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A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: What is wrong with Warner Brothers?
Review: Why would Warner Brothers release a collector's edition of Clockwork Orange without featuring the film in widescreen. Yes, Kubrick was rarely a user of widescreen film but in Clockwork Orange the ratio is probably 1.66:1. This is a horrendous attack on good taste and a blantant exploitation of the recently deceased Stanley Kubrick. To WB: Keep an artist's work in tact especially if you intend to exploit him selling it at 45 dollars and placing it in a cool new case.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: From hell, with fear and beauty
Review: When this film came out it was almost universally misread. One school, the late and generally great Pauline Kael for one, thought that because we almost invariably saw through junior Droog Alex's eyes, including his victims, and we are cajoled and occasionally amused or charmed by his narration, that we are invited to share his vile and violent worldview, and that the film endorses his rapes, bullyings and bashings.

Others, more worryingly, fell for Alex's superfical charms (especially as played by Malcolm McDowell, as a petulant, mod angel), Alex's clothes, his before-his-time interest in false eyelashes and make-up for men, the wit and energy of the invented slang language that Burgess endowed him with, the Russian-influenced Droogish, and his taste for synthesized Beethoven on great speakers.

Alex's moronic real-life imitators, carrying out a few sordid bashings in the UK while wearing longjohns, bovver boots and false eyelashes, were enough to have Kubrick withdraw the film from circulation from the UK for the next several decades.

But this is a moral film about violence and evil, viewed with cold precision. No excuses are made for Alex: the damage he has done to his terrified parents, to the writer he cripples (a painfully thinly-disguised Burgess) and the women he rapes and in one case kills, is shown utterly without sentiment and without flinching. Nor are sentimental ideas about the redeeming value of culture allowed to stand. Alex's love for Beethoven has no humanising significance; it only makes him a thug with good taste in music.

(Music trivia footnote: the smart 1980s electrofunk band Heaven 17 [_We don't need that fascist groove thang_, _Penthouse and Pavement_ and other minor-but-cool hits] take their name from a fictitious band named in the film, whose records are prominently displayed in the record store scene. Intelligent pop with a conscience; Alex would have hated them.)

Alex is an evil product of an evil culture, and is at times only a pathetic pawn in the larger games of police, prison wardens, priests, probation officers, psychologists, at least those specalising in aversion therapy, and of course politicians. But his "suffering", once he been conditioned to be incapable of violence and is vulnerable to the revenge of those he has bullied in the past, does not win our sympathy. Nor is it meant to. Rather it is part of a bitter and general condemnation of moral corruption in our lives and structures.

Both book and movie are also a product of fear. Burgess was in real life attacked, his wife raped: his use of this experience in his fiction is both an invocation and an exorcism of demons. And Kubrick, like Burgess, was perhaps once the class intellectual, observing and no doubt picked on by the school bully, fearful, angry and puzzled by the apparent attractiveness of evil, even in its junior forms. Kubrick is no fan or apologist for violence, which is shown in stylised, often balletic form, but always as horrifying, as leading to real pain.

Kubrick's vision offers no hope, unlike Burgess, who offers Alex an unconvincing form of redemption; no hope except perhaps for the satirist's hope that if we see evil with a cold eye, for what it is and what it does, we may learn to reject it.

This is also an extraordinary film at a visual level, a film of unparalelled originality and strangeness of design and cinematography. Kubrick's visual world in this film, populated by erotic barbie-dolls serving as tables, drugs hiding in milk, eerily lit mansions and burnt-out housing estates, each looking as unwelcoming as the other, is actually colder than the outer space of _2001: A Space Odyssey_, and in some ways it is not only more sinister but also and uncomfortably more beautiful.

I haven't mentioned acting except for Malcolm McDowell's, but in fact Kubrick's cast is uniformly excellent: efficient, credible, and almost invariably loathsome.

The music, Beethoven, Purcell, Rossini and others, often synthesised by Walter (later Wendy) Carlos is justly famous: one of the most tellingly-selected soundtracks ever assembled, with the possible exception of _2001_ itself.

