Stanley Kubrick - vo.rs

The Shining: The Hotel That Rearranges Itself

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 08:00:00 +0000

Watch The Shining enough times and you stop being frightened by the twins or the elevator of blood and start being frightened by the building itself, which does not add up. The Overlook Hotel has a window in the manager’s office that looks out onto daylight, except that the office is buried in the centre of the building where no exterior wall could be. Corridors connect to rooms that cannot exist beside them. A store cupboard has no exit, until it does. Stanley Kubrick built a haunted house whose real haunting is architectural: the place will not hold still, and once you notice, you cannot unnotice, and the ground goes out from under the whole film.

2001: A Space Odyssey — The Film That Refuses to Hold Your Hand

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey opened in April 1968 to a chorus of walkouts and bafflement, and one of the studio’s own executives reportedly left the premiere early. I came to it decades later, first on a battered VHS that murdered the aspect ratio, then properly on a big screen in a repertory house, where it finally became the thing it was built to be. Fifty-five years on, the strangest fact about it is that nobody has out-thought it. Every serious science-fiction film since has borrowed its furniture, its silence or its cosmic nerve, and most of them flinch at the exact moment Kubrick refuses to.