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Trailer Review: In the Loop

With two awesome Beltway comedies in two years, it's pretty safe to say that David Rasche is back with a vengeance. Is it too much to hope for a new Sledge Hammer series? Wait, it is? Oh well- at least this trailer is pretty hilarious.

OST: "A Clockwork Orange"

It’s no surprise that the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s highly controversial adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ sci-fi masterpiece A Clockwork Orange would prove to be almost as great a firestarter as the movie itself. After all, music plays a huge – and hugely divisive – role in the movie: music is all that the nihilistic, savage street thug Alex DeLarge truly loves; music is what makes one of his most vicious attacks so unbearable, as he brutally attacks an innocent while crooning the main theme from the classic musical Singin’ in the Rain; and music is what makes his brainwashing ‘treatment’ at the hands of the government so objectionable, as the Ludovico Technique not only robs him of his ability to do violence, but fills him with nausea when he hears the gorgeous strains of Beethoven’s 9th.

No, But I've Read The Movie: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

It's hard to think of a movie more divisive — both at the time it was filmed and today — than Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess' dystopian social satire A Clockwork Orange. The novel was already controversial enough (the film, as brutal as it seemed upon its release in 1971, actually toned down much of the book's violence, and substituted a consensual sex scene for Alex's rape, in the novel, of two preadolescent girls), and while the film did what it could to make a savage treatment of youth violence palatable to censors, it still earned an X rating in the United States and raised such objections in the UK that Kubrick voluntarily withdrew it from release, and stipulated that it not be shown there again until after his death.

Even beyond that, both book and movie are plagued with inconsistencies, misinterpretations, and resentment: the novel was released in the United States without its critical final chapter (it was finally restored in 1986), which entirely changes the reader's perceptions of what had gone before. Kubrick himself had only a minimal interest in remaining faithful to his source material (which had been given to him as a gift by his friend and favorite writer, Terry Southern), while Burgess — paid only a pittance for the film rights — had his own misgivings about a movie version of his then-notorious book. "I feared that the cutting to the narrative bone which harmed the filmed Lolita," he said, "would turn the filmed A Clockwork Orange into a complementary pornograph — the seduction of a minor for the one, for the other brutal mayhem.

The writer's aim in both books had been to put language, not sex or violence, into the foreground; a film, on the other hand, was not made out of words." A Clockwork Orange was, indeed, made not out of words, but out of images, and it was those images — often of vicious sociopathic behavior to which the viewer is made an uncomfortable witness and even accomplice — that defines the movie just as the elegant (and deliberately deceptive) use of language defines the book.