A Week of Coen

As those who know me well know well, I have quite a large soft spot for the Minnesotan film makers the Coen brothers. The dark, idiosyncratic humour the brothers share just appeals to me, and in their more serious turns their sharp focus on deeply complex characters is compelling. Anyway, a week or so I decided to watch my DVD of Raising Arizona, their second feature, for no other reason than I'd never watched it before and I suddenly had time. As it turned out, this was the first of three Coen films I'd end up watching that week, with The Big Lebowski and Inside Llewyn Davis, their newest, following not long after.

Raising Arizona (1987)

As the brothers' second feature, the fast-paced comedy Raising Arizona is a fun opportunity to try and catch the beginnings of the many hallmarks that appear in their films. The Coens are more devoted to a certain number of hallmarks than your average directors, as if they have a few lucky charms they can rely on to make the film a success. These include the actors John Goodman, John Turturro and Frances MacDormand (Joel Coen's wife), as well as their use of quirky characters, southern accents, recorded music and long speeches (such as the one that opens The Big Lebowski, or the ones that end No Country For Old Men and Fargo). Raising Arizona ticks five of these boxes.

Nicolas Cage, the man who does mental like nobody else, stars as Hi McDunnough, a small-time criminal who, after being caught and released many times, falls in love with Ed, the police photographer who takes his mugshot after every arrest. They end up getting married and, after discovering Ed is unable to have kids and being turned down at every adoption agency in town, Hi manages to steal a baby from a local unpainted furniture magnate. It's never going to end well, and it doesn't. As wacko after wacko enters their lives, Hi and Ed struggle to keep the child in their undeserved possession. It's a yarn with such ridiculous imagination it's difficult to not get swept away with it. When it comes round to one of the strangest chases in cinema history, it's clear that the Coens must have had a whale of a time creating it.

And it is the Coens' film. In a well-known anecdote, Cage said he would constantly suggest new ideas for the character of Hi or for the movie, only for them to be smashed down by Joel or Ethan. They have a very clear idea of what the movie's going to look like, and you can't blame them for not wanting interference when the story's this complicated and winding. It's the sort of thing I wish I could write, the cinematic equivalent of taking a line for a walk. You just come up with the original premise, then run with any ideas that come into your head, no matter how ridiculous they get, until you reach a satisfying conclusion. It's something they do incredibly well, and it's just as much fun to watch as it would be to write.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

I know, I have written a full post about this one before, but the fact remains that every time I come back to it, which is not as often as I'd like, I'll stumble across something new or notice something I hadn't before which reveals a little more about the supremely unique plot of The Big Lebowski. I came back to it this week for the saddest of reasons: the shocking and untimely death of the great Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays The Big Jeffrey Lebowski's assistant Brandt in the movie. The best tribute to the man's huge talent I could think of was to watch and enjoy his performance in this, one of my very favourite movies.

Like Raising Arizona but better, The Big Lebowski takes an even more trivial thing, namely an intruder relieving himself over the rug of a man called The Dude, and uses it as a catalyst to set in motion a Rube Goldberg machine of unconventional madness. There is a spark that lights in the opening scenes and continues until the closing credits roll. The imagination of it is startling, and I'd be hard pressed to think of a film I've ever enjoyed more. Anyway, if you want to read more about what I think of The Big Lebowski, check out the post I wrote a few months back. There, that's saved some time.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

This was the third time I tried to see this film. The first Saturday, my friend Michael couldn't find the time to come with me. A week later, my friend Chris came along as well. We first checked the Vue, but the times were too late. We then checked the Filmhouse, but the ideal times I found turned out to be for two week's time. We visited the Cameo, but they had sold out, and the Odeon weren't showing it at all. So, we ran across Edinburgh to the Dominion cinema at Morningside, where they told us that the film reel of Llewyn Davis hadn't arrived on time, so they had to push back the showing of it another week. At this point, we had run out of cinemas, so we retired to a pizza place and tried again on Monday, when two more friends, Lewis and Connor, came along to see the film at the Cameo again, where they let us in because we'd ordered the tickets. I was glad I did, because the Cameo has incredibly comfortable seating.

And, of course, Inside Llewyn Davis did not disappoint. The film opens with Oscar Isaac's pitch-perfect Davis performing to a packed bar in Greenwich Village, New York. As with every other song in the movie, the Coens just let it run for the entire length, allowing the cinema audience to become the crowd listening. The soundtrack is the movie, the movie is the soundtrack. Every tune is given the directors', and the audience's, full attention, and there is no other music that isn't performed in front of the camera. It may just prove to be one of my favourite soundtracks of all, in fact. Michael went home and bought the album immediately.

