Kubrick's best film

Rating: Null/10 (16 September 2001)

I guess I am what you would call a complete non-fan of Stanley Kubrick, although I would never call him a pervert (displaying sex in your films hardly makes you this) or proclaim thankfulness at his passing away. I do, however, find that it is hard to enjoy all but two of his films: Dr. Strangelove and this one.
The reason why A Clockwork Orange is Kubrick's best effort is because it is his most faithful adaptation. Just about every Kubrick film was based on literature of some sort, and he almost always messed up translating it to screen. You can see this in Full Metal Jacket, where he leaves out more than half of The Short Timers in spite of its very short length. A Clockwork Orange also sees Kubrick leaving out details of his source material, but in all but one case, these weren't important. I'll deal with the one that is.
Stanley Kubrick's conception of the ending was based upon the American version of the novel, which simply ends with Alex having the effects of the Ludovico technique reversed. While this is a neat ending that allows one to speculate about his next step in life, it cuts out the very heart of Anthony Burgess' story, one that is especially relevant in this day and age where child psychologists are shoving Ritalin down children's necks like mobsters electrocuting dogs so they'll be hungrier to tear into one another. That point, in a nutshell, is that being bad by choice is far preferable to being good because you have no other option. When Alex is suffering the vengeance of the so-called good folk, you just wish he could get up and start smacking the crap out of them again. In the chapter of the novel when he gets that back, seeing him make the choice to live a normal, peaceful existence anyway is a great triumph of the will over mind control. Not including that in the film was a big mistake, and it is a matter of record that Burgess was more than a little upset with the US publisher as a result.
The reason why Kubrick's film is preferable to the novel, however, is that the novel often borders on being incomprehensible. Rather than asking you to read and try to decipher a very unstructured slang, the film just shows you what Alex is talking about, giving it to you in clear red, green, and blue. The novel is very rewarding if you get through it, but it smacks of having been written as a political statement and takes a lot of effort, which gets in the way of the horror factor. Sometimes, being able to sit back and watch is a big advantage.
Nonetheless, Kubrick's film has earned him my respect as a filmmaker. He did this his way, he tried to make art in his pictures, and he even managed to succeed at points like this. Which is more than I can say for the Wachowskis and Tarantinos of this world.