Read Online The Film Club by David Gilmour - Free Book Online

the story of a failed writer (Jack Nicholson) who goes slowly mad in a deserted hotel and tries to murder his family.
    The Shining is probably director Stanley Kubrick’s ( Dr. Strangelove [1964] and 2001 [1968]) best film. But Stephen King, the author of the novel, loathed the movie and disliked Kubrick. A lot of people did; Kubrick was famous for being a finicky, self-adoring man who made actors do things over and over with questionable results; when Jack Nicholson ambushes Scatman Crothers with an axe in The Shining , Kubrick made them do it forty times; finally, seeing that the seventy-year-old Crothers was exhausted, Nicholson told Kubrick that was enough takes, he wasn’t going to do it again.
    Later on in the filming, Jack pursued his knife-wielding wife (Shelley Duvall) up the stairs fifty-eight times before Kubrick was happy. (Was it worth the work? Could the second or third take have done as well? Probably.)
    But more importantly, Stephen King felt that Kubrick just “didn’t get it” when it came to horror, didn’t have a clue how it worked. King went to an early screening of The Shining and came away disgusted; he said the movie was like a Cadillac without an engine. “You get in, you can smell the leather, but you can’t drive it anywhere.” In fact, he went on to say he thought Kubrick made movies to “hurt people.”
    Which I sort of agree with; but I love The Shining ; I love the way it’s shot and lit: I love the sound of the tricycle wheels going from carpet to wood to carpet. It always scares me when the twin girls appear in the hallway. For my great moment though, I picked the scene where Jack Nicholson hallucinates a conversation between himself and a hotel waiter, a stiff, British-butler type. It takes place in an almost blindingly lit washroom—electric orange and white. The dialogue begins innocently enough but then the waiter warns Jack that his young son is “making trouble,” that maybe he should be “dealt with.” The waiter (Philip Stone) steals the scene with his precise stillness and quiet line readings; watch the way he closes his dry lips at the end of each phrase. It’s like a delicate, vaguely obscene punctuation mark.
    He too had problems with children, the waiter confides. One of them didn’t like the hotel and tried to burn it down. But he “corrected him” (with an axe). “And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I corrected her.” It’s a letter-perfect performance. Unlike Jack’s, which has not aged so well since I first saw it in 1980. Here he seems hammy, almost amateurish, surprisingly bad, especially alongside this exquisitely controlled English actor.
    That wasn’t Jesse’s great moment, though; he chose the scene where the little boy steals into Jack’s bedroom early in the morning to retrieve a toy only to find his father sitting on the side of the bed with the thousand-yard stare. He summons his son over, who sits uneasily on his lap. Looking at his father’s unshaven face and bleary eyes—in a blue dressing gown Nicholson’s as pale as a corpse—the little boy asks him why he doesn’t go to sleep.
    After a beat comes the chilling response: “I’ve got too much to do.” Meaning, we intuit, chop up his family just like the waiter did.
    â€œThat’s it,” Jesse whispered. “Can we play it again?”
    We watched Annie Hall (1977) for, among other reasons, the scene where Diane Keaton sings “Seems Like Old Times” in a dark bar. Keaton is shot slightly from the side and appears to be looking at someone off-camera. It’s a scene that gives me goosebumps—she seems to be singing the song, making its dramatic points with her eyes. It’s also a moment of self-realization for her character, Annie Hall, a fledgling musician, who is taking apprehensive but certain first flight.
    Some films let you