Following Vidya’s post about Rushdie, and her inability to comprehend why people like his novels – let me write about a movie, supposedly a masterpiece, but I failed to fathom why. This is ‘A clockwork orange’, by Stanley Kubrick.
This movie is currently rated at 50th in the IMDB list of top movies of all time, and is hailed by many critics as a masterpiece, a satirical social commentary. Well, a social commentary of what kind of society? The hero of the film, Alex, goes on committing sickening acts of brutality, rape and violence – without any ostensible reason whatsoever. Its not like he is forced into crime due to his background, or he commits crime to earn a livelihood – he just does it for the fun of it. Then he gets thrown in jail, and is released from the prison with a condition that he will take a treatment which will make him incapable of violence – he will feel sick whenever he is about to commit an act of violence. Then Kubrick shows us how difficult it becomes for him to survive in the external world. There is some oblique point or two about the perils of mind control.
Just what is the point? You just put a bunch of crazy scenes together, along with a half-baked idea about mind control – and it becomes a masterpiece? I guess most people call it a masterpiece just because Kubrick made it – and think they would be seen as stupid, or not ‘cultured’ enough, if they do not get the point of the movie.
There is another set of infuriating commentary about movies that the same snobs make – about camera angles (“See how Kurosawa is pointing the camera at a 90 degree angle towards the clouds, to give us the message of ….”), and symbolisms (“Bergman wanted to give a message about the transience of life by the broken ink-bottle in that scene…”).
Come on, can’t we just watch movies and be moved by simple human emotions?
Imperfection
3 months ago
5 comments:
Your post has triggered a post from me as well. Read it here (http://mostlygibberish.blogspot.com/2008/07/of-movies-contd.html)
At the risk of getting my head snapped by the double-trouble duo, the movie is tied fairly closely to the novel... which presents an alternative reality scenario of the boogieman aka the germanic english culture that could have evolved had Russia/Ireland won the day and enforced mind-control of the sort to keep James Bond up at night. Remember, we're talking a perspective from 60 years back.
Personally, I ranked the really bad Kubrick as 2001:A space odyssey....
Clockwork orange fans have always puzzled me ... But never thought them as movie-snobs
Your thoughts on movies are very good.. looks like the DVD phenomenon has had a good impact on you too :)
Talking about movie reviews, bongs seem to be really good on these (sorry for the crude generalisation)... Here's a review of the latest Batman movie i thought you'd like... co-incidently Arnab (the blogger) mentions Clockwork Orange in the review!!
Thanks for visiting and posting your comments. I thought nobody was reading my blog! Any thoughts on how to make blogs more visible?
@arghya, what is the TG you want visibility with? I've usually seen that people who are discussing current issues or 'hot topics' feature more in keyword searches from google, digg et al. That may be a start.
Also, you could try linking up with more categories. People want to read about particulars, and general blogs have a tendency to get overlooked.
All the best. Happy blogging :)
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