder that we later learn is untrue. Audiences felt tricked, and the film didn't do well. Speaking to François Truffaut, Hitchcock said: "In movies, people never object if a man is shown telling a lie. And it's also acceptable, when a character tells a story about the past, for the flashback to show it as if it were taking place in the present. So why is it that we can't tell a lie through a flashback?"

Even when a film is as aggressively ambiguous and nonsensical as Kubrick's The Shining, audiences still want an objective truth. Perhaps it's the physicality of film – the idea that seeing is believing. The documentary Room 237 is a showcase for the myriad ways in which people have stretched reality to try to find clear meaning in The Shining. Most commentators begin by saying that when they first saw the film they didn't enjoy it, it didn't make sense. Only later did they grasp its true message: it's an apology for Kubrick's faking the moon landings or a metaphor for the genocide of native Americans or a vehicle for sexy subliminal messages. In The Shining, the camera's depth of focus adds to the sense that there must be a grand directorial plan at work: every object burns with significance. And as I watched Room 237, I believed each conspiracy theory in turn.

It's one of the pleasures of watching a story jump between mediums – trying to second guess the logic, or otherwise, behind each decision. At the festival in Bridport, we're showing The Shining in a disused hotel on a cliff top. Jan Harlan, Kubrick's right-hand man, will be there to answer questions. At least then we can finally find out which of our crackpot theories is true.

In some cases, even the source text is unsure of itself. For his second film, Ayoade is working with Avi Korine to adapt The Double by Dostoevsky (the obvious next step after working on one of my novels). It's a story about a man who is disturbed to find that his more charismatic doppelganger works in the same office as him. Ayoade tells me what's unusual about The Double is that Dostoevsky never wrote an ending he was satisfied with. I asked if that would not make life easier, since it removed any issue of the author's infallibility? "Yes," Ayoade replied, "we'll help Fyodor get it right for once."