“I want somebody to take care of me for a change.”
The Witches of Eastwick is the romp you watch after The Shining. It’s a lot more fun, including if you compare the two unhinged, over-the-top Jack Nicholson performances. I admit to the bias that I prefer George Miller over Stanley Kubrick. I believed it back in the 80s and after Mad Max: Fury Road I certainly lean that way now. Kubrick’s film has great unsettling imagery, but Miller has a better sense of the genre, treading the Horror lightly to incorporate a lot of fantasy and a satirical battle of the sexes. Playful plotless sequences like the tennis match and the ballroom of balloons work on me like Danny’s lengthy spins around the overlook.
Both films have a certain ambiguity to the story and the true origin and supernatural abilities of Jack Nicholson’s character. In Witches, the ambiguity is over what he gets out of their power. Is he something they accidentally conjured up or is he in fact pulling their strings? I love the dynamic of that, of not truly knowing who has the real power, and I like the way Nicholson is clearly finding more pleasure in their magic than in their bodies.
In The Shining, Nicholson’s decent into theatrical madness is too sudden and by the time he gets into his most memorable scenes he’s become unrecognizable as a character. Because here he is playing a supernatural being, who’s an outsider among humans, the grand facial gestures and physical tantrums have a nice home to run wild in, and that’s exactly what he does. Nobody, and I mean nobody else could’ve made this part work, let alone do it in such grand style. Miller figures out how to harmonize with Nicholson visually, and he finds unique styles for each seduction scene as well. This is the horror film as a Summer Blockbuster. Love it!
p.s. John Williams score sounds a LOT like his theme to Harry Potter
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