movie comment - A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

[Dave (imported)]

the RETRO channel showed A CLOCKWORK ORANGE tonight and because I ahd to have something on the TV (don't ask why) I put the movie on.

I forgot just how violent the movie was. It still holds up and hasn't aged.

And no, it wasn't Banned in Britain.

And yes, people hate the book.

[StefanIsMe (imported)]

Truly brutal movie, for it's time and even today. The whole dust-up in the modern house, where the gang rapes and murders the older couple, is most disturbing.

I liked the book, though.

[MacTheWolf (imported)]

I never read the book but I enjoyed the movie especially seeing the unique milk dispensers

[Riverwind (imported)]

Some how I think I missed it, and I am thinking that was a good thing.

River

[tugon (imported)]

Will not watch it. A rape scene sure kicks up too many flashbacks. I appreciate the warning.

[Dave (imported)]

I don't class this with torture porn (as it is called) like HOSTEL or SAW (both series) and having see those once, don't want to see them again.

Anthony Burgess wrote a novel of social commentary on (if I can borrow a phrase) crime and punishment. At the time, there was a great movement to social engineering and criminal rehabilitation by chemicals and other means. Rather than deal with rehabilitation in the harder and truer forms of changing the person's attitude and showing them life is worth living the right way, the social engineers and politicians tried to use chemicals to shorten and ease the process.

That sounds like a dreadful movie. It isn't. This is Kubrick being brilliant and creating a vision of a dystopic future.

In the book, Burgess writes of Free Will and asked if crime can be committed by someone who doesn't have free will? He wrote scathing commentary on the politicians involved and their pandering to the public.

The violence is all in the movie but not glorified. Alex DeLarge (the Malcolm McDowell character) is a rotten little bastard who is betrayed by his own troop and given a life sentence and then the "CURE" ... but the cure leaves him victim to society itself and what is visited on him after the cure is as much a crime as what he does in the beginning. Alex Delarge has been disassembled, altered and fixed, and returned to society as a mechanical, half-man subject to perpetual punishment.

[StefanIsMe (imported)]

Thank you, Dave. You made all the points I wanted to but was too lazy to write above (I wrote at 1:30 am after a party). The book, especially, was much more high-minded than the average reader realized.

[Twinsenboy (imported)]

"If a man cannot choose (between being good or evil), he ceases to be a man."

Oh, and the milk in the movie is actually supposed to be testosterone according to Kubrick's own concept drawings:

www.collativelearning.com/ACO%20chapter%2013%20.html

"Come and get one in the yarbles, if ya have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou!"

=D

[Dave (imported)]

"If a man cannot choose (between being good or evil), he ceases to be a man."

...

The movie is violent in the same way SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is violent.

[A-1 (imported)]

Some how I think I missed it, and I am thinking that was a good thing.

River

Unless you really wanted to see a over-endowed young lass run across a stage completely naked after a gang assaults her it probably is. Honestly, I thought that one

of those bouncing "orbs" was going to knock her out cold.

The movie i

s violent in the same way SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is violent.

I do not agree with this. War and miscreants are entirely two different phenomena. Malcolm McDowell is a good actor, however. I enjoyed immensely Roy Schider shooting down Malcolm McDowell's helicopter in Blue Thunder. I cannot say the same thing for the rapings and the muggings in Clockwork Orange, however.

The only thing I enjoyed was the young, naked girl running with her boobs bouncing. I did not enjoy the circumstances portrayed under which it happened.