As vital as the music is to the story of folk musicians and the fickle world of the music industry, the tale of Llewyn Davis remains compelling independently. It's a melancholy picture, emphasised by the dark-green, brown and wet cinematography of Bruno Delbonnin, following the singer's journey around the Eastern United States over the course of a week. As the people around him win recording contracts and fame, Davis refuses to comply to the advice of others when they suggest he finds someone to perform with. He sleeps on the couches of people he is barely friends with, he is temperamental and blunt, and yet your heart breaks when a record producer responds to his soulful and pained performance with, 'I don't see any money here'.

Success is a reward which is seldom earned without compromise. As Davis walks around the wintry city, guitar case in one hand and symbolic cat in the other, he sees compromise as an insult to his former singing partner, who jumped off the George Washington Bridge. He doesn't enjoy the folk singing life, he sees it as the only career choice he can make that stops him from the horror of merely 'existing'. His problem is, the music world doesn't like him either, and so he is destined to keep moving between friends' apartments forever. Like a rolling stone. He will only ever achieve if he lets go of his old life, but perhaps he's missing all these opportunities on purpose, punishing himself and constantly reminding himself of how useless he is alone now his only partner is gone forever.

It really is an incredible and beautiful film. Make a point of going to see it if you haven't yet. It serves as another reminder of the genius and skill of the Coen brothers, and I can't wait to see what comes next from the two filmmakers who never seem to come down from the top of their game.

Please, Mr Kennedy, follow me on Twitter: @crunro

American Hustle (2013)

Hello again, tiny but loyal readership. It's been a good few months since I last put anything on Rewatchableness, and this is my written apology to all four of you. When I started this little blog o'mine back in December 2012, I said I'd make an effort to write about every single film I saw from then on. Bollocks. I'm surprised I kept that promise for the ten months I did, to be honest, but eventually I just found myself in the pitiable state of just not being arsed. It could have been permanent, had a couple of people not brought up the blog and made me feel guilty about abandoning the poor thing.

Anyway, a bunch of things have happened since I did abandon it. The night before I published my last post before the hiatus (which was about The Raid), my friend Connor, who has been mentioned a few times on here, put a link to this website on Reddit. In the 24 hours that followed, I went from roughly 6 or 7 views a day to over 2000. The people working the blogger server must done a double take. Inevitably, though, not many people looked at anything other than the first post they were confronted with, and the next day the viewer count plummeted back down to 20. It might have been that gentle nudge to the face reminding me of how mediocre the blog was that discouraged me from writing on it for a while, but I'm not sure. I'm happy with the casualness of it.

It certainly wasn't that I just didn't see any films. Quite the opposite. For example, I've seen both Filth and Sunshine On Leith, and I probably could have enjoyed writing something comparing their very different views of my home town of Edinburgh (the closeness of the setting meant that in one sweeping shot at the start of Sunshine On Leith, I could clearly see the cinema that I was sitting in at the time, quite an odd sensation). I saw Hitchcock's seminal 1960s horror The Birds for the first time on Halloween night. I saw Gravity twice, with one of those times being in IMAX, and massively enjoyed it both times. I saw the Danish drama The Hunt, which is outstanding and everyone should see, and the touching, shocking and desperately needed Palestinian documentary Five Broken Cameras, both over Netflix. And while I was over in Sweden seeing Swedish Charlotta for New Year, I went to see Steve McQueen's jaw-dropping slavery film 12 Years A Slave and Peter Jackson's passable Middle Earth 3D romp The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

I can't say I didn't appreciate the freedom of watching these films without having to make the effort to write about them afterwards, but I've come to realise that I actually enjoy writing just as much as I love watching movies, and I wasn't such an idiot 14 months ago when I decided to merge these two passions to produce a hideous, mutated and confused baby blog. So that's why I've grabbed the iPad with both hands and thrown myself back into it.

But the top of the post says American Hustle. That's the last film I saw, last Saturday, and that's the film I'm going to use to defibrillate this thing. My good friend Paul had texted me earlier on in the week, asking if I wanted to go and see Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street that weekend with him and Michael, another friend. However, this plan went to mush after we realised it was an 18, and while I could possibly have got in using Paul's passport (as I did with Filth), baby-faced Michael wasn't going to find a way in in a hurry. So we plumped for American Hustle which, it was announced last week, has tied with Gravity for the most 2014 Oscar nominations. Sounded like a fair swap, I thought, and I went in the cinema knowing next to nothing about the story or anything else.