This is a cold, horrifying film. Though it offers several moments of bitter humour, some of which are shockingly funny in their context, as well as the linguistic gusto of Droog-speak, it is not a "fun" film. But it is an important film, one of the classic films, along with _M_ and a few others, about non-supernatural evil.

DVD "extras" for this release are disappointing: no commentary and little else of extra value. However the picture and sounds are crisp and clear, as this film absolutely must be, with its insistence on the clear, cold eye. Recommended.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: This is a thoroughly bizarre masterpiece. This movie takes you through the narrative of Alex telling the story of his adventure from troublemaker, to convict, to reformed citizen, and back to troublemaker.

It is a very bold and forward movie, with many disturbing scenes of violence, and sexual assault.

Over all I thought this was a brilliant movie. The cinematography was excellent. The musical score is incredible, and the acting is superb!

Buy this movie today, you won't be disappointed.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: "I was cured, all right"
Review: Certaintly a movie that needs to be seen to be fully realized, Clockwork Orange holds up as a cult classic over time and ages well. Malcolm McDowell is at the top of his form, playing "Alex" firmly tounge-in-cheek that you can't help but sympathize with our anti-hero. Highly recommended for anyone who desires to be challenged.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: pointless movie
Review: indeed, this movie has no point or lessons to be learned as with just about every stanley kubrick movie. the man has perfected the art of speaking without saying anything. but i guess that doesn't really matter because the movie is just so good. a bad bad boy and his fellow droogies go around doing bad things until the lead droogie 'alex' gets arrested and eventually enlists in a special correctional program. the program works but not as expected, so they return little alex back to his old demonic self. what's the point? i don't know. it's just a very interesting movie. see it if you like sick stuff. there's worse than this, but no doubt this is rather weird. the movie has an impeccable sense of style and a very spooky feel to it. it's also worth noting that the tripped out acid piano renditions of beethoven are topnotch and i would love to find a soundtrack for this.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Poor
Review: I watched an edited version of this "masterpiece" and was disappointed. I gather that the prime objective was to challenge the ideology of a politically-motivated, self-righteous society and the value of individualism but the director simply fails to coherently develop that idea in anything concrete leaving the audience bemused in the end.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: coolest movie ever
Review: This movie really takes you for a ride down a long dark road, it's fabulous.One of the best if not THE best movie of all time.Someone must know of the features in this set!
Please share them with the rest of us.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: simply a masterpiece
Review: On so many different levels does this movie, based on the novel by Anthony Burgess, excell. Many will take one look at this film and abruptly deem it "disgusting" or "sadistic." But look closer, and you will find an incredible performance on multiple levels. From the cinematography, which makes you feel a as if you are a part of Alex (the lead character), and the soundtrack, which at first boggles your mind with the pieces selected, until your realize that there are none more fitting to accompany the story, to the obvious ideals and statements on society which Burgess realized and Kubric conveyed. In my mind, one of, if not the greatest books of all time transformed into one of, if not the greatest movies of all time. An all around masterpiece. A movie for which 5 stars simply does not do it justice.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Kubrick's Best
Review: Only the square kids dont think this movie has all the jive lingo.For you square's i suggest you go check out the barney video ya dig . This is classic and square's need not apply as the performances were top notch and the music was very learned .To The Xtreme ,on the flipside if you catch what I am saying

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A design masterpiece
Review: Narratively, Clockwork Orange is a design masterpiece. Perfectly symmetrical in structure, the scenes in the first half of the movie echo scenes in the second:Alex and his droogs's attack on the beggar is reversed in the second half as the beggar exacts his revenge with the help of his friends; Alex's attack on his droogs is echoed in the second half as they attack him; Alex arrives on the doorstep of the writer F.Alexander's house, this time as a helpless victim and not an aggressor.In the second half, the tables are cinematically turned on the protagonist.As a result, however morally repulsive we might find the film's c violent content, the aesthetic "packaging" draws us in as accomplices.


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