a clockwork orange
kubrick is one of my favorite directors of all time so it's obviously absurd that i'd never seen this before and i'm very glad it was nominated. i'd heard mixed things about this one but it always intrigued me. seems to be the most divisive of kubrick's major works, with plenty of people citing it as a favorite but it's also perhaps the most oft-cited least favorite. i fall decidedly into the latter category, but i get why people love it i suppose. it was pretty thrilling to get to get a whole 2+ hours of kubrick shot compositions and camera movements that i had (mostly) never seen before. the whole film is as impeccably designed as anything he's done, but it's all just an aesthetic covering for the rather banal nihilism at the film's center. the first third has some disturbing stuff but it all feels so empty. i suppose the decision to depict such depravity with a sense of objectivity is an interesting choice on kubrick's part, but it just left me cold, feeling nothing when i probably should've at least been shocked or something. we see people raped and killed while the camera remains fairly indifferent, and the only person we're ever really asked to empathize with is alex. i have no problem with movies that want you to care about an evil person, but they're easier to stomach when they don't also dehumanize the victims. i have plenty of problems with lars von trier's version of shock value, but i recently watched
the house that jack built and the reason that film works so well is that it forces you to fully feel the weight of how evil matt dillon is by allowing the victims to feel recognizably human and sympathetic. i think i enjoyed the last third of this the most, when the societal critique fully emerges, but even then i couldn't bring myself to care enough to get fully invested.
with that said, there's lots of redeeming stuff in this. malcolm mcdowell was a perfect sociopathic miscreant. i've seen a lot of reviews that sht on the performances of patrick magee and michael bates, but i thought they kinda ruled, even if bates got tiring after a while and i couldn't understand most of what he said. and like i said, the film is perfect on a purely formal level. if you dropped any scene from this movie into another movie, ignoring the fact that it wouldn't make sense contextually, i would be like "damn that's the best scene in the movie, holy sht," but taken together they just leave me cold. the definition of a film that's less than the sum of its parts.
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