The first thing that slaps you in the face about American Hustle is Christian Bale. Director David O'Russell has clearly heard the old Hollywood adage that if you want to hook your audience from the very start, get your main star to put on 43 pounds in weight, shave his head for a hideous combover, slouch until he gets a herniated disc in his back, then open with him topless. It works. With an image more than reminiscent of Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder, Bale's repugnant Irving Rosenfeld walks into a scene right from the middle of the storyline, that shows us exactly what we're dealing with: we have three people: Bale, Amy Adams and Bradley Cooper. Wee bit of a love triangle going on between them. They're attempting to capture a politician (Jeremy Renner with a quiff) taking a bribe on film, but the politician takes it badly and walks out.

Naturally, once Irving takes us back to the start and shows us how he got to that point, things prove to be a bit more complicated. The whole story of conmen conning and conning some more, then being conned themselves and being offered retribution through helping to stage another massive con is entertaining, and the great script makes it power along. It's enjoyable to see such a terrific cast loving every line they're reciting.

It's just a shame that as the cons get more and more numerous and intricate, it's incredibly easy to slip away for a second and end up not having a clue what's going on. Both Michael and the aforementioned Connor said that they thought the acting was brilliant, but they didn't like the movie because everything had just become gibberish by the end. And when I tried to explain it to Michael during the credits, I realised I hardly had a grip on what was happening either.

American Hustle is a film that begs for a second viewing for all the wrong reasons: you're so confused at the end that you feel you have to go back and find out where you lost it. That isn't to say I didn't just like the feeling of it. Even if I was lost, the performances, the soundtrack and the intentionally tacky, kitsch style of it made it good fun to watch, and I wouldn't be sad if I ended up revisiting it. It's certainly never boring to watch.

There, I'm done.

Follow me on Twitter: @crunro

The Raid (2011)

For weeks we'd been planning this event: during the October holidays, myself, the two Michaels, Connor, Nick and Chris would romp along to Chris' house in order to eat pizza and marathon the Star Wars original trilogy (do three films count as a marathon? No, almost certainly not, but hopefully no one will notice). However, as it usually goes, these great nights rarely go as planned. Michael H ended up in St Andrews, unable to make it down in time. What with their recently found jobs, Connor and Nick could only make it along after nine, and Haile Gebrselassie himself wouldn't have the endurance to watch nothing but Star Wars until after three in the morning. My parents had made it clear that I was walking home, too, so the 'cannae be arsed' factor also came into play.

And so it came to be that we were sitting on Chris' sofa at half past nine, scrolling through Netflix to find a possibly accompaniment for the pizza we'd just ordered. We scrolled past a low-budget British movie named Tower Block, with Sheridan Smith and Russell Tovey in it, amongst others. I stopped Chris there, saying I had heard it was 'like a British version of The Raid'. Everyone liked the sound of this, so we watched it for a good ten minutes before we realised that The actual Raid was also on Netflix. We stopped wasting our time and switched on the genuine product.

The Raid is an Indonesian film, set in Jakarta and directed by Welsh-born-but-currently-Indonesian Gareth Evans. Both Connor and Chris had come across it on Netflix before, and both said it was one of the best action films they had ever seen, a sentiment agreed with by Empire magazine. This is the basic premise: a SWAT team have to muscle their way to the top of a Jakarta tower block in order to find and arrest the notorious drug baron who lives on the final floor. If you're hoping for much more than that, you'll probably be disappointed. Aside from a couple of neat twists towards the end, your main draw is the violence: violence that I have never seen more beautifully and graphically co-ordinated in a film.

Honestly, if you're not too squeamish, these fights are awe-inspiring. There are moments where I couldn't understand how the shots were filmed without actually killing actors. Axes are slammed into people's shoulders as they run; bullets are fired through their heads as their eyes are still darting back and forth. It's CGI, sure, but it's CGI so convincing you can't help wincing when a man is decapitated by a door frame. One sequence in particular, set in the corridors of the seventh floor, is directed by Evans as if he was conducting a symphony. As each new assailant attacks Iko Uwais' Rama, the tempo shifts and the camera spins to showcase the incredibly impressive martial arts skills the man actually possesses. As unlikely as it is that his moves would actually stop and disarm a madman with a machete, you let it pass because it's so bloody cool. The Raid has style.

