Product: A Clockwork Orange (1972)
Rating: 5.0
Brilliant
In which high government officials are seen as the moral equivalents of street thugs (just better at p.r.), demonstrating that nothing has changed in 35 years.The HD transfer is spectacular. This is how I remember the movie upon its opening in 1971. Pristine, startling, amazing.Repeated viewings over the years of worn-out circuit prints, VHS and standard-def DVD had dimmed the movie's capacity to astonish. Now, in High Definition on BluRay disc, the luminous brilliance, texture and color of the images are restored, and the richness of the images makes a tremendous difference to the film's impact. The sound is also excellent -- certainly superior to the original theatrical release in the days of optical soundtracks.In addition to the beauty of the Hi-Def picture, this is worth owning because (at last) it is a close approximation of the original theatrical aspect ratio (screen shape); the theatrical presentation being, after all, the venue for which Kubrick composed his shots. (Ignore those who claim he meant this film to be seen in full-frame 1.33:1, as in all the previous home video releases. He clearly created it to be seen in theaters, and in theaters he had the image matted to 1.66:1, which is very close to the aspect-ratio of this BluRay.Buy it; watch it on your big-screen 1080 HDTV in a dark room, uninterrupted. Real horrorshow!This is a 2-disc "Special Edition," with the same extras as the standard-def DVD in the new (2007) boxed set: commentaries, trailer, new interviews with Wm. Friedkin, Sydney Pollack, Malcolm McDowell, Wendy Carlos, Mrs. Kubrick, others.Then take advantage of the recent (2011) BluRay release of "Barry Lyndon" (1975), Kubrick's underappreciated masterpiece, which also benefits greatly from High-Definition.