Review of Room 237 (2012) by Jack G — 30 Mar 2013

I will say this - I was never bored. It kept my attention, and it uses video clips in some engrossing ways (i.e. showing the Shining playing backward from the end and forward super-imposed together to try and get at some interesting, if still stupid, visual cues). To the point where I face-palmed, many times. And there are SOME small shards of interesting points (i.e. that Kubrick had little messages to Stephen King to fuck with him), but then you have just everything with faking the moon landing, which is itself just a crazy fucking conspiracy theory (and btw, even if the government or NASA decided to do that, and that's a big IF, Kubrick was actually very very busy in 1969 preparing his Napoleon movie that never got made - he wouldn't just toss aside one obsession for another, at least not so quickly.

I also couldn't tell what the director ever thought of what these people thought exactly. Does he believe all they say, or does he find them to be crackpots? I watched a Q&A with the director and he was evasive in answering if he had any theories, just like "Oh, I think some have merit, some don't but I won't say which is which." If he has someone saying '2 times 3 times 7 equals 42' in his movie and it is NOT there to actually mock the person saying that, then he's got issues.

I do like the pointing out of the continuity errors though, that's Kubrick actually having fun in the movie. Not, you know, it's ALL about the holocaust and so on. Watch Rob Ager's documentary Kubrick's Gold Story instead, it's much more enlightening as actual analysis, and even if you don't agree with all his theories (and I don't), he at least has, you know, gone to the Kubrick archives to look at a lot of stuff to try and see the subtext or hidden meanings. Saying just randomly that Kubrick had a 200 IQ means nothing to me. Where's the proof of shit like that?