Cracking the Code in ‘Heeere’s Johnny!’

WHEN “The Shining” was released in 1980, many viewers, including the critic Pauline Kael, left theaters mystified by what they had just seen. Expecting a standard frightfest based on a Stephen King best seller, they got an unexplained river of blood surging out of hotel elevators, a vision of cobwebbed skeletons and a weird guy in a bear suit doing something untoward with a gentleman in a tuxedo.

Three decades on, scholars and fans are still trying to decipher this puzzle of a film directed by Stanley Kubrick. To them it’s only ostensibly about an alcoholic father, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) going more than stir crazy while his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and son, Danny, try to cope in an isolated hotel, the Overlook. Mr. Kubrick was famously averse to offering explanations of his films — “I have found it always the best policy to allow the film to speak for itself,” he once wrote — which has led to a mind-boggling array of theories about just what he was up to…..

New York Times

Nothing revealed Stanley Kubrick’s singular intelligence — nor his endearing humor and humanity — more than budgetary decisions. He wore his producer’s hat as ingeniously as his director’s one, confounding expectations.

Before he arrived in New York for the opening of 2001, stories of his obsessive genius preceded him. He had a pilot’s license, but wouldn’t fly after monitoring the control towers at various airports, finding their safety inadequate. He knew the best dental procedures and rumors spread that he had an open telephone to the dentist’s office when a family member underwent treatment….

Moviefone

As our ten-yearly poll to find the Greatest Film of All Time gets ever closer, B. Kite considers David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. in the light of the Vedanta-inspired spiritual philosophy that underpins all the director’s work

Despite the accusations of incoherence sometimes made against them by critics who ought to know better, the films of David Lynch seem to share a remarkably consistent cosmogony that can be sketched as follows: the soul originates in light and unity and has its home there. Although this unity can never in fact be divided, the soul takes on the guise of individual identity, or separateness, and enters the theatre of the world. Once in place, it often forgets its origins and mistakes its role for its being or, in dim intervals of recollection, believes itself so soiled by violence or dark multiplicities of desire that it imagines itself isolate, forever drifting, alone and homeless. But that is the ultimate illusion, and the bleakest. The soul’s essence remains untouched and untouchable, and after however many cycles of rebirth its eventual homecoming is assured, has happened, is perpetually happening. It only remains for the soul to wake up in order to realise it never left. Nearly every Lynch film has a happy ending…..

Sight and Sound

The sole full-length feature made by Jean Vigo, L’Atalante was a bridge between the surrealism of 1920s French cinema and the poetic realism of the 1930s. Graham Fuller makes the case for its inclusion in S&S’s forthcoming ‘Greatest Films of All Time’ poll

Jean Vigo’s great work about a pair of troubled newly-weds and the crusty old mate with the Hapsburg jaw and unfettered imagination who travels with them aboard the Normandy freight barge L’Atalante was based on a one-page scenario by Jean Guinée. This was the pen name of Roger de Guichen, who had been intrigued by the sight of a woman helming a barge on the Seine, and had named his fictional vessel after a frigate commanded by one of his ancestors in the Seven Years War. Following the banning of Vigo’s Zéro de conduite in 1933, the director’s supportive producer Jacques-Louis Nounez sent him Guinée’s scenario hoping it would deter him from the kind of radical experimentation that had illuminated Vigo’s scabrous 42-minute satire of boarding-school life….

Sight and Sound

Deborah Ross

Steven Spielberg’s version of War Horse is like an extended Sunday afternoon episode of Black Beauty gone mad via the first world war, just so you know, and although it made me cry this is no endorsement. I rarely cry in real life but have been known to howl in the cinema, even when I’m aware something isn’t much good. It’s as if my brain and tear ducts are entirely unconnected so while, in this instance, my brain was saying this is a mediocre film, prosaic, plodding, over-sugared and with nothing like the power or imagination of the stage play, the tears still plopped. I wish there was something I could do about it. Is there a lead available to somehow connect my brain to my tear ducts? From Maplins, say? It would be good if there was.

Based on the Michael Morpurgo novel which has already been adapted as that National Theatre play, our story begins in a paradisial, chocolate-boxy Devon as Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan), a hard-drinking farmer, rashly bids for a thoroughbred horse at auction, just to spite his landlord (David Thewlis) and no matter that this blows his rent money. His long-suffering wife Rose (Emily Watson) is distraught. Ted was meant to bring home a big, clumping working horse at a low price. But their son, the earnest and earnestly handsome Albert (Jeremy Irvine), falls in love with the horse, calls it Joey and embarks on the seemingly impossible task of teaching him to plough…..

The Spectator

Sexual obsessions and psychoanalysis take centre stage.

Steve McQueen’s “Shame” explores addiction; Jan Svankmajer’s “Surviving Life” charts one man’s disturbing dreams.

By Iain Millar.

Steve McQueen takes a step slightly further away from the day-to-day preoccupations of the art world and more firmly into the film world with his second feature, “Shame”. It’s a degree less formal than his previous venture, with a more conventional story arc, no previously known central protagonist (his first film, “Hunger”, had the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands as its central character) and a visual style that, while controlled, assured and arresting, draws more on the language of conventional narrative cinema, with fewer of the slow-moving tableaux of the earlier film…..

The Art Newspaper