A most unusual and disorienting movie experience

Rating: 10/10 (4 June 2018)

Stanley Kubrick's ninth film, "A Clockwork Orange," is a brilliant and dangerous work, but it is dangerous in a way that brilliant things sometimes are, because it is a movie of such manifold, contradictory effects that it can easily be seen in many ways and may well be wrongly used by a number of people who see it.
Although the film, like Anthony Burgess's novel from which it is adapted, is cast as futurist fiction, it is much more a satire on contemporary society than are most futurist works, all of which, if they are worth anything, are meaningful only in terms of the society that bred them. It may even be a mistake to describe the movie "A Clockwork Orange" as futurist in any respect, since its made-up teenage language, its dÃ©cor, its civil idiocies, its social chaos, or their equivalents, are already at hand, although it's still possible for most of the people to ignore a lot of them.
It seems to me that by describing horror with such elegance and beauty, Kubrick has created a very disorienting but human comedy, not warm and lovable, but a terrible sum- up of where the world is at. With all of man's potential for divinity through love, through his art and his music, this is what it has somehow boiled down to: a civil population terrorized by hoodlums, disconnected porno art, quick solutions to social problems, with the only "hope" for the future in the vicious Alex.
In my opinion, Kubrick has made a movie that exploits only the mystery and variety of human conduct. And because it refuses to use the emotions conventionally, demanding instead that we keep a constant, intellectual grip on things, it's a most unusual and disorienting movie experience.
10 out of 10.