Make "Room" For Stanley.

 

ROOM 237 (2012)

102 minutes

Not Rated

Directed by Rodney Ascher

A skier is really a minotaur.  A paper tray becomes a phallic in-joke.  Dopey from the Seven Dwarfs disappears to show maturity.  Stanley Kubrick's face is hidden among clouds, and a dissolve from one frame to the next turns Jack Nicholson into Hitler.

Movie geeks have their own personality, and this blogger is one of them.  However, I just recently watched the trendy pseudo-documentary Room 237 and was astounded, not just for seeing a modern horror classic revisited, but witnessing that die-hard fans of The Shining voicing their opinions of hidden meanings are far more twisted than anything Jack Nicholson may have portrayed while snowed in at The Overlook.

This film is a fantastic example of the power the medium of film can have over one's psyche.  It's incredible.  Having seen The Shining probably over 20 times in its entirety over a 30-year period, I am thankful to say that I have NEVER once been able to come up with the astounding theories these folks have somehow created.  Is that a bad thing?  Not really.

To be fair, more power to anybody who can go through and analyze a movie, because isn't that what critics have been doing for years?  But sadly, when you can look at a movie like The Shining and surmise that it's Stanley Kubrick's sly disguise of the Apollo moon landings being a fake, or that a can of Calumet powder is actually symbolism for the horrific treatment of the American Indians, I have to question the theses that are being produced here. 

Actually, if one was given this as an assignment in a film class, and was asked to come up with hidden meanings within a movie, then this is a first-class analysis all the way, but the way the people in this documentary present their theories, I had to shamelessly laugh at what was being described, because in the words of Dark Helmet, it's gone quickly into LUDICROUS SPEED!

And I have to admit, not once did I believe ANYTHING that was being spelled out.  While I applaud the filmmakers for approaching the film to find meaning, you can't help but heartily chuckle at some of the ideas.  Stanley Kubrick was indeed a visionary, but I find it hard to believe that he would purposely put a subliminal picture of himself up in a cloudy blue sky over Colorado, or strategically place a poster of Perseus' nemesis on the walls of the Overlook's game room.

However, the film is wonderfully edited and well-made.  Archive footage of Kubrick at work, clips from the movie, and several other films are interspersed to match the ideas being talked about on the screen.  And any documentary that gets in clips from The Legend Of Hell House (one of this bloggers favorite haunted house movies), deserves to at least be seen as an entertaining motif.

The fact is though, practically ANY film sets itself up for interpretation if the viewer looks hard enough.  I'm sure that if one had the time, you could sit down and come up with a theory that the Transformers movies are a sly jab at the downfall of the film industry.

Oh, wait...

Room 237

Grade: B+