You have the shinning. Do you mean the shining? No, do you want to get sued?!
Reading The Shining again, it's funny to see what Kubrick kept for his adaptation. The movie is famously so different from the book that Stephen King absolutely hates it; I like it myself, but consider it its own thing. I mean that was just Kubrick's whole thing anyway, adapting books into movies but changing them so much that their fans are still getting angry 25 years after his death. (A Clockwork Orange is a better movie than it was a novel and I will die on that hill.) But I keep stumbling across little bits of dialogue that he kept, like when Jack is hallucinating talking to Lloyd the bartender and calls liquor "white man's burden".
I also finally realized what always nagged me about Jack Nicholson's and Shelley Duvall's casting in the movie: they're too old. Jack and Wendy's ages are never given, but they had Danny when they were still in college and he's only 5, so they're probably not even 30. This wouldn't necessarily be important, but when they do things that drive me nuts in the book I usually stop to think about how young they are. I mean back then people acted like having a kid meant you were all done with growing up yourself, but that's just not how that actually works. Jack is an asshole even before the Overlook starts working on him, but dudes in their 20s do generally kind of suck. What's that meme? Men really will spend the winter snowed in at a haunted hotel instead of going to therapy.
Years ago I had this boyfriend who loved Brave New World but took entirely the wrong message from it: he thought that future sounded great. You had your whole life planned out for you, never had to worry about money and employment, and were given a steady stream of euphoric drugs. Sign me up!
Anyway, I have a similar feeling about The Shining. I wish someone would pay me to live alone for months in a fancy hotel! I mean a non-haunted one. Actually, if the shining exists I'm pretty sure I have none of it, so I would probably be okay even at The Overlook. They'd have to let me bring a dog, though. I'd use the time to finally learn to play the autoharp.
Anyway, here's my Shining journal page.
I also finally realized what always nagged me about Jack Nicholson's and Shelley Duvall's casting in the movie: they're too old. Jack and Wendy's ages are never given, but they had Danny when they were still in college and he's only 5, so they're probably not even 30. This wouldn't necessarily be important, but when they do things that drive me nuts in the book I usually stop to think about how young they are. I mean back then people acted like having a kid meant you were all done with growing up yourself, but that's just not how that actually works. Jack is an asshole even before the Overlook starts working on him, but dudes in their 20s do generally kind of suck. What's that meme? Men really will spend the winter snowed in at a haunted hotel instead of going to therapy.
Years ago I had this boyfriend who loved Brave New World but took entirely the wrong message from it: he thought that future sounded great. You had your whole life planned out for you, never had to worry about money and employment, and were given a steady stream of euphoric drugs. Sign me up!
Anyway, I have a similar feeling about The Shining. I wish someone would pay me to live alone for months in a fancy hotel! I mean a non-haunted one. Actually, if the shining exists I'm pretty sure I have none of it, so I would probably be okay even at The Overlook. They'd have to let me bring a dog, though. I'd use the time to finally learn to play the autoharp.
Anyway, here's my Shining journal page.