Product: A Clockwork Orange [VHS] (1972)
Rating: 5.0
A Brightly Painted Hooker
Fete of Death"A Clockwork Orange" is one of the most lyrically beautiful, ritualistically brutal films ever made. The violence can be so off-putting that you feel compelled to turn away from the screen, but the sheer beauty of Kubrick's stylized barbarism makes it impossible to look away.The visual poetry of the film is entrancing. The premise is fascinating: that a quasi-Hobbesian futuristic society attempts to cure a nihilistic cutthroat thug (Alex) by treating him like a Pavlov dog. The rights of the individual are subjugated to the rights of the state. The film presents us with the horns of a dilemma: do we sympathize with a bloodthirsty punk like Alex, or with a cold-blooded omnipotent state that employs the methods of stimulus-response behaviorism to brainwash its individuals to conform in the name of the group?All in all, "A Clockwork Orange" comes off as emotionally bankrupt (like the society it lampoons), and therefore, emotionally uninvolving and devoid of passion, all gussied up like a brightly painted hooker, like Alex himself, for that matter, tricked out in his meritricious, eye-catching costumes.--Bryan Cassiday, author of "Fete of Death"