What is it about this melodramatic story that is so irresistible???? We all loved it, but why? Carol will enlighten you:
This past Thursday, we watched Spartacus, the exciting movie based on the true story of escaped slaves trained as gladiators led by the mighty Spartacus. In the movie, Spartacus is bought as a slave by a wealthy Roman politician and trained to fight as a gladiator along with many others. When the servant girl he falls in love with is sold, he makes an escape and is followed by the others. As they journey to Rome to fight the Roman army, they are joined by other slaves of all different sorts who wish to fight with them. Even the servant girl, who escaped from the carriage taking her to her new home. This movie is filled with the perfect blend of action, romance, and drama. I would definitely recommend this movie to anyone with a sense of adventure who likes to see a good battle!
Outstanding! Your own website to review movies! Cute!
ReplyDeleteLooks good Carol. Notice this link about J Pop:
ReplyDeletehttp://blog.wired.com/games/2009/04/qa-japans-pop-i.html
jsut for me to remember: THE SHINING:
ReplyDeletePhysical Cosmologies: The Shining (excerpt)
(This is an excerpt of a large-scale guide to the inner workings of The Shining. The written probe here is evidence of a conscious attempt to create motion-glyphs out of seemingly mundane and unrelated forms, signs and symbols of two continental systems. In essence a primer for a new form of visual cognition, The Shining eschews all formal genre conditions of horror crafting a vastly unseeable new genre, one that has yet to be fully integrated into our culture as re-cognition. Your memory is consistently being tested as well as your powers of observation, not unlike a test we would administer to an ape to see relevance and awareness. Our consciousness as thinkers that utilize the visual cortex to connect motor and sense areas requires that we evolve beyond our liminal trappings. The Shining, though primitive, represents a revolution awaiting the brain, dormant in many ways but suprisingly it remains and even grows more attractive as it grows older. Its greatest tools and tests remain hidden from a vast majority of viewers and await discovery.)
"There's something inherently wrong with the human personality," he says. "There's an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious: we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly. Also, ghost stories appeal to our craving for immortality. If you can be afraid of a ghost, then you have to believe that a ghost may exist. And if a ghost exists, then oblivion might not be the end."
Stanley Kubrick, Newsweek 1980
..As a blank tool, Kubrick employs symmetry as the doorway to signed, symbolic layers. Using practically every surface each setting allows, he hides deeper unconscious meanings as each film accrues imagery and behavior into unmistakable patterns. The Shining continuously exhibits the subtlest shifts in symmetry, asymmetry, direction, facement, effectively reducing the film to a series of finite locations viewed eventually from every direction. Once compounded in the brain, viewers assemble meanings from each scene/view unconsciously. A non-linear accumulation of data. Neurophenomenologists would label this portalling. This is portalling distended into component parts not unlike how videogames operate.
What is this hotel? It is a paradox mirror. Expecting nature’s paradise, we face a mostly monotonous hell. An outpost attempting to control a gateway to a cosmological heaven, inverted by its misuses upon indigenous spiritual aesthetics, it now operates as an essence vortex for those unlucky enough to have been seduced by its Western-faced promise: eternity. A reliquary for a group condemned to a fate worse than death (an inversion of ‘heaven’), it beckons those possessing an insecure relationship with their self, torqueing identity until absorbed. The Overlook needs souls since it is cosmologically cursed and will consume every murder within its walls into the horror of banal infinity.
Beyond the basic visual cues: Do you sense the foundational derangement Kubrick offers us? Do its strange not-so-subtle intricacies give you any pause, the almost utterly illogical sound qualities at times (the quiet inside the car, the deafening Big Wheel), the zoom-ins that rebuke standard shock cutting in horror films, the titles that rise, and the intertitles that seem almost subnormal? What about constantly lit rooms and corridors, the absurd, mannered performances: dullness on the verge of madness. And what of the real plot, what are the actors not cognizant of in the currents under the surface? The film has been uniquely framed and covered with visual guidance, and the activities of the characters are built around actions to suggest a bleak almost-cognizance. With The Shining, Kubrick closes the 70’s with a vicious assessment of the occident’s presence on the North American continent (death by axe). The film asserts a bold awareness of the American experience with a nightmare built from the collapse of a family unit of three driven apart by inferiority and emasculation in the face of reliquary power as mundane white magic: The Hotel.
