Room 237 (2013)

i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

How sad is this?

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

A lot of people reviewing this documentary seem to be showing a lack of imagination or maybe an inability to see the big picture. This documentary is certainly a celebration of The Shining's very detailed, precise, and fully fleshed out story world. It is also a meditation on meaning: how we bring meaning to things even as we think we are taking meaning from them. The film presents five way-out-there interpretations of this film. It is not claiming that these interpretations are true. Instead, it is showing how a perfectly conceived and fully manifested piece of art can become a magnet for meanings. We watch five different interpreters argue five intense and very different interpretations of this movie. Along the way, these interpreters point out existing patterns in this film, many of which I'll wager you have never noticed.Does this make their interpretations valid? The film does not answer this question. Instead, it revels in the acts of interpretation. This is not a documentary that claims to finally reveal the truth behind Kubrick's masterpiece. Instead, it suggests that this movie acts as a catalyst, which somehow activates the various "truths" that viewers bring to it. If, like me, you are interested in the way the human mind works, then you will probably find this movie engrossing. Its at times less than convincing interpretations of The Shining are never less than fascinating.

This film portrays the hidden meanings and clues behind Stanley Kubrick's only horror film, "The Shining", based on the best selling book by Stephen King, and why this movie still continues to baffle and confuse purists. This movie is mostly full of interviews, movie clips, and other stuff. If you like the shining, then you'll like this movie. Worth a rental.

An exploration of various interpretations of Stanley Kubrick's horror film, The Shining (1980).Sometimes ridiculous interpretations and conspiracy theories about the meanings behind this amazing film. People get what they want out of it. The master Kubrick puts in many small nuances that keep people coming back, that is his genius. Watch it to the end to get the real meaning behind what Kubrick was after. BUT, you'll be tempted to turn it off when you hear from the nut job talking about the moon landing fake footage as related to the film. The most interesting work a guy did was running the film forward and backward superimposing them at the same time, really cool.

Room 237 is a great example of what happens when a state, and even a system, is in a crisis. What this entire film comes down to is that director Stanley Kubrick left hidden messages in his later films, especially in The Shining (1980). This may be true because filmmakers sometimes do this in order to show to the public what they really think or feel. As knowledgeable people know, there's no real freedom of speech. Everything that's made in Hollywood, and in the West in general, contains propaganda. Everything is controlled by the ruling class. The problem with Room 237 is that it's also propaganda. It offers the opinions of several people. These people are said to be Kubrick enthusiasts, and they kind of narrate while we're shown footage from Kubrick's films. The problem with this is that we don't find out who these people are and what their intentions are. Even their faces aren't shown. Why are these people saying what they're saying? Room 237 doesn't tell us. So, it turns out that the goal of this film isn't to educate but to provoke. What we're told in Room 237 is highly questionable. A bit of it may be true, but we, the viewers, have no way of knowing. We don't have access to such information. One thing that's clear to me, however, is that Room 237 is propaganda made by people that serve a faction of the Anglo-American ruling class. Ordinary people often make the mistake of thinking that the ruling class of a country is united and is of one mind. The reality is that the ruling class is composed of factions, each with its own interests. They agree about some things, and they disagree about other things. These different factions try to rally ordinary people to their cause, to their interests, by releasing propaganda through films, books, music, news and any other medium. So, when, for example, election time comes, a faction wants people to vote for the candidate that it's supporting. Each faction would like to have their own man or woman in power. The factions especially begin to disagree and even fight when there's a crisis, like the capitalist economic depression that began in the West in 2008. Based on this, I can tell which faction is behind Room 237. For example, in the film, it's claimed that the Apollo moon landings were faked. At least the footage was faked. This is probably true, but why are we being told this? Is it because the filmmakers are nice? No, it's because they want to shake up the situation and discredit another, dominant, faction of the ruling class. Ordinary people don't have access to secret information about the Apollo program, and the only reason why, in the last few decades, we've been seeing reports about the moon landings being faked is because ruling class factions are disagreeing. So, in this film, we're told about the genocide of Native Americans, the Nazis and other things that we often hear about in the West, but with a spin that's a bit different. It's meant to provoke and make us question what we know. But a lot of what's said in Room 237 is lies. As I've already mentioned, the goal of Room 237 isn't to educate but to provoke. Right after we're told about the Nazis, we're told that Joseph Stalin allegedly starved 3 million people in Western Ukraine. This is not true. It's an obvious capitalist lie. And Stalin never said that the death of one man is a tragedy and that the death of millions is a statistic. It's just another capitalist lie. So, why are we getting these anti-communist lies in Room 237? It's because even the faction that got this film made doesn't want a real revolution, a communist revolution, to happen in the USA. I'm thinking that this faction is the same one that promotes so-called conservative propagandists like Alex Jones, Matt Drudge and Andrew Breitbart. Half the time these people talk about liberty and the free market, and the other half they dedicate to lying about communism, the Soviet Union, and especially Joseph Stalin. They push the interests of their faction of the ruling class, but they also don't want for a communist or a socialist revolution to happen, one that would sweep away the entire capitalist ruling class. This is the faction that wants to lower wages in the USA and to destroy the welfare state. Sure, some of these people may be against America's wars, but not because they're nice. They just want to rally as many dupes as possible to their cause, to their political candidates from the Republican Party.