The Shining - Cause It's Halloween This Month

Film analysis for me has always been a sincere pleasure for me ever since I was introduced to it the freshmen year of my high school year. The teacher told us that we had to write an essay after watching each movie and this was the first time in my life that I had to reflect and put thoughts on paper about how I felt about movies. I wrote about a lot of movies in that class, everything from Singin' In The Rain to Days Of Heaven. This opportunity was the beginning of me starting analyze films, looking for the deeper meanings and appreciating cinema's finest productions ever put on celluloid. I still look for it no matter what movie I'm watching, hell if you didn't see the ideas of rebirth, death, religion, and grief throughout last week's Gravity then I do not know what movie you were watching! So why am I talking about film analysis because today I am writing about the film that has been analyzed more than any other film ever made: The Shining. Now why has this movie been obsessed over and studied like some holy text? Well I will tell you soon so keep reading about a movie impactful on its audience that it still is debated, wrote about, and documentaries made about it to this day.

The Shining is Stanley Kubrick's 11th feature film released in 1980 starring Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall. Nicholson plays a young writer, father, and husband who decides to take up a job to watch over the Overlook Hotel, a large mountain resort, during the winter months while it is closed. While accepting the job he learns that the previous housekeeper had murdered himself and his family during their stay at the hotel. Jack brushes it off as nothing and decides to bring his wife, Wendy, and young son, Danny, up with him to stay in the hotel for the winter as he tries to write his new novel. Then things slowly start getting weird as Danny starts to see things and Jack begins to lose his grip on reality and his sanity. 

Gravity

There are lots of reasons I fell in love with movies. It has a lot to do with growing up watching Jurassic Park and being mesmerized by the spectacle of dinosaurs being brought back to life. It also has to do with an Introduction to Film class I took Freshman year of high school thinking it would be easy and then realizing that film was something bigger and better than I could have ever imagined. Still there you can't beat that some movies became a cinematic experience, breaking the fourth wall of the screen and soaking me into a world I had never seen before and actually experiencing it. It has those moments where you forget you are watching a movie and become part of that reality. With this I think about movies like 2001 A Space Odyssey, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, and many more. It becomes awe-inspiring that a film can break through and become something more than moving pictures that they can place us in the middle of these amazing places. Now we have a new kind of experience, one unlike anything I have ever experienced, with a little movie called Gravity. 

Gravity follows the space shuttle Explorer and it's crew as it attempts to update a satellite for medical reasons. Specialist Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is a rookie astronaut in space for her first time but luckily she has Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), a veteran astronaut who wants to break the record for most time in space, to help and assist on the mission. As the repairs and updates commence on the satellite the team gets a report of a Russian satellite being destroyed and the debris heading their way. The team must then rush back onto the shuttle before getting hit by the debris. Soon things turn for the worst and Stone and Kowalski must work together in order to have any chance of survival in the bare, scary, empty space that surrounds them.