If you are in the Americas, you are in a land once occupied by a multitude of humans that practiced complex mythic and spiritual systems. The conquest of these lands by Christian Europeans (and Russians) is one of the central dramas in the Americas’ history and includes a 400 year conflict that slowly transformed into bureaucratic holocaust-style genocide (forced marches, concentrations camps, intentional starvation, and imprisonment without due course) dressed in the particular political reality of each decade’s mode, pursued by all governments of North, Central and South America, majority and minority parties alike. Native American humans are survivors of a vast colonial genocide shrouded by history and the grand westward expansion: manifest destiny. By the 1970’s, America witnessed a nearly destroyed, divided indigenous population on the verge of physical and economic extinction and absorption. The reservation is generally a terminus for the tribe it contained, ususally on land that no one desired. Like a minimal last stand, the American Indian Movement’s revolt against the Federal U.S. and Leonard Peltier’s subsequent prosecution symbolized the last insurgency from the United States government. By the mid 70’s, tribal idealism and revolt were over, like other movements of liberation of the 60’s, the era that spawned King's haunted house bestseller-masterwork, itself in a lineage that includes Fall of the House of Usher (Poe) and The Haunting of Hill House (Jackson).
At film's beginning we are told by its manager that the Overlook Hotel has been built upon an ancient Indian burial ground (we are flown to this sacred communion area between humans and the upper world as a prelude to this comment). This sacred place has been deformed by the inclusion of a Hotel by encroaching Christian-occidental settlers (magic stealers). Like the scientific practice of saving the brains of dead native/amerindian chiefs, the building of a vast rooming house, a capitalism palace, on this site is the ultimate unaware degradation. The red-earth policy (federal forced movements of Native Americans, a system of containment-apartheid that remains today) has the Overlook as ultimate, fictional cap to dynamic control over the entire Navajo and Apache cosmology. In essence and in physical this vast mirrored hallucination masterwork is a contained battle reliquary. The hotel is a psychic doorway of darkest conflict. Each of its rooms facets to a whole narrative of the destiny that defines the United States of America’s regime of westward expansion.
The Shining is within a game/journey of symmetry that its hero, Danny, practices and masters. It is a game of consciousness and awareness. He knows how to use each path (right or left) and decipher where it will lead, he learns it by exploring emergent patterns. The Shining begins with earthly, mirrored symmetry and ends with a devolved human staring at us from the inside dimension of a photo, frozen in a photographer's flash, a ghostly world of dead souls. The films are linked through 2001’s end and Shining’s beginning. Thus Spake Zarathustra to Dies Irae. Dave Bowman/Starchild’s final shot, staring at us in the audience (Earth) is cut with the horizontal symmetry of the long lake, it is his view down upon us. It is the height of consciousness. Consciousness rises in 2001 but descends as The Shining progresses. The films are conceptual mirrors.
The Shining is a film meant to be watched both forwards and backwards. The human mind may find ways of playing it backwards subconsciously. Tricks are used to play with your memory of standard cinema convention.
