Flack wrote:I haven't watched this yet for the reason you mentioned -- I wasn't sure if it was from the "these guys are serious" angle or the "these guys are crazy" one.

There's a really interesting Shining article flowing around about how the map of the hotel is actually impossible and makes no sense. Sounds like it might be more entertaining than that documentary.

http://www.geekosystem.com/impossible-shining/

They do go into the impossibility of the layout, but instead of just saying, huh, how about that, they attribute it to the filmmaker's intention to leave you unsettled and, I suppose, drawing analogies between your inability to orient yourself in the hotel and the Jews inability to find a way out of Auschwitz. Or something.

I haven't watched this yet for the reason you mentioned -- I wasn't sure if it was from the "these guys are serious" angle or the "these guys are crazy" one.

There's a really interesting Shining article flowing around about how the map of the hotel is actually impossible and makes no sense. Sounds like it might be more entertaining than that documentary.

http://www.geekosystem.com/impossible-shining/

Room 237 is a documentary of a bunch of fucking lunatics reading WAAAAAAAY too much into Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining". I can't tell if the filmmaker wants us to get on board with these crazy motherfuckers or make fun of them. I spent most of the movie doing the latter.

Themes range from:

1. The Shining is really about the slaughter of American Indians.

2. The Shining is really about the Holocaust.

3. The Shining is really about Stanley Kubrick admitting to faking the moon landing video. ("I believe we went to the moon, just that the video was faked" is the guy's way of getting out of Buzz Aldrin punching him in the fucking face.)

4. A bunch of other crazy horseshit.

Of these, #3 was the most entertaining, mainly because it has the most realistic chance of being true.

Anyway, this got way better reviews than it deserves. If you find any of the theories compelling or interesting, you need to be locked up with the rest of them, and if you agree we're all supposed to just laugh at these jackasses, well, it didn't take an hour and 49 minutes to convince us.

TWO (**) STARS.