Watched A Clockwork Orange last night, as I had read the book and wanted to see the film again to see what I thought of it now. And I thought that it was sort of shitty and that the book is way, way better. Thought that the film was a popular success, that people don't name it with The House of the Spirits and such like in the 'fuckin' atrocious films made out of good books' category, not because of any directorial genius from Stanley Kubrick, but because of Malcolm McDowell's fantastic portrayal of a flamboyantly evil prole kid.
I don't like Stanley Kubrick much - thought Barry Lyndon was a massive snore and liked Spartacus a lot, which he disowned. Maybe I would like him more if I knew more about cinema and ground-breaking cineaste techniques, but you know what? I don't. And I don't want to. I want to watch movies and not have them be big fucking snores. I want movies based on books to not change the themes of the book unless the themes of the book sucked, which the themes in A Clockwork Orange didn't.
I think this is where my hostility to the movie is coming from. Most of the reason I watched it again is that I couldn't remember how it ended, and it ends very differently from the book - with the idea that now Alex has been 'reformed' into a gleeful monster and is being let out into the world again. And this after the film has toned down his violence, depravity and animal prole-ishness (seriously) so that we have some sort of savage sympathy, the desire to cheer on that beast - in no small part thanks to Malcolm McDowell's performance, but mostly because of subtle changes to the narrative, like the age of some of his victims and an increased focus on consensual sex.
So besides playing down the class-y and violent, perverse elements of the book, the movie utterly changes the much more satisfying ending of the book which I feel all that ultraviolence was naturally leading to and nowhere else. The movie was just too fucking Hollywood in comparison; nothing but a normal heroic pattern except with an anti-hero instead.
4 commenti:
Mistress, I totally agree with you about inferiority of ACO the film to the book, esp. the ending. But here are 4 Kubricks, no 5, I still go to bat for:
1) The Killing - supergreat noir, stellar performances
2) The Shining - supergreat horror, again with the great perfs. totally different from the book, but equally great.
no wait this is a comments page. I'll stop there.
The Shining was good. That was him? Neat. The F-word swears by '2001 A Space Etc' but it doesn't have Charles Bronson in it so I'm just not interested these days.
My fave Bronson is the one in
'C'era una volta il West'
Mine too so far, although I like other Sergio Leone movies better. Wikipedia says Leone wanted Bronson in the whole 'man with no name' series instead of Clint Eastwood. In my fangirl imagination, he is.
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