Review of A Clockwork Orange (1971) by Filipeneto — 13 May 2018

I never liked this movie. It's based on a book I have not read yet, I've never found it for sale, so I can not judge if it was true to the book. However, most people seem to have a consensual opinion that this movie is brilliant and one of the best ever made. It's a nuisance movie in its very nature, as it tackles too brutal themes. It basically speaks of extreme violence and the possible ways to control it through brainwashing and absolute control over people. It's a world that no one really wants to see. If violence is something we condemn, extreme violence is disgusting. The total conditioning of a person reminds us of the times of slavery and the man as object. These are ideas that our civilization, at great cost, has learned to hate, but we all won with it. These themes would make an excellent movie and this movie would have been great if it did not overdo it all through barbarically graphic and unnecessary scenes! And the film gets worse as it shows to the public plentiful bursting and destruction, accompanied - surprise, or perhaps not - by scenes of nudity and almost explicit sex. Stanley Kubrick filled the vast majority of his films with generous doses of blood and semen. He has always seemed obsessed with all this, and I am sure that Freud would make a rather interesting analysis of that, so why would it be different in his "magnum opus"? In the midst of all this monument to madness, we must recognize that the film tackles a complex subject and has an interesting history, although it is so abject that it ends up not worth the effort to watch. Perhaps in the future someone with courage will remake this movie in a more restrained manner, without exaggerate. We also emphasized Malcolm McDowell's excellent performance. The actor, still relatively young, went to the limit, accepting things that I, in his shoes, would not accept, and manage to maintained the interpretive level and shine. For this, he deserves congratulations.

From the point of view of detail and technique, its possible that this is one of the best films ever made. But we are too shocked to notice and appreciate. And the truth is that cinema is not only technique. The audience does not fill the theater to admire the way the camera moves, the color and light of cinematography, the quality of characterization. The essence of any movie is the story told and, in this case, it's the story of a nightmare. Does the conception of a cinematographic work of art need, necessarily, to shock or cause erections? In the past, art was beauty and perfection, and I still think of art in that way.