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Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Such a frustrating disappointment

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

I love The Shining and have seen it many times. I always had the impression that there were probably some hidden mysteries embedded within the film, subliminal if you will, with many little odd things happening so quickly on camera they eye fails to catch them. Unfortunately, this documentary takes that notion a bit too far.A few of the cinematographic tricks are possibly worth learning about, but this is mostly a very far fetched conspiratorial rant. Pulling in multiple historic events, relating them in an oblique way to the film. Much of it is so ridiculous, the viewer may have difficulty sitting through it.If you can remember getting smoked up back in college, and talking about philosophy with your dorm-mates late into the night, that is the overall feel of this documentary. For the true fan only.

I'm real love-hate with Kubrick and THE SHINING falls in the middle of that spectrum. It's creepy, but, absurd. And, Nicholson is so obviously loony from the get go, that there is no descent into madness. He's already there.And, most of the theories in ROOM 237 are also absurd and often factually and provably false. Further, at least half the stuff the 'theorists' toss out there falls in the category of - Yeah, that's how movies are made! It's obvious that none of the theorists have ever been to a big budget movie set, let alone worked on one. Further, if I were the Cameraman, Editor, Co-ScreenWriter (Diane Johnson), Prop Man, Production Designer, Set Decorator etc. who worked on THE SHINING - I'd be even more angry. Not to mention Stephen King who's original tale is often ignored. It's as if Kubrick made this movie in his backyard all by himself to hear the theorists tell it. Now, we all know that Kubrick was a fanatic about detail, but, THE SHINING would STILL be shooting if he did everything alone as these interviewees would have it. The best line in the whole Doc comes near the end when one of the theorists admits that Kubrick may not have consciously intended for all these hidden meanings to be in his film, but that it didn't matter. Clever way of saying that much of this is B.S., I suppose.All that said, it was entertaining. And, I certainly wish Director Rodney Ascher would have exercised a bit more of a skeptical eye towards the claims. But, he seemed more interested in putting together the clip montages than editing the facts. I've said for decades that Kubrick's films are not only the most analyzed in cinema history, but, also the most OVER-analyzed. He made so relatively few films that his cultists spend years and years combing over every minute detail. ROOM 237 only scratches the surface.P.S. Watched the extras on Disc 2 of the DVD. The most interesting is a panel discussion taped at the Overlook Hotel with Director Mick Garris (the TV Shining mini-series), ROOM 237 Director Rodney Ascher, Kubrick's personal assistant Leon Vitali and the Moon Landing conspiracy guy Jay Weidner.Garris sort of played a peacemaker who feels that everybody has the right to interpret a work of art in any way they wish (including his version). But, the real fireworks were between Vitali and Weidner (who were sitting right next to each other!). Vitali started off by debunking the conspiracy theorists using what I called "Yeah, that's how movies are made!" in my original post. He explained in detail how much of this stuff is just reading way way too much into continuity 'mistakes' and innocent coincidences. The moon conspiracy guy tried his best but Vitali openly disdained him going so far as to make a 'Cross' with his fingers as if warding off a vampire!! For his part, Rodney Ascher tried to play devil's advocate trying to defend his conspiracy theorists under Vitali's withering attack. Ascher also showed some detailed knowledge of the production history of THE SHINING. I just wish he had done more contextualization in his own Documentary! Like I wrote before, it seemed as if Ascher was more interested in putting together pretty montages (of other people's footage, I must add), than doing the basic job of a documentarian in putting some sort of skeptical eye towards his interview subjects.The DVD also includes about 45 minutes of deleted material where the conspiracy theorists drone on some more. (I started fast-forwarding). Not sure if you can find the Overlook Hotel panel footage online. Not worth the effort to track down the DVD maybe, but certainly of interest.P.S. Also on the Moon conspiracy guy: Growing up, the number referred to as to the moon's distance was always 238 Thousand miles - not 237.

I don't regret watching this documentary. I think it's important to note this now, because much of what I have to say is pure criticism.Room 237 is a very poorly made documentary, featuring some very outlandish theories. I came across it after seeing it on a list of 'Must See' documentaries, and noticed a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. How it has been awarded that is beyond me.It's very difficult to keep track of who is saying what. The speakers are introduced with their name on the screen once when they first speak, and then never again. You don't see their faces at all (the entire visuals are clips from The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Eyes Wide Shut etc), and their narrations segue in and out of each other with no real flow of ideas or themes, just in a sort of stream-of-consciousness manner, as if it were one person trying to put all their ideas down before they forgot without structure or editing.Early in the documentary I was skeptical, feeling that each speaker was just looking for what they wanted to find, often clutching at straws to make their point. I would grant a certain credence to a couple of the ideas raised (the notion of Kubrick being so meticulous makes you wonder whether some aspects were continuity errors or indeed planned, for example), however these people often take their ideas much too far, with little to no evidence to back them up. As time progressed, I found myself with my mouth agape at certain points; not in wonderment, but simply incredulous that some of these people had been taken seriously enough to be included in this documentary. From reading various other reviews, I believe it was Jay Weidner who claims that he has proof of Stanley Kubrick working with NASA to fake the moon landing footage. He goes on to claim that he's sure that he's being spied on by the government because of these views and what he has said. It would be easy to mock him for this, but that last part makes me worry for his mental health, since this could be an indicator of schizophrenia.As others have mentioned, the editing ranges from awful to non- existent. Interviewees lose track of what they're saying, one interviewee has his child shouting in the background, excuses himself, and you hear him get up, walk across the room and close a door. There is no room in a professional documentary for this kind of thing, it is utterly ridiculous that this wasn't edited out, and completely undermines any plausible credibility of the filmmakers.I said at the start that I didn't regret watching this documentary. It's made me think more in depth about the content of The Shining, and has encouraged me to watch it again and pay more attention to the finer details. It's worth watching Room 237 for that purpose, but for no other reason.

Other hidden meanings in "The Shining": 1. In the gin commercial, the ice cube to the right clearly shows the Secret Service man driving JFK's limo in Dallas turning around and shooting the president. 2. A frozen-frame blow up of the poster to the left of the faux skier one reveals a photo of the box where President and Mrs. Lincoln were watching "An American Cousin" on the night the president was assassinated. To the extreme left you can see a myopic 2nd assassin firing a Derringer that missed Mrs. Lincoln, the second must-have target. 3. In the opening credits of "The Shining", as soon as Stanley Kubrick's name scrolls upwards out of the frame, in addition to his airbrushed photo skillfully placed in the clouds, and to its immediate left, is the right earlobe of Jon Voight, Kubrick's first choice to play Jack. 4. The original sneak prevue release, shown in a theater in Honduras, had Danny carrying a ripe banana as he fled into the maze. He gets corned by his homicidal father and obsessively eats the banana, tossing the peel in front of him. His father raises the ax, steps forward and slips on the banana peel, hitting his head fatally on a partially obscured obsidian bust of Stephen King. This ending was booed by the attending Hondurans who subsequently burned down the theater to protest the racial profiling of bananas. Kubrick then re-shot the ending we all know. 5. As a movie running 1 hour and 42 minutes, the laughs for this commentator stopped coming after 20 minutes. Picture was far too long to sustain a light-weight comedy.