What with this and Kil, the Malaysian film I watched and loved at the start of the summer, I really believe that South-East Asia is a gold mine for stylish, modern independent movies. The Raid both pays homage to and is a part of the martial arts film culture that originally put the area on the cinema map, the sort that never really pushes its premise story-wise, but captivates you with action until you come round during the credits and have to pick your jaw up from the floor. This is the type of movie that reminds people why world cinema is worth having a look at.

Follow me on Twitter: @crunro

Amadeus (1984)

It was the September Weekend holiday last week, in which Scottish state school kids get both their Friday and their Monday off for a four-day weekend in the middle of September. Late on the Thursday evening, I noticed that Amadeus, the 1985 Best Picture winner, was on BBC Two at quarter to midnight. I took the split-second decision to give it a watch, regardless of how early I was supposed to get up the following morning and how tired I would be by the end. I would commit myself to this film. It was only as the title card appeared:

AMADEUS

DIRECTOR'S CUT

...that I sank back in my seat and put my head in my hands. It would be a long night.

But what a director. Miloš Forman is my second-favourite Czech, and his 'other film', One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is undoubtably one of the best films I've ever seen. Forman won the best director Academy Award for both One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus (two out of his three nominations), and both won best picture. His movies craft extraordinary characters and tells their story with exceptional skill. If there's anyone I'd trust to re-edit a film up to three hours long to take me late into the night, it's Forman.

The extraordinary character at the centre of Amadeus is Antonio Salieri. He's an Italian composer with a gig writing music for the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. We join him as an elderly man in a mental institution, where he retells the story of his glory years to a young priest; glory years which were largely eclipsed by the meteoric of a ridiculously talented former child prodigy named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Where Salieri can write the occasional march for a royal event, Mozart is in another league. As Salieri recounts, he wrote his first entire symphony at the age of eight. When he composes, he writes out the exact complexities he is hearing in his head in one go, making no mistakes in any of the multitude of parts.

Salieri's problem is that Mozart is a conceited, arrogant, moronic arsehole. He doesn't nearly deserve the divine talent that has been bestowed upon him. This drives Salieri's jealousy beyond reasonable bounds, and he fantasises about murdering the young man so he can play his own compositions at his funeral. It only intensifies as Mozart has success after success, writing great symphonies and operas, the beauty of which Salieri can only awe at (Amadeus' soundtrack is immense). His narcissism and immaturity is toe-curling to watch. It's a situation that the best of us can relate to: the mind-melting irritation that comes as a result of being bettered by a seemingly undeserving contemporary, one who achieves so much more with far less effort.

With this story, Amadeus speaks to a vast majority of us. Those of us who have ever been made to doubt that hard work will get you anywhere. Those of us who have ever been driven to rage by the taunting of our superiors. However, the message behind Amadeus, so vividly demonstrated by Forman, is that these attitudes have deep consequences. They will destroy you as well as the target of your spite, and no one comes out clean. It's a truth that everyone will learn over the course of their lives. Save yourself the time and the bother, and bathe in the magnificence of the incredible Amadeus.

Follow me on Twitter: @crunro

Elysium (2013)

I was in Edinburgh last week for one of the all-too-infrequent day visits with Connor and Chris, two of my friends. Whilst we had decided that the trip would involve going to the cinema, we hadn't a clue what we were actually going to see until about half an hour before the film started. Having surfed through most of the options on my phone, and dismissed a vast majority of them, I suggested we try a movie I was vaguely curious to have a look at: Neill Blomkamp's dystopian sci-fi Elysium.

Blomkamp had only one feature film to his name before he made Elysium - the well-received District 9 from 2009 - but he already had an enviable reputation in allegorical science fiction. Amazingly, District 9 was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 2010 (losing it to The Hurt Locker), one of the few from that genre to achieve that honour. Famously, not even Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was nominated. It was for that reason that I decided to give him a go.

For Elysium, it appears that Blomkamp has decided to be a bit more subtle with his metaphors and a bit more focussed on the action side of things. Elysium is an enormous, beautiful satellite where the privileged of Earth have set up home in order to escape from the mess of a planet beneath them (a concept not previously unheard of: I kept getting flashbacks to Wall-E). A hairless Matt Damon is part of the unloved back on Earth, and part of a plan to infiltrate Elysium and put every human back onto the same level. This is easier described than done, though, as any illegal ships found entering Elysium's sacred airspace are immediately destroyed by a big gun shot by a very angry South African man down on the surface.

