a fabulously bizarre spectacle

Rating: Null/10 (10 January 2004)

I'm not one for the regular predictable Hollywood all-guns-blazing blockbusters, so Clockwork Orange caught me immediately.

I've never read the original book by Burgess, but it surely seems not to have been the easiest novel to be transposed onto celluloid. Yet Kubrick has made a wonderful creation of it. It has all the designer stamps of 1970's fashion over it, so it makes for curious retro-viewing. The characters, their costumes, their language, and their visits to the 'milk bar' are all originally crafted. At first you might think that this film is going to be a couple of hours of pure excuse for erotic violence, but then a genuine profound plot starts to ensue, and then you're taken on a path with no predictability whatsoever.
I think it's a classic, but I also appreciate that the tone of it may hold wider appeal to a British audience, where it is all filmed. It has a certain darkness to it which could only stem from the grey housing estates of Northern England. I hired this video in Japan boasting to my landlord that this was a superb movie, but after 15 minutes he just reached for the off switch, claiming it was too incomprehensible (plotwise not languagewise) to follow! You need an artistic love of the surreal.