After a big interval huh? Its not that I forgot about my blog, its because I never had the time to read a good book or to watch a good movie (worth writing about). And I would hate to make my friends read abut consumerist trash like d new dress I got or how good d new over over over …… priced new cosmetics range that makes any1 look beautiful lolz. Jokes apart I managed to read my first Stephen King novel. The shining , and yes I watched the movie also. Lost few nights sleep though.
Jack Torrance, a loving dad when he is sober and otherwise a foul tempered alcoholic is on his last chance, a favour from an old friend Al. Fired from his job as a high school teacher, suffering from chronic writers block, and always craving a drink, the recovering alcoholic is given the job of winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel. Which is completely isolated from the rest of the world during the winter. Wendy, his wife isn’t that happy with the arrangement, but she wants Jack to stay off drinking, keep writing, and get his pride back. So she agrees. But Danny has the shine. He can tell what people are thinking and feeling, and he sees things that regular people don’t see. At five, he doesn’t always understand what he hears and sees, but when is imaginary friend Tony, who often tells him things, comes to him and shows him the Overlook, he understands his family is in danger.At first, everything is fine. Jack is writing, Wendy is relaxing, and Danny is gradually coming round to the idea. And then, strange things start happening. The hotel contains a malignant force, and it wants Danny’s shine. And it will do whatever it has to to get it. Can one small five year old beat the evil spirits of fifty years of history?
There are quite a few things which differentiates this book from a run of the mill horror novel, 1stly you would never realize whether Jack is seriously “taken in” by the ‘evil hotel’, or he is suffering from cabin fever or he is simply a schizophrenic, and the writer never explains much about Danny’s shine, and you would never get to meet a proper ghost, but the hotel itself has a towering presence, deadly secrets and awful history. The so called ghosts seen in the novel are all victims of the hotel. As some critic rightly puts that these ghosts are the tormented souls of murdered children, dead gangsters, drunks, floozies, and petty sinners just like ourselves. King’s choice to portray ordinary protagonists with real-life problems: alcoholism, marital friction, poverty, and failed ambition sets the scene for gut-wrenching terror as the reader follows this familiar family to the precipice of Hell.
Where as the movie, Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining, one of the most popular and critically praised horror films ever made. The leering visage of Jack Nicholson grinning through a shattered door is one of the most immediately recognizable scenes in cinema, and Nicholson's performance here is one of the most well-remembered out of a very long career.
But there are some very basic problems with the movie, first of all Jack seems very much in the verge of breakdown, from the very beginning and no one is particularly surprised to see him go insane; it's just a question of how long it will take. His son Danny's "imaginary friend" Tony doesn't play even remotely the same role, and the veritable menagerie of ghosts present in the Overlook Hotel of King's book becomes the ghosts of a single family. Too many symbolism, too many “how the good old Americans were butchered by the white” killed the creepiness of the movie in my opinion. The most scary parts of the novel like the elevator, the fire hose, the play ground and last but not the least the hedge animals were some what missing in the movie. In the book the father dies as a victim, in the movie as a villain. And the movie killed off my favourite character from the book, what a shame, but no more hint dropping, by all means watch the movie, and more importantly don’t miss the book, though its 500 pages but it’s an amazing page turner.
