TV & VIDEO - July 16, 1987

Let’s face it: everyone’s a movie critic. Or wants to be. Consider one Bill Blakemore, an ABC News correspondent who recently wrote a lengthy re-review of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” in the Washington Post. Blakemore said that the horror tale starring Jack Nicholson had little to do with the Stephen King novel and everything to do with the genocide of the American Indians, the British all-male military establishment and racism against blacks. “If you are skeptical about this,” Blakemore writes, “consider the Calumet baking-powder cans with their Indian chief logo that Kubrick placed carefully in the two food-locker scenes.” And what has Kubrick said about his own film? “It’s about a man who tries to kill his family.”