It is a performances centric movie

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

When I found out about this, I was curious to see what this would be like. But when I sat through the whole thing, i took the disc and case and though it away in the garbage, because that's what this is. A bag of s**t!Where do I start? Let's start with the comparison to the source material. Is it faithful to Stephen King's hit novel? Yes, yes it is. Unfortunately, this faithfulness to its source material is what makes this mini series suck so much, because clearly King doesn't understand the differences between literature and film. Film and literature are two completely different mediums and thus, everything that worked in one medium won't have the same effect in the other!I've noticed the reviews praising this mini-series have one thing in common: they all say the mini series is great for being faithful to the novel. If you actually judge this film by the acting, atmosphere, and directing, its no contest that Kubrick's version is the far superior version.First off, the acting. Steven Weber is horrible and completely emotionless. He doesn't act anything like an actual psycho, which makes Jack's descent into madness completely horrible and poorly done. Maybe Jack's mind deteriorated the way King wanted it to, but the guy's bad acting ruined it.Next off, Courtland Mead. I absolutely hated this kid! He's annoying and emotionless. Plus, the way he kept his mouth open the entire time made me think this kid took acting lessons from Kristen Stewart.The next part, the scares. Nothing about this adaption was scary at all! I don't even need to compare them to the Stanley Kubrick version. All the scares here look like they were thought up by a 12 year old! The hose with teeth is just stupid! Unless it snakes into someone's pants and bites off their penis, I'm never gonna be scared by that! The hedge animals were just dumb, plus their bad cgi made it look even worse. The woman in the tub started to make me feel scared, until i heard what she said. "With a little boy here, a little boy there, here a boy, there a boy, everywhere a boy, boy." WHAT? What was going through King's head when he thought of that? It's just stupid!I know some people say it doesn't matter if it isn't scary. But it's HORROR!!! Of course it matters!!!! Especially it it's based off of one of the most horrifying novels ever written!!!This mini-series may be faithful to the novel, but it doesn't stand up to its reputation! If anything, this adaption damages King's novel! Being faithful to the source material doesn't automatically make a film great, because it seems the die hard King fans are too hypnotized by that fact to recognize how horrible it is! Stephen King created this just to satisfy his wounded ego over Kubrick's far superior version!If you hated the Kubrick version, that's fine. But please don't waste your time with this. It will ruin your view of the novel. I watched this and in the process, I lost a good portion of respect for Stephen King.

I just re-watched what I will call the "real" movie (even though it wasn't the Stephen King authorized version) and then watched the miniseries version the next day. Wow, the miniseries was an amateurish joke with no comparison to SK's version (I don't care that it departed from the book, since we are talking about movies here).The TV version was flat, cheesy, overdone with the ghosts (which took away their effect). The series just seemed like it was going through the paces to get the plot elements on screen as quickly..The ghost in the black tuxedo was pathetic and the one in the white one wasn't much better. The hotel was not spooky in the slightest and the hedge animals were as scary as Jar-Jar Binks. There was no atmosphere to the location and there was no feel or mood to the scenes.. it was just so one-dimensional in comparison.The actors for the two male roles were also not suited to them IMO. I know people complain about Jack Nicolson being too crazy from the outset, and this departs from Stephen King's version, but I am OK with that after having seen it done both ways.. In the TV version, he never gets there and you can tell he isn't capable of getting there. And the boy: OMG so annoying and flat. The conversations between him and mom with dialog like "it's not dad, it's the hotel..." unconvincing and no true fear, just cold and robotic.The Danny Loyd version was chilling and the TV one was annoying and formulaic.Shelly Duval also did an awesome job of conveying the fear and despair of Wendy's predicament- very believable.I could go on, but won't.... suffice it to say, I was embarrassed for the TV miniseries creators after seeing it.

This is a very good mini-series adaptation on the horror classic, a story about the Torrence Family who become caretakers for an isolated hotel. The son, Daniel Torrence (Courtlead Mead) sees paranormal images of the hotel's past using a telepathic gift known as "The Shining." The father, Jack Torrance (Steven Weber), is slowly being driven insane by the spirits that lurk the hotel, threatening his wife Winifred (Rebecca DeMorney) and Daniel.The creepiness and eerie atmosphere of the hotel gave the perfect setting for the movie, making the audience jump when demonic creatures appear and when horrific events occur. The characters, for the most part, did a nice job portraying their roles - not on the same league as the actors in the original movie, but still on par in delivering some great performances. I think the cast in this mini-series was more engaging and I feel you actually connect and understand them better than the more eerie and unpredictable characters in the original film. The plot, for me, was easier to follow and grasp than the original movie and I thought the subplot about Daniel seeing an image of a young man, guiding him during difficult times, was a nice additional to the plot; it actually made the story more captivating. I also enjoyed the parts where the protagonists take on the evil spirits and how ***spoiler ahead*** the ending actually wraps the story better than the original film.Overall, it's a very good horror mini-series for a scare.Grade B+

I'm a huge fan of Stephen King's novel, it definitely makes the list of my top favorite books, so I was delighted to watch another adaptation, this time with a fair amount of similarities to it. It couldn't be different, seeing that King himself was involved with the script, and it kind of gives the feeling he's answering back to Kubrick: "this is how I imagined my creation to be." I rated it high because it's so much like the novel, and although I absolutely love Kubrick's version, it's also very fulfilling to a fan when the book is adapted the way you want it! Although I rate it highly, I'm aware of its problems. For one, the thing that got on my nerves (all the time) was Courtland Mead's acting. His nasal and annoying voice, his mouth constantly hanging open, his mop top hair, besides, he's too old to be anything like the character in the novel, but that's the least. Danny Torrance is supposed to be a likable character, and to me he is adorable in his 5 year-old naive wisdom and braveness. I didn't get any of it in the mini series, and Danny is basically the main character, without him, it just doesn't work. I wonder why King and etc. chose this boy.Apart from that, Steven Weber is one of the main reasons I liked it so much. I know about his sitcom past, but his work in this saves it from being a total disaster. I'd say his perfect John Doe quality is what made me think of him as the next best thing to the "actual" Jack Torrance. Rebecca DeMornay gives an average performance, I'm sure she is exactly how Stephen King thought Wendy in his head, but if it was any other blonde actress playing her part, it wouldn't have made any difference to me. I was happy with the feature of almost all of the scenes from the novel, especially the (in)famous one-liner: "Come down here and take your medicine!".Budget limitations and the length tend to turn people off. This is the problem with Stephen King's movie adaptations, because certain aspects of his writing are not meant to be watched, only imagined. It's the case of the hedge animals (or the Wendigo in Pet Sematary, I was glad they decided to let it out), they're important to the story, but the terrible special effects just made me cringe. Also, I was OK about that additional epilogue of Danny graduating, but why the "kissing kissing, that's what I've been missing" bit?. It's so cheesy, and it seems it doesn't serve any other purpose than adding some cheap sentimentalism to Jack-Danny's relationship, when it doesn't need any. In my opinion, Jack was redeemed when he stayed in and fought the hotel as hard as he could, and that was what saved his family. Anyway, I guess it comes with the job, you have to have some kind of explicit emotional undertone in order to make it likable for general audiences. Not all of it is made of die-hard fans of the novel like me, ha.