Some thoughts about A Clockwork Orange

Rating: 9/10 (3 May 1999)

I have to agree with a previous comment about the detractors of this movie; it seems this is not the right movie for people who just wanna see the classic psycho movie characters and be scared (while laugh at the characters' foolishness inside). This is not that kind of movie; so just watch The Shining (a really good movie, btw) instead of this if that's what you want. ACO isn't, indeed, an easy movie; Stanley Kubrick did a wonderful job in trying to make the audience identify in Alex's character, while keeping Alex's character himself so unbelievably real that sometimes you think Malcolm McDowell was real crazy. That's probably why the movie is psychologically shocking (and no, you don't see that much blood or straight violence on the screen). This is not, indeed, a movie translation of the novel itself: although they share the sharp sense of humour of Alex's narrative, the story is slightly different, and the reader doesn't identify with "the novel's Alex" that much; as Burgess himself said, the movie is "Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange", the book is "Anthony Burgess' a Clockwork Orange". I'd say their aim was pretty different: Burgess' primary one was probably to describe society dehumanization, Kubrick wanted to show how criminals aren't "aliens" and sometimes respectable people aren't better than them. This is, probably, why the movie was dubbed "disgusting" by so many people. The movie is visually really different from anything else ever appeared on the screen: not at all hollywood-looking (nothing fancy looking here), and maybe that's another reason why the "anti" camp is still pretty big; nevertheless, I think Kubrick did a wonderful job in describing those "futurible" suburbs. One final note: the movie described a very close future when it came out; now it's probably more like "an alternate world", although really close to ours. That's why the movie itself still keeps his scary fascination.
10/10