The Shining (1980)

"Come and play with us, Danny. For ever. And ever. And ever..."
                                                                                                    
Wow. It seems some things really are as good as their reputation. The Shining is a beautifully shot Stanley Kubrick film, and has a towering, perhaps career-defining performance from Jack Nicholson at its centre, but at its root it's a slasher film with supernatural elements. Yet here we have an auteur director like Kubrick, a serious mainstream Hollywood cast, and we find that a slasher film can be elevated from the genre ghetto to become a mainstream classic.

It is, of course, a Stephen King adaptation, and the cast is ably supplied with excellent performances from Shelley Duvall and Scatman Crothers, who would go on to become the voice of Jazz in the Transformers cartoon. The plotting is masterful, if not unusual for the genre; the idea of "shining" is interesting but oddly peripheral to the plot. But essentially this is a masterclass in acting from Nicholson and a timely lesson in how the normal tropes of horror- the hotel is even built on the predictable Indian burial ground- can be transmuted into gold by a genius like Kubrick. The only disappointment, I suppose- and I'm clutching at straws here- is that the concept of Tony, the boy who lives in Danny's mouth, is somewhat undeveloped, which I suspect not to be the case with the novel.

Also interesting, to me at least, is how very 1980 the hair, the clothing and everything looks; I'm 40, albeit British, and this is how I remember the world of my earliest memories. But there's no doubting that this is a fine film, possibly Kubrick's finest.

Time Bandits (1981)

"Four foot one! That is a long time, isn't it?"

This isn't really all that brilliant a film, in spite of some splendid individual bits of comedy, but it's a fascinating record of Terry Gilliam at this point in his career, with stylistic signs of his later directorial career yet with one foot very much still in Python- the film just feels very Monty Python, not surprisingly as Gilliam co-wrote it with Michael Palin, and both Palin and John Cleese get some splendid cameos: I love Cleese's version of Robin Hood as Prince Charles. And, as with the Python films, the owner of Handmade Films, one George Harrison, is involved, in this case providing a rather good song.

Also brilliant are Ian Holm's height- obsessed Napoleon and Sean Connery's noble and charismatic Agamemnon, complete with the Caledonian tones which were, I'm sure, de rigeur in ancient Mycenae. David Warner is, as ever, a magnificent baddie and the great Ralph Richardson is, literally, God, although he phoned in his performance somewhat.

The whole concept of a portal in young Kevin's bedroom, a portal into other realities that does not abide by the laws of science, is so very reminiscent of British children's fiction, from Alice to Narnia. The dwarves, put in charge of shrubbery by the Supreme Being, remind me a bit of Slartibartfast from the then-recent Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, while also providing a good employment agency for dwarf actors.

It's not as good as I remembered; individual scenes are good but as a whole it drags a bit. Still, it's a fascinating film to look back on.