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Ramin Bahrani is known mostly for making offbeat movies. However his 99 Homes is very much on the beaten path. It is an over-dramatized and somewhat improbable story of being seduced followed by redemption. Very good performances by Andrew Garfield and Michael Shannon.

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Billy, you too are making the same point I made namely that the movie is very much on the beaten path. Even if you liked it more than I did, you must admit this is not what we have come to expect from Bahrani.


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Room 237 is a film in which a bunch of obsessives rattle off various theories about the sub-textual meanings in The Shining. These range from the genocide of the Indians, to hints about Kubrick faking the moon landings, Nazis! and more. When one enthusiast starts weaving a theory about Indian genocide based largely around the Calumet baking soda cans in the storage room, I was cynically wondering why the large cans of Tang didn't have equal hidden meanings. And then later another nutter launches into how Kubrick helped fake the moon landing footage and is hinting at that throughout the film, as the presence of large jars of Tang makes abundantly clear. Conspiracy theories are always amusing/interesting but a lot of the ideas here have an I Buried Paul quality to them.

Some of the observations, and especially the minor details taken up, are interesting. However, a number of them just seemed like parodies of over-analyzing a text and finding whatever meanings you are looking for. The Nazi/Holocaust theories fell into the later category: #42 on the kid's sweater + a German brand typewriter = 1942 and Nazi genocide. Uh, sure. Seemed just as easy to say 42 was Jackie Robinson's number plus Scatman Crothers taking an axe to the midsection referred to segregation or black oppression or wherever you wanted to go with such loose theorizing.

I was also less impressed with those who thought Kubrick was a super-genius who tossed in symbols and allusions to all of human culture in his horror movie. But I guess that would account for the draggy pace. Not necessary, but probably a good idea to re-watch The Shining before and/or possibly after viewing the Room 237 documentary. Room 237 is probably a good thing to catch some fragments of on cable -- but overall just adds up to a misuse of interpretation and obsession.

This is good:
Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly:
"Room 237 makes perfect sense of The Shining because, even more than The Shining itself, it places you right inside the logic of how an insane person thinks."

A lot of the problem is that these folks are sure they've decoded some important hidden meaning intrinsic to the film, whereas if they just took a more low key approach their ideas and connections would be more interesting and believable. That the silhouette of the skier in a poster on the wall happens to (sort of) look like a minotaur is interesting, but doesn't mean that it was intended to convey that meaning, deftly hinting at the labyrinth, etc

When one enthusiast starts weaving a theory about Indian genocide based largely around the Calumet baking soda cans in the storage room, I was cynically wondering why the large cans of Tang didn't have equal hidden meanings. And then later another nutter launches into how Kubrick helped fake the moon landing footage and is hinting at that throughout the film, as the presence of large jars of Tang makes abundantly clear. Conspiracy theories are always amusing/interesting but a lot of the ideas here have an I Buried Paul quality to them.