"Room 237" (2012) - Director Rodney Ascher's Exhaustive (and Exhausting) Documentary, Unraveling Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining"

[DonRocks]

Don't *ever* say I'm not thorough. Because I didn't go ga-ga over "The Shining," I took it upon myself to rent and watch "Room 237," a documentary ripping apart Kubrick's film, exploring all sorts of conspiracy theories, going frame-by-frame over many scenes, etc.

Because I just watched "The Shining" yesterday, the film was still fresh in my mind, therefore, "Room 237" was very watchable; if I hadn't been up-to-the-minute on "The Shining," then this documentary would have been very, very difficult to finish - it's 1:43 in length, and you can feel every minute.

So, in terms of recommendations ... this is priced just like a regular full-feature film on all the movie rental outlets - if you want to drop $3.99 to watch an analysis of "The Shining," at an exhaustively detailed level, narrated by people who may, or may not, be as intelligent and knowledgeable as you, then you'll undoubtedly get something - however small - out of this. However, even just a day after watching the movie, I found it tedious, and struggled to finish: I had to sift through a lot of babbling, just to extract a few tiny nuggets of interest.

This film is subdivided into nine chapters, each supposedly offering a different "meaning" of "The Shining." From Amazon Prime's "X-Ray" commentary, I noted this, which sums up my own feelings about "Room 237" quite nicely: "Stephen King - never a fan of Kubrick's adaption of his own novel "The Shining" - started watching this documentary only to give up halfway through as he felt the filmmakers were reaching for things that simply were not there."

Stephen King got it right - there's very little here.

You'll get another level of depth from Kubrick's film, but is it worth it? Only if you're a serious enthusiast.