Naturally, in a film in which a handheld missile launcher is used to take out spaceships as they fire off into orbit, there is an abundance of violence in Elysium. Some of the images will stick with you for a while. There's the bloody surgery scene, where Matt gets holes carved into him and metal strips screwed into his skull, and the moment where a man gets his face blown off in slow motion... which, incidentally, he lives through. While there is something oddly beautiful about someone being blown into fragments on board a satellite, it's not a film to take the grandkids to see. Suffice to say, Elysium's gore is the most realistically realised gore I've ever seen in a film.

But while the focus is certainly on the action, there's more than an undercurrent of moral warning. Elysium, at its base, is a film about class and privilege. It shows the consequences of a future where the out-of-touch wealthy have finally achieved what they've always desired: a remote paradise where they can socialise with others like themselves, bask in the myriad benefits that their vast wealth can afford them, and relax far away from the working classes who caused their every problem whilst they suffered down on Earth. They take advantage of miraculous health-beds that remove any disability or disease in a person's body by using them as a means of staying forever young; the poor, meanwhile, have to make do with incredibly overcrowded hospitals with the minimum number of doctors and nurses who cannot afford to spend any time on them.

The proletariats and their employers have grown so far apart that they are literally living on different worlds. The poor get poorer and sicker, the rich live on in wilfully ignorant bliss, justifying their unjustifiable privilege with the disillusioned belief that they have earned the right to not help anyone except themselves. Ta-daa! That's capitalism. Kudos to Blomkamp for creating such a satisfying metaphor. He makes his views on the ruling classes known, too, by cheerfully smashing spacecraft into their perfectly tended lawns. Quite satisfying.

Besides big names Damon and Jodie Foster, some of the best performances in the movie come from relatively unknown actors. Brazilian Wagner Moura is outstanding as the twitchy, unstable Spider, and his emphatic way of delivering lines is quite fun to watch. Diego Luna is wonderful in the short time he's got as the tragic Julio. Previous Blomkamp collaborator Sharlto Copley would be worth casting just for his fantastic South African accent, but he makes a really terrifying villain in Agent C.M. Kruger. It's all enjoyable, fast-paced action but also, notably, it's a film with a point. Personally, I can't wait to see what Neill Blomkamp's still got up his sleeve.

Follow me on Twitter: @crunro

Finding Nemo (2003)

I've now written about just over 50 films for this blog, and I'm already on my fourth Pixar film. I don't think I've ever found such a large amount of any other studio's output so appealing and so watchable. Looking in front of me now, I notice that the Munro family has every Pixar movie bar four (Ratatouille, the two Cars films and the recently released Monsters University) on DVD. The one I chose to watch is perceived by many to be their greatest feature to date, which naturally means it is also considered among the best animated films of all time.

It's not difficult to see why. What appears to be a relatively simple story on the surface (fish is kidnapped in front of his dad, who has many adventures trying to find him again) turns out to be a deep parable of what it means to be a parent. Finding Nemo follows Marlin, an overprotective clownfish voiced by the great Albert Brooks, as he frantically searches for the son who was snatched out of their home off the coast of Australia and plopped in a dentist's aquarium. Mortifying, perhaps, but director Andrew Stanton ensures that the darker parts of the story are dealt with promptly so they bolster the story without alienating the younger folks the film is aimed at.

The cast of speaking characters is immense, and as Marlin meets more and more different fish, each with an important message for him to find, the tale becomes more epic. It's an odyssey on the scale of Jason and the Argonauts, but with the intimacy of a character study piece. The impressive calibre of actor lending their voices to the movie reflects the quality of the writing. As well as Brooks, there's Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe, Geoffrey Rush, Barry Humphries and Eric Bana, along with the obligatory John Ratzenberger and a role for the director as Crush, the easy-living turtle who rides the East Australian Current with his son Squirt. None put a foot wrong.

But more important than the voice cast and the moral message is the question of whether Finding Nemo actually appeals to its target audience of kids. Well, I can answer this. I was in that demographic when it came out. I bought a 3D Finding Nemo poster when a Pixar exhibition came to the National Museum in Edinburgh, and it's still in my room. I believe no kid could ever be disappointed by it. There's no time to get bored, as the action moves along very quickly with multiple new characters being introduced every five minutes. It's difficult not to be entranced by Pixar's portrait of the spectacular, vibrant colours of the fish and the Great Barrier Reef, sharp bubbles rising amongst floating rings of azure refracted light. There's comic relief aplenty. It's an instant favourite film.

