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Um, BREAKING NEWS, Daredevil has been cancelled but...A Christmas Prince: A Royal Wedding was just been released on Netflix! I'm happy with this trade.

I think Amy's words are getting twisted around. She wasn't saying that the victims deserve to get assaulted or killed. She said that Kubrick made the choice to make the victims seem unlikable and therefore unsympathetic.

I agree with a lot of this. I also feel like I was giving this film short shrift a little bit in my comment, since I focused on why I could see an argument for voting against it. So let me try to mount more of a defense or full-throated praise. It seems to be generally true that people respond more to A Clockwork Orange when they're young and see it fade as they age. It's the same for me . . . but I'm not sure if that has to be a big strike against it. I will say that when I first saw this movie at 18, it wasn't just something I loved, it was something that opened my eyes to the possibilities of what cinema could do. This wasn't just a comedy or an action movie, it was a movie that used dark humor and violence to first shock your sensibilities and then after grabbing you by the scruff, forced you to examine the disturbing consequences of those actions and the response to it. It delivered a bracing inquisition in to fundamental moral questions: Alex is terrible, but what do you do with someone like that? If you take away his ability to do bad, was that a victory? Did it make society safer, or did it just ensure the violence came from somewhere else? Was it worth the removal of his humanity? Maybe when you're young you need something like this to kind of get in your face and force you to start thinking philosophically about moral issues, even if it's a bit shaggy and unsubtle about doing so. There is value in that. Though perhaps not as much as with something like 2001, I do still keep finding relevance in the movie and new things to explore. For example, upon this most recent viewing I was struck by its commentary on the criminal justice system. The government's treatment of Alex isn't just cold during the Ludovico treatment, their cruelty also continues afterward, when they just toss him back out into the world with no further support system. We see how that goes: Alex's old friends come around (as cops!) to torment him, his former victims try to exact revenge, his family are nervous around him, even perfect strangers (Joe the lodger) immediately treat him as a pariah. To me this was a great illustration of why recidivism rates are so high. Also, the KISS of movies? I don't think so. I never heard a KISS song that even pretended to be about anything other than partying or chasing girls. I'd say the closer musical parallel is early gangsta rap -- music that does carry a social critique or message, but one that is sometimes drowned out by the violence and misogyny on the surface.

I like to think of myself more as an if only so I'm not enslaved to a very creepy old man. And also because Debbie Reynolds is EVERYTHING.

I have my room started. Not sure how to get the link. Found it. Thanks Grudlian! The Google extension made it much easier. Here's my room

I took a film class in university in which the professor loved Kubrik. Like to him Kubrik wasn't a filmmaker but rather the second coming. As a result I think we covered all his films from 2001 to Eyes Wide Shut in class. Naturally we covered A Clockwork Orange and he went into a whole lecture about it and what it means and everything like it. He was also in the dark comedy camp as well. I remember him talking a bit how the message of the film is so obscure that people miss it and it is embraced for the wrong reason, kinda like Taxi Driver or Fight Club. There is a certain type of male that embraces these characters as examples of cool or what they should be while missing the point of the film. Needless to say I liked the movie. After university I watched several Kubrik films several teams again. 2001 and Dr. Strangelove I both really love and watched regularly. I was also one of those people that defends the second half of Full Metal Jacket. However Clockwork Orange never really got a rewatch. I would just regurgitate what my professor told me to people. Then for Unspooled I went back and watched the movie again, and for me it didn't hold up. This whole movie to me came down to a feeling of wanting to have its cake and eat it too. We are going extreme to prove a message or a point so why not push it as far as we can. It is also the like Amy was saying the hold of Alex up on a pedestal. I found him unlikable, as we are suppose to, but I just found him uninteresting as well. There is no real depth to his character. "He's a thug but he loves art and classic music." Great, that's not depth. And again how the whole thing goes out of its way to dehumanize the women they attack and have the victims "ask for it" yet when Alex as the victim is sympathetic. I get that this can be due to the unreliable narrator aspect of it. We just have to accept that this is all his twisty version of events start to finish, but since I don't care about Alex why do I care to hear his fantasy. I kinda want the shoe to drop if that was the case, but that's just me personally. I also don't know if it is also a lot of the ideas I've now seen done in other films that I enjoy more. While not the exact same I think American Psycho is a better example of a dark comedy with an unreliable narrator from an ultraviolent book.

Not me, I bailed after an hour. Suck it, Kubrick! Yeah, the movie screams 2edgy4me to me.

Deck the Halls is an Iconic Classic @hdtgm

Big spoiler for the Rocky movies in this ep, in case anyone hasn't seen them all. Like me.

Sorry for the multiple posts - I'm catching up on the episode - but what did raise my eyebrow was at Amy's statement that art should make you feel uncomfortable. While I agree that it's great if "art" makes you think or maybe even consider distressing or foreign concepts, it shouldn't be the only criteria for judging whether you like that art. I felt like Amy didn't really have much defense for the movie, but in the end she even preferred it over Taxi Driver because of this one criterion. I don't get it.

I definitely raised an eyebrow when Paul said that Kubrick made the rape scenes "engaging."