There are several reasons why backwards is a viable viewing order. The front credits are end credits, blue-turquoise filled helveticas rise as if the film is coming to an end (and Kubrick does not use rising end credits, ever). Like many other subtle combinations of camera movement and storytelling/activities in the film, seen backwards, the first shot of the film can become the end of the film: the final image the horizontal/horizon, mountain and reflection, a state of hybrid native American nirvana. Another example: Wendy reads Jack’s typed book ‘backwards’ in the film’s forward, ie: she reads the page in the typewriter then the top page and continues down. The film itself is a reflection, each scene each possesses a mirror scene of the other (ie: Danny and Wendy’s campfire/roadrunner meal is doubled beginning and end.) Kubrick stages certain interactions with characters that walk confrontationally, ie backing up. Seen reversed, a baseball bat wielding Wendy appears to be coaxing Jack ‘back’ into himself, similarly Danny backs up to fool his father in the snowy maze. Shock cuts: the film is actually scarier backwards since Kubrick has reversed the order of storytelling horror conventions in the forward. People have always commented on the film’s inability to shock, the scariest imagery comes at the tail of each ‘scary’ scene, diffusing any effect. Backwards the effects rise in their shock value. Most importantly, the film is a series of zooms, tracking movements some to and from awakenings. Many of these tracking sequences exhibit characters from far away, enough so that movement is primary to the scenery rather than plot. And the end is set in the past, not the present or the future, in the flash of a photographic bulb. Shown backwards it is a heroic film about human experience: A man trapped in the logic of ghosts, trapped in a grayscale 2-D flat world, a photograph inside history, frozen in spectral finity: is unfrozen, and is lured outside of a maze where both his wife and son proceed to ‘undouble’ him and assist him in his war with his self and is finally able to drive away from the Overlook, from the lunarscape of this unreal summit and into a perfect mirror, earthmade.
Press play.
A mirrored landscape of mountains. Island proves what plane of existence we inhabit and viewed in reverse, we see the plane we are leaving behind to enter perfection, symmetry. An image forms right as the camera looks towards the sedimentary mountain that forms an arrowhead flint in mirror, and the camera pushes in, it has recorded two key reflections. In a film littered with both Native American and European derived visual forms (rugs, wall hangings, furniture) Kubrick immediately hints at a geologic/natural source for native cosmological shape-forms and their colors that appear throughout (these colors and forms duplicate in the Lobby's floor then the Colorado Lounge walls). He is suggesting if a religion/myth/spirituality engages forms from the land then it may be suffused with powers beyond our view (does this form-transform have an endpoint?).
Chosen not for its proximity to Colorado where the film is set, this opening image showcases two essential cosmological structures seen from right angles to one another. St. Mary Lake is where spirits of the Blackfoot underworld are said to sleep and is bordered in the opening shot by 'Gunsight' Mountain seen directly ahead arrayed with four mythic mountains left of center frame. The island that passes to our left, mirrored, appears floating and behaves visually like the spaceships of 2001, it appears to be moving and enacting a passage between upper and lower worlds. In effect you are watching the first motion-image of Blackfoot cosmology, a stunning evolvement of the landscape traveling in 2001 grafted into a mythical viewpoint. Tracking right (and as a movement it is meant to be instructive, teaching the audience the film is made of right-angled cuts: it is making a right angled pan, one of a few that litter the film at specific points). The right-pan is revealing as well, it exhibits an arrowhead shape in the mirror pointing left. Cut and we are now looking down, upon a road. This parallel path to the lake is a real road: ‘Going-to-the-Sun’ Road, another central cosmological structure in Blackfoot tribal mythology. Located directly at the continental divide in Glacier National Park, the road’s construction/destruction was begun in 1921, the year the film ends, so in a subtle manipulation, the road begins in 1921 as well as the photograph that ends the film in a flash: a nod to continuum.
We are now looking down from the same direction in which we were last traveling. The view is an overlook. The single arrowhead form is now composed of trees pointing upwards. A Yellow VW Beetle journeys through forest, followed by camera/spirit. Beetle is symmetric, from afar it looks as if it could be going forward or backwards, following a yellow line. Color and form hide the unusually apt name: Beetle. Metaphorically, at this height, we are inhumanly scaled in awareness, the Beetle is bug-sized in our optics as if we are giants, mimicking a scale offered Jack as he gazes at his family within the maze later, Kubrick is offering us the most ambitious POV of the film here, Tony’s (who we will meet in two scenes): Danny’s shining spirit. Who is Dave Bowman (the reborn Starchild's source in 2001).
