glorious indulgence in weirdness

Rating: 9/10 (3 May 2006)

the indulgence in weirdness, in dark weirdness, in "weirding out," the impulsive action, the giving into momentary impulse. The same sort of indulgence is in the language itself, in the joy of phonetics, saying the word that pleases at that moment, that satisfies the hunger to make a certain sound. The book, of course, offers a greater capacity to enjoy the weirdness of language than does the movie. But the movie has its dialog, and furthermore, what it lacks in verbal narration (thank god it doesn't read the book aloud to us) it makes up for by using music, thereby exploiting an aspect of the film medium that is lacking from literature and other purely verbal media. The movie and the book are both great in their own rights, respectively, though it is fair to judge the movie in terms of Burgess's book, which, as I'm sure all of you know, has a different ending. Speaking of the ending, consider the significance of 21 chapters versus 20 chapters, think of 21 as a number, being 3 7's (7 * 3).