leading from
a) Meeting confusion in Doctor Sleep
I went to see the movie Dr Sleep. If there's a book on sale, I haven't read it. I haven't even read the Shining which this is a sequel to.
In relation to the movie The Shining, first of all I didn't recognise the character Wendy Torrance that was played by Shelly Duval in the Shining. The actress Alex Essoe didn't resemble her at all
I had an idea about who the young boy Danny was supposed to be but I wasn't entirely sure. Perhaps there was a slight sense of forced denial because I didn't really want to buy into really having to know and make any connection between this film's cast and The Shining's cast because they didn't look particularly similar.
b) Who is who? I don't really know.
We are soon introduced to a woman who has a husband and daughter I thought that Wendy Torrance and Lucy Stone were for a while the same person, and so Wendy Torrance somewhere in the 1980s would marry David Stone, and send her son to boarding school, while becoming step mother to Abra Stone, which would mean Danny had a step sister that he seldom ever saw, and Wendy would soon find out that her step daughter was also "Shining".
However, since I didn't know how to recognise the actress who played Wendy, I soon found out that this character was actually Lucy Stone and Abra was her actual biological daughter and the scene where the she finds out about her daughter's powers was some years later when Danny was an adult.
c) Buildings in the square
When we came to find Danny as an adult entering a town where he decides to say. there was a model version of the buildings around the central square in the central green, created by the school children as a project. I didn't know which year this was supposed to be or perhaps if the events of the Shining had taken place perhaps in the fifties or sixties and perhaps this was 1980.
Seeing this part of a model town, I wanted to see models of the models in the central square of the model town, and see models of the models of the models in the centre of that. Perhaps I would have wanted to see see models of the models of the models of the models of the models of the models ad infinitum in the centre, or just as small as they could be physically made on a microscopic level.
d) Years later
Danny stays in the town where time leaps several years later and having had a shave looked even younger. He soon finds himself communicating with the young girl Abra as a form of telepathy through chalk board writings, and I thought she was still somewhere in 1980 talking into the future with him and that we'd find out that she had disappeared many years earlier, but in the end, it seems that he didn't know her at all, and that he wasn't related whatsoever, although they would come to meet and she would come to think of him as a sort of an uncle figure.
e) At the big hotel
We find serving at the bar, someone who doesn't look very much like Joe Turkel. I really didn't know who the person was supposed to be. Then it dawned on me that perhaps he was supposed to be made up to look a bit like Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrence, but not that much. Later in the film, it became much more obvious that this was who it was supposed to be and that revelation really bored me, I'd rather just be told that it was a man in a Halloween costume pretending to be Jack Torrence but it wasn't very good.
e) End word
There was a plot of some sort about fighting people who steal children who were "shining" and feed on their energy to become very long lived, but that bored me. I was bored by people breathing in this steam coming out of people's mouths etc. I was bored by the manner of the villains' deaths, it got to a point where it didn't really matter what what happened to the villains. I'm very easily bored by something that is supposed to be horrific in this way in movies. I probably hope to find a much more valid plot secretly buried in the film that would clear the drama with these villains aside. I didn't like the ending or the specific idea that the entities in the big hotel were these energy draining spirits who would kill off the lead villain. I was bored by the ending in general.
I don't think this film will result in documentaries being made about its meaning, buried conspiracies and what people thought was what. Actually this film almost sent me to sleep, but I remained awake, and to talk about this would give too much of the plot away because I have basically told you mostly what was the bewildering nonsense that went through my head as I tried to work out what exactly I was watching, which for me was a priceless experience.
It might be that I went to see the film looking for foggy confusion, and I found enough of it, and so I'm glad that I went to see the movie, I was bored by the villains, and if other people liked it and want to tell me how they loved it, I will be happy for them. I appreciate that the movie's budget wasn't very big. I am made aware that Stephen King liked the movie and he wasn't a fan of Kubrick's The Shining, but he liked the TV version more because it resembled his book more but I never bothered to watch it.
