Her spooky contribution turned out to be last-minute roasted vegetables, because apparently the spookiest dinner of all is one that doesn't follow proper nutritional guidelines!
That was the night that we intended to watch The Shining, but alas, in the end I could not convince Will that vintage horror isn't actually scary--she used to be so much more gullible when she was younger! So it was a week later, over Chinese food that we bought with the excuse that I needed the specific type of break-apart disposable bamboo chopsticks for our gingerbread Cuneiform project, that three of us finally got around to watching the movie that two of us had been highly anticipating.
I was especially excited because I'd just finished reading both The Shining (started on a Friday while subbing in a high school Agriculture classroom for the day and finished the next morning because I just about could not put it down) AND its sequel that I had not even known existed, Doctor Sleep:
I'd certainly read The Shining before, because I was a hyperlexic kid who tore through Stephen King in elementary school (kudos to my grandparents for never censoring a book! We shall believe that this was for philosophical reasons and not because they DNGAF what I did as long as I wasn't bothering them). I also saw the film version multiple times on cable (see above re: grandparents and lack of censorship). My takeaways as a kid were that both were memorable and likeable, but not terribly loveable.
Lol, I guess all that stuff about alcoholism and mental health and abuse sailed right over my head, thank goodness!
So, the book version of The Shining is actually brilliant. Doctor Sleep is even better. And the film version of The Shining is also brilliant, and different enough from the book that it's still surprising even if you just read the book a week ago.
I read somewhere that Stephen King, an alcoholic, wrote The Shining at a time when he was actively, heavily drinking. And that's why Jack, who ostensibly spends 99% of the book sober, still acts drunk and has no positive coping skills to manage his sobriety. The main character of Doctor Sleep is also an alcoholic, but, like the Stephen King who wrote him, he becomes sober and, like King, utilizes AA and its resources. That sobriety, in turn, leads to the protagonist making different choices than the Jack Torrance of The Shining could have. The depiction of the alcoholic character in each book felt very real, and it's fascinating to me that it comes so directly from the author's own experiences.
My teenager is the perfect age to appreciate the way that the film version of The Shining is a WHOLE MOOD. OMG the scenery. OMG the sound. OMG the interior design. OMG THE CARPETS!!!
I mean, look at the little organdy dresses that the Grady children wear! I 100% had almost the same dress in peach.
You know how when your kids are tiny, you're so excited to see their little faces when something magical happens? Christmas morning when they realize that Santa came, or the first time they see Cinderella's castle at Disney, or you break open a geode? You guys. When about halfway through the movie I casually asked my kid, "So what do you think that whole 'redrum' business is all about?" and she was all, "I dunno it's weird though," I was SO EXCITED to see her face during the big reveal!
Top Ten Memory for sure!
The scene where they throw around the n-word sucked, though. They said it once and we all went, "WHOAH!" Then they said it again. And then a third time just to push the point, I guess. AND that's one of the parts that they lifted straight from the book, so... yuck.
The next day, this commentary track sustained me through coffee, breakfast, housecleaning, putting away Halloween decorations, and just some general Sunday-level puttering:
I kept having to go find people, though, to interrupt their own Sunday-level puttering and tell them all my Shining fun facts. Here are my favorites:
- The Steadicam operator (who invented the Steadicam for this film!) used a boom to raise and lower the Steadicam as it was pushed along, and at one point he discovered that young Danny weighed exactly the same as the Steadicam, so sometimes he would remove the Steadicam from the boom, put Danny on it instead, and fly him around the set while Danny shrieked with laughter.
- In my favorite scene from the film, Wendy takes a peek at the page in Jack's typewriter, and sees that all he's written, over and over, is "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Weirded out, she goes over to the six-inch tall stack of pages he's already written, and starts flipping through them, only to see that they ALL SAY THE SAME THING. Every page is laid out differently, with paragraph breaks and parts for dialogue and other constructions, but it all says the same thing. It's SO GOOD. So apparently, Kubrick wanted Wendy to be able to flip through the pages at random and have everything that she pulled up look cool like that, so for months, every spare second that his secretary had was spent in typing up all those pages herself.
- Kubrick insisted on shooting the film in chronological order, which is not how films are usually shot. The shooting also ran months over schedule, and combined with that, the Steadicam operator said that pretty much as soon as he got on set, little Danny commenced a huge growth spurt. It's not noticeable because the film was shot in order, but the operator said that if you took a shot of Danny from the first scenes of the film and put it next to a shot of him from one of the last scenes, he's visibly older by the final scene. Which probably makes the film that much more realistic on a subliminal level!