Amy gave the examples you provided above. Amy's take was those were Kubrick's decisions and she interpreted that as the victims being unlikable. It seems like a case of you not agreeing with Amy and that's fine, but don't twist her words to make it seem like Amy is victim blaming. (ETA: Not you specifically)

This would be an excellent choice. I watched this repeatedly when I was a kid, and in retrospect I'm sure it was terrible.

I don't know how to respond to this, given that I've watched the movie many times and clearly have gotten more than that out of it. I'll just say that I disagree completely.

I just wanted to reiterate that Amy and Paul missed the mark on their summary of this film. The entire film is from the perspective of an “unreliable narrator” that is in a delusion. He isn’t presented at all as sympathetic, he thinks of himself, the humble narrator, as sympathetic. Also. after his suicide attempt, he is back to his old self; therefore, he is “cured” of the treatment, not “cured” by the treatment.

Yeah. The HDTGM classics is typically through Amazon. As I recall from when I hosted, you can just maximize the Amazon player in rabbit and it works like normal.

Comedian and actor Will Ferrell feels awkward about being Conan O’Brien’s friend. Will joins Conan along with trusty assistant Sona Movsesian and producer Matt Gourley to reflect on his unmatched commitment to comedy, sharing humble roots with Conan at The Groundlings, feeling good about bad reviews, and remembering the comedy bit Will performed on Late Night that got them both in trouble with Lorne Michaels. Plus, Conan answers questions from fans about hair, Star Wars, and staff favorites. Got a question for Conan? Call our voicemail: (323) 451-2821. Will Ferrell’s new movie Holmes and Watson opens in theaters December 21st. For Conan videos, tour dates and more visit TeamCoco.com.

Vanity

Tinto Brass was originally going to do Clockwork at one point, but then he went off and did The Howl (his only movie that I've seen) and Kubrick grabbed the rights to the book or something. This was after Brass' phase of doing softcore porn and before his later phase of doing softcore porn. What I'm saying is, yeah, this was a genre film. Though that doesn't make it mutually exclusive from being an art film. Kubrick's my favorite director, like Sycasey, I don't think this is a top 5 Kubrick. Like everyone else, I liked it a lot more when I was young. It's one of the few Kubrick's that actually got weaker for me over time. That said as I was rewatching it, I still enjoy the hell out of it (well, not the main rape scene. That is... uncomfortable). That said, I enjoy The Warriors, but if you were to strip all the weird characters out of The Warriors, I'd enjoy that movie a lot less. I would not place The Warriors on the AFI top 100 list. At least, I don't think. It seems like "in the bottom 50" anything goes with people. I think I had a point there, but then lost it. Oh well.

Nah I dunno, I don't think anyone involved thought they were making 'art' here. I think they knew it was comedy/irony/confrontational/basic, and were not trying to hide it under the guise of anything higher. So yea in a way... it's punk rock. () It's also, like Taxi Driver, only bro-core if you think you have to relate to Alex. You don't. You shouldn't. Good lord, you shouldn't. Is that how people watch this? I had the same defense of Taxi Driver. Who is doing this? Is it that difficult to realize a movie where you do NOT have to relate to the main character? If you're watching this and cheering Alex on, wtf. And I don't even particularly like Clockwork... but I do think it is more than just shock.

Agreed on all points. It seems pretty obvious to me that Alex is the quintessential example of the "unreliable narrator." AlmostAGhost theorized above that the whole movie might be simply a fever dream of Alex's and not really happening . . . I wouldn't go that far, but the presentation is definitely subjective and highly tilted towards Alex's POV. That's why the other characters come off poorly, IMO -- Alex sees the older people as stuffed-shirt fuddy-duddies just there to be used for whatever he can get from them. He thinks the violence is fun and playful. Of course, as soon as violence is directed back towards him, it's seen very differently. Does Kubrick empathize with Alex? Maybe. I'm not sure if it's that or that he is deliberately trying to place the audience in Alex's shoes as a challenge to our morality. It's also very possible that he just doesn't want to do the obvious thing and present Alex's actions as clearly evil from the beginning; that might not leave the movie anywhere to go after the opening scenes. On the podcast they also discussed the film's relationship to Burgess' novel, and Amy claimed it was a "bad" adaptation because it didn't share the same moral viewpoint Burgess had. I'm not sure about that. I'm reminded of a more recent film, directed by someone often compared to Kubrick: The Social Network. That's another movie where there seems to be a differing point of view between writer and director: Aaron Sorkin's script tells you Mark Zuckerberg is an asshole, but David Fincher's direction kind of wants you to admire him. IMO, that makes for a richer film experience, to have these competing ideas about the same person coming at you throughout. A Clockwork Orange is an even more extreme version, but I think there's something similar going on here. You're getting BOTH messages: Alex is reprehensible, AND ALSO sympathetic. It's not either/or.

I know this is an old video (and there are other versions) but I saw this again last night and recognized more movies thanks to Musical Mondays. This link is for the search results showing other versions.

What gigi-tastic might look like...

Presumably, The Kool Aid Man and Joe Camel was already taken.