Mountain is the destination of this road. It’s also a dead end.
Upon leaving vegetation into unreal (lunar) landscape, titles begin to rise. Reverse of standard end credits – an assertion the film is being shown backwards We swoop over driving VW Beetle to conform to the POV’s prey. This sweeping shot combines optically the film's frame of scales, we equalize to its horizon for a split second, something the film remains at on the floor's plane inside the hotel. The hue of the blue titles is not the same as the sky's tone, a reference to turquoise-sky relation in mythology. Incredibly, Kubrick merges film convention (rising titles to mimic a film's end) and cosmology (the turquoise being sent skyward) a simplification of monumental cosmology blending. As a geological form, the turquoise's color is an earth-merging-sky glyph, a transmutational exchange similar to the initial sky/lake mirror but evolving transitionally. Blues of the underworld meeting the upperworld. Titles create first color oppositions: Blue-yellow. Sky-Car, Divider Line-Credits. Another right-angle, the Beetle seems to overlaid with sunflares visually embodying the name of the road. The flares and the lines share similar angles:
Beetle arrives at The Overlook: The hotel is in the mountain’s shadow, it is mountain that overlooks hotel. The roof of the hotel does not reach the sky, suborned to the mountain's own reach heavenward. The earth claims the hotel whose color is camouflage. The hotel makes little distinction in landscape--in effect it is ghosting. Disappearing, the first ‘ghost’ of The Shining is the hotel itself. (And the last in reverse.) The Bug's Yellow color continues in the film (parked in the lot: as if the yellowness is absorbed into the hotel like an organism swallowing) the tennis balls that rolls to Danny and off screen, Jack. A Final deleted scene was Ullman handing a tennis ball to Danny, closing the loop even tighter. A yellow line paints the two-lane road. Yellow’s value is symbolic and it extends to gold, the fusion of sun worship and mythical treasure, the center of the hotel is its Gold Ballroom.
THE INTERVIEW, seen in reverse, the title refers to none of the dialogue pairings that follow, but to the film itself, literally: “a view between” two worlds: the mirror shot of the lake’s reflection etc. Placement of titles on black is essential, it denotes a break in time within the film, convincing us each sequence between them is in real, continual time. The titles appear centered and raised above a centerline like the island of the lake. Unusually, Jack's eye placement whether far or close tends to be on this title-card's placement. Camera follows Jack left to right. The interview here is developing a structure: Jack crosses through English descent design (the windows, the chandelier), upon Native America patterns, to an English transaction counter, paper notes behind the counter and angled right. The horizon splits these two realms. In the far distance, through the doorway is the final location of the film, the wall and its 1921 photograph. Framed Gold Ballroom details (sign, curtains that frame his final appearance photo) Jack crosses over are counterpoints to the sun's earlier glinting, this human synthesis-craving brings the sun indoors. Kubrick carefully begins the creation of angled forms that reach off frame begun by the road's lines, notice the ceiling edge and table counter. These are forms that suggest continuum. Very few scenes in The Shining lack this quality. If 2001 is the initiation for this reversal in the stargate, then these angles are extrusions, solid, liminal animation forms. Other Kubrick films employ these framing conventions, here they acquire ulterior significance.
First words of film are "I have a meeting with Mr. Ullman. My name's Jack Torrance." Our first double is the pairing of the actor and the character he plays. Jack Nicholson Jack Torrance. Names matter; Jack will later be defined by who calls him by which part of his name. From now on he is either Dad, Jack or Mr. Torrance.
