My Rating: 91/100

Pollice Verso: 👍

Suggestion: listen while you read, the old Ludwig Van:

To say A Clockwork Orange is the strangest film I’ve ever seen would be slanderous to the word strange. It’s the type of weirdness on knife’s edge between lunacy and genius, and my socially-adjusted self wants so badly to mark it the former. And yet I’m disturbed by how much I enjoyed it.

Stanley Kubrick’s psychotic trip follows Alex, a protagonist like no other, in the sense that you would get along just fine in a world where no one conceives of such a singularly grotesque character ever again. He’s like your prototypical antihero but with as little of the hero part as you can have while still being labelled an antihero. Indeed the only thing heroic about him is how he manages to not be institutionalized before the events of the film take place. And whereas usually those types of characters tend, like the Joker, to garner audience sympathy as victims of some outside force like a cruel society, or bullying, or their parents, Alex deserves no such absolution. He is the unmoved mover of his own immorality, evil to his rotten core and constantly sliding further into wickedness as he spends more time breathing his own air.

Somehow, despite this, you sort of have to root for Alex. The central question of the film requires it. It is a question of crime and punishment and free will. One of those late-night college dorm room type moralistic questions about the purpose of punishment and corrective action. Is it right to punish someone for a past crime if you can be certain, without the use of further punishment, they will never commit such crimes in the future? And would you even be punishing the same person if that person no longer has free will to even commit said crime?

As much as those questions can be fun to punt around with friends over whiskey, I found the sort of aesthetic focal point of the film much more moving. It is a noticeably peculiar aesthetic, consisting of ugly exterior epiderma of a post-industrialist city that give way to overeroticized baroque interior spaces. You are literally hit on the head with this theme as Alex bashes one of his victims dead with a giant rocking penis sculpture. It is, as they say, as queer as a clockwork orange.

Besides being a feast for the eyes, the film’s aesthetic is its sort of raisons d'être. We are in Alex’s world. And Alex's world is both a playground and a battleground, where the rules of right and wrong are blurred by Beethoven and brutality. The beauty only a thin cushion at the nadir of a high-dive of bottomless moral corruption. If one were to strip away our protagonist’s violence, we would be left with a still bellicose and schizo passion.

Taken together — the reprehensible antihero, the quandary of crime and punishment and free will, the aesthetic — what does it all mean?

For me personally, it meant hearing myself saying what the fuck out loud in response to how many times I’ve said what the fuck in the span of any given five minute interval of glazed-eye viewing. Those what the fucks provided the melodious background chorus for the rest. Violence is currency. Control is illusion. Art is freedom.

My Rating: 81/100

Pollice Verso: 👎

I actually went into Saving Private Ryan expecting to cry and I didn’t so I was disappointed, if that makes any sense. I know that seems perverse to want to cry in a movie, to be bummed it wasn’t sad enough, but that’s how I felt.

It’s like when your friend hypes up a restaurant. He tells you it’s the best steak he’s ever had and you need to go there. And when you decide to go — mostly to shut him up — you order the steak and it’s good. It’s good, but it’s not the best steak you’ve ever had. Now, actual quality of the steak notwithstanding, you probably would have liked that same restaurant in another universe where your friend didn’t promise you the sacred cow. But here your expectations practically served disappointment on a silver platter.

That was Saving Private Ryan. Sad, but not that sad.

Before you call me a soulless psychopath for this take, consider this:

One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.

— Joseph Stalin

Now, ignoring the fact that I’m stealing a quote from Joseph Stalin in defense against my own psychopathy, you should see my point. SPR plays like a statistic, horrific in its death toll but hardly tragic. An inch deep and a mile wide — both figuratively and literally — as we follow Captain John H. Miller and co. across France in his suicide mission to save Private Ryan.

What makes something tragic is one death, but one very, very deep death that affects you. Think about the most famous tragedies of all time. Hamlet is so tragic because we follow the character Hamlet the entire time as he descends into madness. His uncle murders his father, he doesn't trust his mother, everything's crumbling around him, and we get deep into Hamlet's psychology. That's what makes it so tragic. If all the cast of characters just died and there wasn't this rich dialogue revealing the interiority of the character, we wouldn't really care.

And that's the whole point. In Saving Private Ryan, the characters don't feel like real people with deep layers of psychology from which to relate. They feel like numbers, like a news report or a history textbook. For that reason, I'd say the movie kind of failed for me. It should have spent much more time in the POV of one character, maybe the translator, because he seems to be the closest to someone the viewer could connect with, just filtered through his eyes watching this whole thing unfold. Spending less time on these different scenes of cataloging what's going on in a numbingly clinical way.

Major gripe with SPR aside, the only reason it deserves a place on the AFI100 comes down to production. It’s a masterpiece especially considering its release in 1998. The film opens with cinematic stress disorder in the form of an overwhelming half hour D-Day sequence. It is simultaneously the worst and best part of the entire two and half plus hours. Bullets fly in head-spinning directions. And limbs. At one point the filming submerges us underwater where you legitimately wonder whether you’ll be hit by a bullet before you drown. It’s horrifying, and yet you can’t pull your head away. This lasts for some amount of time that leaves you so numb by the end that you no longer fidget in your seat watching the bunker-gunners being burned alive.

That first scene will be etched in my memory forever. It will remind me, production-wise, of the brilliance SPR in its dealings with the macabre, rivaled only by Platoon. Not much else will be remembered, not-so-sadly.