By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4 cats
Director: Rodney Ascher
Country: united_states
Year: 2013
Running time: 102
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085910/combined
Chris says: “Remember when someone first stumbled across how eerily Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon album synced up to the first forty or so minutes of THE WIZARD OF OZ? With the band denying any intentional links between the two, one would have difficulty calling it anything more than a series of coincidences. I kept thinking about that throughout ROOM 237, wherein five people offer their conspiracy theories as to what’s really going on in THE SHINING, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 schlock masterwork (somewhat liberally adapted from Stephen King’s novel). One interviewee proposes it’s actually about the genocide of the American Indian; another claims it’s Kubrick’s apogee for shooting fake footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing for NASA. Elsewhere, repeated numbers take on new meanings, a binder temporary becomes a phallic symbol, continuity errors are revealed to code-cracking keys, and so on.
“We only hear and never see the interviewees, for visually, the film only contains found footage. THE SHINING itself is slowed down, freeze-famed and examined with the scrutiny of a crime scene photo, but director Rodney Ascher also incorporates stuff from the rest of Kubrick’s oeuvre (he even almost redeems the much-maligned EYES WIDE SHUT!). Additionally, there’s a plethora of sources ranging from ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN to a cheesy ‘80s flick I could not identify full of endless shots of young adults sitting in a movie theatre, manipulated to look like they’re watching THE SHINING. Ascher coaxes great entertainment value from the editing here and it reinforces how fascinating a movie about watching movies can be. As the conspiracies pile up, however, they threaten to overwhelm. ROOM 237 works best when one considers that, since Kubrick’s long gone, these conspiracies, no matter how convincing are nothing more than coincidences; even one of the theorists perceptively notes how ‘whacked out’ the film is to begin with. Sometimes, a binder is just a binder. 4 cats”