Once told his office is the first door on the left, he crosses the camera's location and we now see Jack's other side, he passes across the first horizon-focused indigenous pattern, the blanket affixed to the wall in the distance, at the opposite position to his final resting place photo, in essence his figure is walking past a kind of eternity passage. Two men are framed inside it waiting for an elevator facing left. These terminuses abound in the film at corridor endings. They literally reanimate in differing formats throughout the film, distending elements across other scenes. Jack stares at a woman who descends a staircase. He will later stare at two women. Though there is an animal-desire component to this gesture, it is also the hotel's carefully placed time-warping that is in play. This is the least hallucinatory ghost movie with the most trance-like reality. The arrow-form made of the lake's reflection of the mountain is now on the lobby's floors and he uses its left arrow point, and of course, Kubrick glosses the floor to show you the arrow is now part of a reflective surface, blending lake and floor.
Then into an ante-room where on walls that are separated by a doorway appear modern art (left) and a snowcapped view of the hotel and mountain (right) a telegraph to the future inside the film. The left image is an abstraction of an Indian.
The interview with Ullman also introduces the first use of artificial light. A constant symphony of natural light, incandescent lamps, and cool fluorescent luminance plays throughout the film. Windows help signal the role each room is playing in the scene. Some places are symmetric and near symmetric (Most of the hotel with some exceptions: Kitchen, Games Room and the Torrance’s Apartment, and the Boulder exterior and Interior). The outdoors are endlessly parallax, only the double yellow line and the Beetle are symmetric. The indoors are endless but controlled.
Jack moves sunlight/fluorescent/sunlight.
The general manager’s office, and his secretary Susie’s ante room offer the best evidence of modernity in the hotel. If we didn’t first see this room, would we know what year it is? The abstract art depicting an American indian chief and color photographs of mountains and a snowpatched Overlook (outside General Manager’s office) also establishes the importance of wall hangings. They are crucial elements in the storytelling that follows. This pairing showcases modern human use of color technology: Photograph and Abstract art. This is our stable conscious world fighting with its unconscious. Susie’s ante-room contrasts with Stuart Ullman’s office beyond, a ghosted room littered with the past (emblems, awards, certificates and black and white pictures) bathed in soft orange colors to drain dimension from the living. And undead. This is a fluorescent tomb. Notice the extrusion angles of the plant holding shelves and the light boxes on the cieling that reach skyward.
Clothing and hair tone colors are used to subtly imply role. Susie and Ullman are introduced as backlit redheads with Susie in a ‘disappearing’ outfit, she fades into background of the room, is forced to move around Ullman to fetch their coffee. Ullman is red white and blue dressed for maximum contrast despite his hair color exactly matching curtains, he is a ghost attempting to appear defined, living. His outfit begs for/demands dimensionality. This shot is subtley asymmetric with the window frame.
The rug's zig zag pattern, begun on the wall hanging further back with the elevator awaiting men in Jack's first walking shot, emerges here as the pattern on the curtains opened to light suggesting the power of rendering humans as ghosts is an indigenous, natural force. This is a subtle animation. Kubrick frames them inside it.
A long dissolve establishes the Torrance’s Boulder apartment complex. The complex is in the near background fading right, a forested mountain left, a parking lot centered duplicating The Overlook's locale structure. Obvious asymmetry, except for the two cars at the right, they are almost symmetrical pairs. The opposite of the hotel’s obsessive order and camouflage. The mirror of its establishing shot, earthbound. Transportation access foreground. As a film ordered backwards, we are aware on some level that this parking lot is the origin of Jack's Beetle, an arrival we have just finished watching earlier.
Inside the apartment is similar asymmetry with pairings assigned to the background. Art & design. Books make zig zag patterns (left, the opposite of the paper messages behind the counter in the hotel) the Navajo and Apache patterns complete more complexly. This is not bought art for control as in the hotel, the spirit is integrated. Some things are not hung, like the child's painting in a later scene. And yes, the plastic basket behind them is a central, symbolic object (it's yellow, the same shade as the Gold Ballroom's curtains.) The baseball near it is the first sphere in the film, and the tennis ball that arrives later is a combination of sphere and yellow.
