Who wouldn’t want to stay in The Grand Overlook Hotel indeed?
Well quite possibly everyone really, particularly if a quite mad, pre-frozen to death in the maze Jack Torrance was bashing his way into your room with an axe while screaming “Here’s Johnny!”
But what if that same hotel also possessed the whimsical beauty and retro-stylistic flourishes of Wes Anderson’s films?
Could you be persuaded to linger a little longer, well long enough to open to admire the way the rooms in both The Shining and Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel bearing a stroking visual resemblance to each other, enough at least to inspire one Steve Ramsden to mash-up the two films together to dramatic bathroom-window opening effect?
Quite possibly you could, especially if you had Ramsden, a self-described “Papua New Guinean-born, English-sounding filmmaker” describing what inspired him to make this glorious coming together of two quite disparate movies in the first place:
“I noticed how Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick frame their shots in a similar way – this was the result: The Grand Overlook Hotel!” (source: Live For Films)
The result is, as Perri Nemiroff from Collider correctly observes, “absolutely seamless”.
“Not only does the mashup’s creator, Steve Ramsden, find some spot-on dialogue crossovers, but he actually manages to make it look like an Overlook hallway leads right into a Grand Budapest room. And how about that coloring? I never realized how many visuals in The Shining had such a Wes Anderson feel to them.”
So while you may not want to stay in The Grand Overlook Hotel necessarily, you might be persuaded to linger long enough to appreciate the symmetry and cleverness of this most perfect of mash-ups.
At least, until Johnny comes calling.