Best movie of this year hands down!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Fresh and Exciting

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This remake simply shouldn't have been, there was no need to make it or expand on an already competent original.I'd heard nothing but bad things and I fully understand why. It's not that it's poorly made, it's just so very mundane.Standing at over 4hrs split across 3 episodes this remake misses the point of the original story altogether. Gone are the iconic scenes including the blood filled elevator and creepy twins, gone is the bike down the corridor or dead lady seducing the father. And no there isn't a "Here's Johnny" moment.It's all replaced with lack of originality and mediocrity.The cast do their best but nobody could have turned this around, it simply should never have been.Cliched, boring and I don't mean to be harsh but that kid looks like he ingested the whole ugly tree.Plain and simply bad.The Good:The cast do a decent enough jobThe Bad:Kid is just awfulEnding is far fetchedPoor writingWhole thing is just so unecessaryThings I Learnt From This Movie:The classics need leaving the hell alone

It is closer to the book than Kubricks masterpiece. Not counting the over sentimental added ending, that was completely unnecessary. But this is horrible. From the low budget, to the terrible acting to the censorship of TV, that doesn't allow for any f-words or any graphic violence. Steven Webber is no Jack Nicholson. But he does a decent job as the only one in the small cast. But he's still just a TV-actor confined to TV-censor-ship. Everyone else is just terrible. The kid playing Danny and the guy playing Hallorann are the worst. Because compared to fantastic Danny Lloyd and Scatman Crothers in the feature film, they are terrible. They are the ones with the ability to shine and they need to be powerful characters. In this TV-crap Danny is an annoying brat with way to many lines and Hallorann is just a pathetic old man. Rebecca De Mornay does her best, but she never seems truly scared like Shelly Duvall in the feature film. 5 and a half hours is how long the miniseries last. And until Danny finally enters room 217 and find the lady in the bathtub it drags on and on with nothing happening.This is especially a problem with The Torrances making several trips to Sidewinder and meet people there. This ruins the sense of isolation and being alone in the hotel. Because they can leave anytime they want to until the snow comes. And explaining everything in detail to us very apparently dumb viewers doesn't help either. The special effects are horrible. From the crappy looking cgi hedge animals, to the model of a snow-cat, to the hotel blowing up in the end, it all looks terrible. The ghosts of the hotel, apart from the well made rotting lady in room 217, looks like ordinary people wearing Halloween makeup to look like ghosts. The hotel itself seems too small, compared to the one in the feature film to ever be scary. In the feature film the enormous hotel itself, is a character. Here it's just a ordinary looking hotel that looks mostly like it's shot on sound-stages, which makes it that less believable. I don't even think a graphic profanity filled version with a big budget on a pay per view channel could have made this any better. No matter what it would have still paled to Kubricks version. The hotel in the feature film seemed very real and very scary. I think Stephen King should have pulled his head out his ass and considered it an honor that Stanley Kubrick took his mediocre novel, not suitable for a movie adaptation at all, and turned it in to one of the best horror movies ever out of it. And that one of the greatest actors of that time Jack Nicholson played the lead. I can only agree with King on one thing here. In Kubricks version Jack Torrance got mad too fast. But there was not enough time to show his decent into madness. As far as the alcoholism goes it is also shown in Kubricks version, but in a much better way. Everything is just better in Kubricks version. I can only warn people not to watch this.

This is an excellent movie. It's very scary and entertaining. I loved the animals carved out of plants coming to life scene. That's one of the scariest and best scenes. I also loved the part with the ghost in the bath tub. That was just wildly intense. It doesn't matter how faithful to the book a movie is. It just matters how good the movie is. Both this and the 1980 version are very good. Jack doesn't use an ax in this one when he has gone completely insane. He uses a croquet mallet but the terror is no less. In fact I would say the terror of that is more intensely done. The music in this is very good too. It's very creepy. Watch this. It's entertaining from beginning to end.

I am not going to compare this piece of rubbish to Kubrick's film; too many viewers have already done that.In my opinion, "The shining" is one of King's few novels worth reading. Some parts of it are slow-paced and boring, with the usual long descriptions of the characters' past and misfortunes in which King always likes to indulge himself for dozens of pages. That is the most irritating thing about his books. It is OK if you are writing "War and Peace" or "Gone with the Wind", but not for a horror flick. You should stick to the main story instead of creating sub-plot family melodramas.Anyway, "The Shining" is not an easy book to adapt, and only a very competent screenwriter who knows his trade and a film-maker equally effective can deliver a good movie out of the book. Kubrick, who was both things, did it, and that was it. They could try and make a dozen remakes of the story in the next one hundred years and they wouldn't get it any better. I re-read the novel very recently, and then I watched King's only approved and much blessed official adaptation in order to see how true to its title is. I felt pity. It is more faithful to the book than Kubrick's, I gave it that, but still it is not as faithful as the title and all the publicity initially promise, and that is cheating the spectator. All right, it shows Jack's alcoholic past in flashbacks, but was that really necessary in order to understand what happens later at the hotel? Also it shows Tony, and what for? In the book Danny only sees him once or twice and always from very far away, a blurred shadow. Why turning him into a character that is popping up in the screen every half an hour? He can't help Danny at all but only keeps telling him he shouldn't have come to the hotel, so what's the point? It is bloody irritating, and the actor looks silly!Then, there is the topiary. I laughed at the ignorance and ingenuity of many viewers who rave about this remake and put Kubrick's film down only because it doesn't show the hedge animals... Dear cultured critics: back in 1980 CGI was still sci-fi fantasy, and the only way to have shot that sequence would have been by combining live action with animation (go and check "Mary Poppins" to see what I'm talking about if you don't follow me). So Kubrick did very well by leaving the episode out instead of making a silly thing that would have looked laughable in what is supposed to be a a horror chiller. And that is precisely one of the biggest follies this adaptation has, and even the CGI is cheap and badly done and brings more laughs than shivers because the animals look like bird droppings on the snow!Then the cast is terrible. Someone mentioned that a monkey with a telephone book would have done a better casting, and he is right. The actors seem like they never bothered to read the book in order to understand what the story is about and get to know their characters. The kid was just that, so we can't blame him. But Rebecca de Mornay and the fellow who plays Jack (who is he, by the way?) are as plain as cardboard cut-outs, and the same goes for the guy doing Grady, who instead of looking menacing he is a total duck. And Van Peebles looks like he just popped out of a Busby Berkeley musical, I was expecting him to burst singing and tap-dancing any second. The only one of whom it can be said gives a decent performance is Elliott Gould, who plays Ullmann as the cynical, sarcastic, tight-fist snob who thinks of "his" hotel as the greatest thing on earth, just as described in the book. And as for Stephen King's surprise cameo as the orchestra conductor, I didn't know whether to laugh or to be angry because he looks like a Loony Tunes caricature of Xavier Cugat.And then, the director of this mess seems to have thought himself to be a new Stanley Kubrick and tried to imitate the master's trademark of slow tracking shots that precede key events. Didn't he have any self- respect? And the ending... so happy-ever-after that is laughable, and so overloaded with syrup that it could kill a diabetic just from looking at it. This multi-million dollar egotistic heap made only to satisfy King's ego is just a waste of time, money and celluloid.