To intro­duce Stan­ley Kubrick [ SK ], Quentin Taran­tino is a great fan of SK [ Suththam :) ]. The killing is a film about a big plan con­nected with a busy race-track on a spe­cific day.. An ex crim­i­nal released from the jail plans for a big-time heist with pick­ing up peo­ple of var­i­ous occu­pa­tions with one need in life — money. A group of dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ties are formed with­out reveal­ing their exact part. An ex crim­i­nal, his old friend, a bar ten­der, a counter offi­cer, cor­rupted police­man, shooter and a wrestler [ and a gravel-voiced nar­ra­tor — may be thought as GOD ! ]. Con­fus­ing right ? Def­i­nitely not when you see the final out­come of their plan. They form a time-table for the heist and what hap­pens exactly is the film is all about. Of course, fate and moral­ity are to be considered. :)

The film begins from the very first scene and the intel­li­gent n non-linear nar­ra­tion keeps the audi­ence busy in who’s doing what and why ? The nar­ra­tion is just like join­ing var­i­ous jig­saw puz­zles to form the com­plete pic­ture. Some­where I read that 35 dif­fer­ent seg­ments hap­pen together to form the final act.

It starts slowly with a horse race and haunt­ing theme music. The nar­ra­tion talks about dif­fer­ent tim­ings of the day and hap­pen­ings with respect to the char­ac­ters. The draw­back in non-linear nar­ra­tion is that shots are over­lapped and repeated [ remem­ber Viru­mandi ! ] but the top n  intel­li­gent direc­tor gives a dif­fer­ent mean­ing, every time he repeats or over­laps a shot/scene. The non-linear struc­ture makes the film more inter­est­ing. The hid­den ele­ment of the movie is fate. The pace of the film is amazing.

A must watch thriller which is 53 years old. It’s listed in AOL’s top 25 thrillers [ that’s how I selected this movie.]
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Shining/1980/Supernatural thriller [based on Stephen King’s novel ]
Directed by : Stan­ley Kubrick.

“I am inter­ested in giv­ing my audi­ence a real scare” — Stan­ley Kubrick

The psy­chol­ogy of hor­ror film is not to show the ugly ghost, rather mak­ing the audi­ence to antic­i­pate it. The anx­i­ety is the exact feel­ing about see­ing a hor­ror genre of films. I would sim­ply say SHINING is the mother of all hor­ror movies.

This movie is not the worst clichéd style of hor­ror movies where in 4 pairs [ exactly :) ] go to a beach resort and get­ting killed one by one. Non-sense. Instead, an aban­doned hotel with just 3 char­ac­ters, is used as the cen­tre point of the film.

Plot :

The film talks about the hap­pen­ings of a story writer, Jack Tor­rance (Jack Nichol­son — his eye brows and vague smile adds value to his char­ac­ter ). He gets an offer to work as the win­ter care­taker at a hotel which gets almost aban­doned by heavy snow­fall in the win­ter sea­son. Jack reaches the hotel with his wife and son Danny [ 6 yrs old ]. Dur­ing the clos­ing day [ begin­ning for the audi­ence :) ], the psy­chic hotel chef iden­ti­fies some­thing unusual with Jack’s son Danny. Danny has the abil­ity to detect ghostly pres­ences in the hotel. The chef calls this tal­ent as “SHINING”. Once the hotel becomes snow­bound, Jack is occu­pied by the ghosts in the hotel and then the story begins :)

Bril­liant story. Aban­doned hotel.. Heavy snow­fall.. [ No dif­fer­ence between day n nights ! ]. The film starts with an aer­ial shot of Jack dri­ving in a small car to reach the hotel. The most impor­tant ele­ment in hor­ror film is the music. The visual has to be backed up with appro­pri­ate n haunt­ing score. Stan­ley Kubrick is the pio­neer in using the steadicam in the film indus­try. A tech­nol­ogy has to be used to enhance the story telling and improve the visu­als. I couldn’t resist rec­ol­lect­ing the irri­tat­ing time-slice cut used by Shankar in BOYS and 360 degree rotat­ing shots in Vet­taiyaadu vilayaadu [ Enna Kodumainga ! ].

Stan­ley Kubrick is an essen­tial film maker in the film his­tory. His other works are

2001 : A space odyssey
Spar­ta­cus
Clock­work orange
Eyes wide shut