Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1444 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-03-03
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 114 minutes

DVD Description
Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) becomes the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel up in the secluded mountains of Colorado. Jack, being a family man, takes his wife and son to the hotel to keep him company throughout the long and isolated nights. During their stay strange things occur when Jack's son Danny sees gruesome images powered by a force called "The Shining" and Jack is heavily affected by this. Along with writer's block and the demons of the hotel haunting him, Jack has a complete mental breakdown and the situation takes a sinister turn.

Special Features
Commentary by Garrett Brown and John Baxter, View from the Overlook: Crafting The Shining, The Visions of Stanley Kubrick, The 1980 TV Feature: The Making of The Shining (with optional commentary from Vivian Kubrick), Wendy Carlos featurette: the composer discusses the music of The Shining, and the Theatrical Trailer.

Synopsis
Opening with spectacular aerial shots of a beautiful, mountainous landscape, Stanley Kubrick's horror classic The Shining, based on Stephen King's best-selling novel, sucks the viewer into his frightening tale with quiet, relaxing visuals - but the ominous soundtrack warns that all is not right at the gorgeous Overlook Hotel. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson at his eyebrow-raising best), a Vermont schoolteacher, accepts a job as the winter caretaker of the glorious early-20th-century resort that operates only in warm weather because the snowy roads deny access in the colder months. Jack brings his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), with him, as well as his young son, Danny (Danny Lloyd)--who brings with him a little boy named Tony who lives in his mouth. As the Torrances settle in for the long, lonely months ahead, strange, unexplainable things start occurring in the hotel--and in every scene Jack seems to be growing a little more evil and dangerous...

Customer Reviews

Not a film for King fans
The Shining is my favourite of Stephen King's books, and I have to say, this is a truely aweful vertion of it.
Kubick once said that he thought The Shining was about "A man who went mad in the mountains and blamed it on ghosts"
This is not what The Shining is about at all, as any fan of the book will know. This focuses on how Jack Torrence looses his mind, rather than on the personal struggle he faces to save his wife and son.
This is a good suspence film, but it's not The Shining.
To a fan of the book I recomend this version: Stephen King's The Shining [1997] it is much more faithful to King's masterpiece, and the "true Shining"

CUT DOWN FULL SCREEN VERSION -- you really want it?
Most people who want a copy of "The Shining" will find that the previous DVD release, released in 2001 (which comes in a white cover rather than this black one), is the one to get. There is very little reason to want to buy this version -- and no reason at all to upgrade. Arguably, this is an INFERIOR release, and you'd be foolish to buy it. Let me explain why.

Kubrick shot "The Shining" in "full frame", which means that the material shot would fit a standard 4.3 TV screen. This footage was NOT masked down to cinemascope by Kubrick but was distributed to cinemas as full frame. It was up to the cinema to mask it down in the projector. This was actually a pretty standard practice, and many movies, particularly before the 1960s, were released as full frame. Many DVDs of these movies have been released with the full frame, too. You get the full width of the cinemascope picture, but you also get the extra footage above and below it that was not masked off.

Having the "full frame" version does have advantages -- it fills your screen if you've got a standard 4.3 TV, and of course you're getting extra footage. What's more, if you have a widescreen TV, you can just use your zoom controls to make the picture fill your screen without distortion, cropping off the top and bottom, hence getting an approximation of the cinemascope version.

The previous white cover DVD of "The Shining" presented the entire, full frame version of the movie EXACTLY AS IT WAS SHOT. This new version gives you ONLY a masked-down version. You're not getting the true cinemascope version of the movie, however, you're getting one masked-down so that it fills a typical widescreen TV screen without letterboxing. It's neither one thing nor the other -- not the full screen movie as it was shot, and not a true cinema version either.

This would be fine if the picture quality was improved over the white cover version. But it's not. Nor is the sound any different. Having studied both, my feeling is that this is exactly the same version that was used in the white cover DVD release, but cropped down to "widescreen". It actually looks like it's more fiercely compressed, losing a little definition over what you see if you zoom up the previous full screen version to fill your widescreen TV. (If you want better definition, of course, you should get the Blueray version.) What's more, this version is plumped up to a 2DVD set by a superfluous commentary and some new featurettes, but the only extra you need is the "making of" which was also in the previous version.

The bottom line is, in this black cover version you get exactly the same movie as in the previous white cover DVD, running the same length, but with LESS actual footage! That makes it a no-brainer for most purchasers -- if you've got a widescreen TV, get the PREVIOUS white cover version, and you can zoom in to see the "widescreen" version EXACTLY as you get it on the black cover release, but also zoom out and see the WHOLE movie as it was shot. Buy this masked-down version, and you don't get the choice. (If you've only got a standard 4.3 TV, get the previous version, of course.) For that reason, this has got to be a one-star don't buy. Grab the previous version while you can.

At last, a decent review!
A brilliant review of the disc (above). We don't need film reviews of classics here, but we DO need to know what we're buying. THANK YOU!!! I thought Kubrick shot in 4:3 so I put the box down in the shop and checked here. Saved me money...