Introduction of Wendy and Danny is a sly introduction to American settler life through minimal set decoration. With Roadrunner-Coyote as audio dimension (early westward settlers were likewise entertained by constant cycle of this cross-kingdom conflict crossing the death valley expanses), Wendy reads near-mirrored cover of Catcher in the Rye, is crowned by the first real symmetry (the salt and pepper shakers in the distance) as a campfire burns (uninhaled cigarette), around a picnic gingham, her outfit is union suit and hop-dress, a perversely mundane settler outfit (circa 1860), Danny is emblazoned with USA iconography, and Bugs Bunny's ears both mirror the Warner Bros' cartoons TV presence and mimic his finger's mirror. This setting is duplicated later in family quarters of Overlook as climax approaches. This relationship to ‘outfit’ is crucial since Danny morphs emblematically as well as follows a color path, each seem to acquire costume colors in a pathway of tone.
Her reverse angle in the conversation shows doubling within background: two saucepans, two milk cartons, two dishwashing dispensers. While not as disturbing as Jack’s pending doubling, it preludes horror with normalcy. In reverse it moves doubling from foreground to background (dissipation). This doubling is crucially not perfect, uneven, like Danny’s finger, this asymmetry a natural component to humanity. Danny reveals his mastery of his interior/self, he makes his case as hero known. I command this.
A person in the measure of one’s thumb
Stands in the midst of one’s self
Lord of what has been
And what is to be
One does not shrink away from him.
Upanishad (Hume translation 1911)
Symmetry is disengaged from film for single (a shot that includes only one person, usually framed waist and above) on Danny as he raises his finger and exhibits a human version of the doubling we are introduced to in background. His shirt is an animation extending from Ullman's desktop flag.
Bill Watson joins Jack’s interview, his role is simply to begin the absorption of Jack, a double, to ensure audience is unconscious of hotel’s power. The doubling means two parallel timeframes are being drawn together in differing planes. Subtle outer asymmetry of desk's symmetric inner form. This is a portalling glyph rife with meaning: the office is hiding its asymmetry by seeming symmetric. Ullman shifts his right left orientation from within the sequence, he appears framed right in the wide shot including tables and chairs and then framed left when the camera moves tighter, as if there are two Ullmans, disassociated, demonic.
Notice the room's design is not typical, behind Jack (and his mirror Bill) are corners that defy simplicity, they are columned shapes that make a kind of shading background that implies depth reversal. Notice the inset that shrinks the shelf's depth. Coupled with the hidden aspects of asymmetry, Kubrick has begun using both left and right cortexes to blend and hide information, mostly as innocuous values. These are things that are weighted laterally that keep a stable horizon (whether present or not) but unstable values in subtle shifts, like this room asymmetry, like the girls that are not twins later. If a shot lacks a stable plane (a horizon reminder like the desk), then it probably has a vertical plane like the one that bisects Jack's head (below). However primitive the result is, this is Kubrick's most experimental pursuit in The Shining, he is using neuroscience, paleoneurology and the cortex to both scare you and develop a new language of storytelling. Frame on Jack and Bill shows memorials of Hotel, its past rendered in framed pictures and incredibly there exists another portalling animation. Jack's second scene in hotel interview includes a photograph on his frame's background wall that also appears at film's end next to the image of the 1921 party an aggressive yet subliminal link between corporeal Jack and incorporeal Mr. Torrance.
Ullman mentions Winter of 1970. TV playing mid-film is called Summer of 42. His outfit also mirrors the miniature US flag on his desk. The lines of his shirt duplicate the flag's bars. His hands form extensions, and are folded in repeated patterns of similar asymmetry. His tie is resolutely blood-red and is a precursor to the blood that flows from the elevator's left door one scene from now.
Eye contact with audience: Jack makes the first of his glances audience-ward throughout scene, when asked how his wife and kids are going to react to the hotel, he glances at us in the audience before declaring “they’ll love it.” Once the description of cabin fever (early American discordance) and previous caretakers’ slaughter-suicide are finished, the conversation drifts to his family.