There's nothing not to like about Finding Nemo. It has charm by the barrowful, and depth to match its setting. Show it to a child and they'll be captivated for the running length. It even manages not to suffer from the Cuddle Syndrome many animated films fall victim to, which involves a blatant overconcern for upsetting children with scary or sad scenes, wrapping them in a thick layer of cotton wool. Finding Nemo takes its viewers, whatever age, along with Marlin on his odyssey, with all the necessary highs and lows. It is a masterwork in movie production, supported by an outstanding script, and it fully deserves its lofty respect in the animation, and wider film-making, world.

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The Shining (1980)

It's quite a sharp shift, going straight from Ed Wood to Stanley Kubrick. Regarded as one of the few true geniuses who found themselves putting their ideas across through the medium of cinema rather than in some great philosophical thesis, Kubrick had a knack for adapting his source material into a film with depth usually well surpassing that of the book. He would take the basic story of the novel and reform it around the messages he intended to pervade.

Perhaps the best example of Kubrick's reanalysis of a work is his 1980 film The Shining, which I watched for the second time a week ago today. Stephen King was far from happy with Kubrick's adaptation of his homonymous seminal 1977 horror masterwork. He disagreed with the casting of Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, saying Nicholson's previous role in Milos Forman's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest would suggest to the audience that Torrance would go mad before the film had even begun. He disagreed with many of the new aspects of the story that Kubrick had introduced. He mistook a drastic new take on his story for a badly beefed-up interpretation. King's Shining and Kubrick's Shining are two explicitly different works. Many adaptations struggle as they simply put the words from the page onto the screen, without exploiting the opportunity for making a unique film from a framework that has already been created.

The trouble with (or greatest thing about?) The Shining is the fact that Kubrick buried the true message behind the film so deep within the plot, script and photography that no one knows for certain what it is.  While most fans agree that there is some metaphorical depth beneath the surface tale of a man being driven to kill his own family by the ghosts in a hotel he is looking after over the winter, they can't agree about what it is. The recent documentary Room 237 (which I am desperate to watch) explores the many theories behind The Shining, with a group of hardcore fans tossing their suggestions into the ring. These range from the film being about the persecution of native Americans (the hotel is built on an ancient Native American burial ground; a can featuring a Red Indian profile is strategically placed in one shot), the Holocaust (a subject that fascinated Kubrick for much of his life) and, most strangely, the authenticity of the Apollo 11 moon landing footage. One man believes the film is Kubrick's admission that he actually directed the fake moon landing film. His sole proof for this seems to be, Danny wears an Apollo 11 jumper in one scene.

It's fair to say that Kubrick hardly hands it to you on a plate, though. At times, The Shining can feel like a drug-induced nightmare, a surreal, Dantean hallucination that confuses you more than scares you. Nearly every shot contains some odd incongruity that could be read into as representative of a certain idea. Some may not be intentional. It wouldn't be difficult to choose a random message before the start and find a fair amount of evidence for it. Even more interesting is trying to find the answers to the film's many mysteries that remain unaddressed at the end. If the ghosts are all in Jack's mind, how does he escape from the larder? And what is that photo at the end supposed to mean?

And when it's not being wonderfully perplexing, a good chunk of The Shining is simply terrifying. The first act is deeply ominous and full of foreshadowing, stretching the tension to breaking point, before Jack snaps in the second half, trapping his wife and son in the hotel during a snowdrift, and letting the spirits of the hotel take over his fragile mind. Jack's famous axe-wielding assault on his family's room as they frantically try to escape through the slightly-too-narrow bathroom window is the most frightening few minutes of cinema I've ever watched, above all the crappy modern exorcism movies I've been subjected to. The suspense as Jack chases his son through the hotel's maze is palpable. 

With one of the most spectacular manipulations of tension of any horror film, and one of the most startling final shots ever filmed, The Shining is a fantastic film to get your teeth into. Far from being ruined by repeat viewings, they are almost necessary. It's near impossible to only watch The Shining once. Every time you watch it again, it gets even better, as you notice more details and begin to form your own opinion on what it is actually about. I myself have no idea. The Shining is a cerebral masterpiece, a film beyond most others, so it shouldn't be much of a task to keep watching. Forever and ever and ever.

Follow me on Twitter: @crunro