ROOM 327

[Borstalboy]

From the Onion AV Club:


I was also eager to watch a feature-length documentary about various folks’ bizarre theories regarding what Stanley Kubrick was really up to when he made The Shining, and Room 237,playing in the Fortnight after premiering at Sundance earlier this year,delivered the sincere insanity I’d hoped for and then some. Obsessively examining the movie frame-by-frame, searching for clues hidden in production design or the Overlook Hotel’s floor plan, five amateur sleuths proffer five different interpretations, ranging from Holocaust allegory to Kubrick’s winking confession that he helped fake the Apollo moon landings. None of this is even remotely persuasive, and some of the alleged clues, like a background poster of a skier claimed to be a minotaur, are outright laughable. Doesn’t matter, though, as Room 237 isn’t so much about the theories as about our relationship with cinema itself, and the way the medium offers endless possibilities to the viewer depending on what you choose as your focal point. I do wish that director Rodney Ascher had structured the film so that each interviewee (each of whom is heard but never seen—a brilliant decision even if it was budget-imposed) got his/her own discrete section, rather than juggling their respective theories as they relate to various nebulous topics. And it might have been heady to draw a comparison to the many people who spend their days constructing painstaking, out-to-lunch photographic arguments that no planes hit the World Trade Center or the Pentagon (to say nothing of the JFK assassination and the Zapruder film). But I’ll never be able to watch The Shining again without wondering about that impossible window, or noticing the Calumet baking powder can sitting incongruously on a shelf in what’s clearly the wrong place. And Jack Nicholson truly is reading a copy of Playgirl in the Overlook lobby in one scene—that’s for real. What the hell is up with that? Grade: B-