A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
In a near-future Britain, young Alexander DeLarge and his pals get their kicks beating and raping anyone they please. When not destroying the lives of others, Alex swoons to the music of Beethoven. The state, eager to crack down on juvenile crime, gives an incarcerated Alex the option to undergo an invasive procedure that'll rob him of all personal agency. In a time when conscience is a commodity, can Alex change his tune?
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What critics compared A Clockwork Orange to
At its best, Bronson is briefly capable of recalling the likes of A Clockwork Orange and Fight Club .
The director clearly has boned up on his source material, primarily Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” and, in a brothel sequence, David Lynch.
There are times during Bronson when it’s unclear what Refn is going for, and times when the movie seems like a derivative, extra-pretentious version of A Clockwork Orange.
(It's a second cousin to A Clockwork Orange .)
Refn gives his film a larky tone that often recalls "A Clockwork Orange" as Hardy flips back and forth from addressing the camera, often made up and from a stage, and acting out scenes from Peterson's life.
The combination of horrific violence, soaring music, and chilly stylistic precision that makes the whole thing feel like an experiment can only naturally call to mind A Clockwork Orange , which is in all ways a much better film.
Rapturous and surreal are scenes like an inky invasion of the swimming pool and a slo-mo party brawl, which play like mind-spinning trips out of A Clockwork Orange or Under The Skin.
The Seventies was a golden age for British pulp fiction (Wheatley would also have the nerve for James Herbert’s The Rats), with “the old ultra-violence” of Kubrick ’s A Clockwork Orange, like Ballard , part of a climate of gleeful, often grubby extremity.
The American poster even dares make a cocky nod to the key art for Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange.”
It’s all there on screen, stranded halfway between “ Dredd ” with all the action cut out and “A Clockwork Orange” without the incisively dark sense of humor.
There are inevitable echoes of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange here, plus overt nods to more obscure British cult movies including Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment.
Jump and Wheatley chose to locate the action of "High-Rise" in 1975, so their film is a retro-futurist nightmare, full of massive sideburns and shirt collars, as well as orgies and ennui freely inspired by the works of Lindsay Anderson ("O Lucky Man!"), Stanley Kubrick ("A Clockwork Orange") and Nicolas Roeg ("The Man Who Fell to Earth").
Yet "A.I." is also littered with Kubrick-movie references: female figures on a futuristic bridge that ape the chairs of the milk bar in "A Clockwork Orange"; interior design that pays tribute to "The Shining"; a city street right out of "Eyes Wide Shut"; and a big set piece that mirrors the lunar excavation of "2001."
(Joe is played with pizzazz by Jude Law, who recalls no one more than Malcolm McDowell in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.)
Futuristic cars travelling through forests recall "A Clockwork Orange."
In it, a robotic child longs to connect with his "mother," and this thought of whether robots could love intrigued legendary director Stanley Kubrick ("A Clockwork Orange," "Eyes Wide Shut") who then bought the rights to the tale.
It's part of the carnal London from "A Clockwork Orange" but also the post-apocalypse outback of George Miller's "Road Warrior" films with an overlay of Ridley Scott's incredible evocation of L.A. in "Blade Runner."
The seedy sex capital "Rouge City" (which Mr. Kubrick apparently wanted to be architected with phallic buildings) instead feels like a neon nightmare only slight steps away from modern day Las Vegas, rather than the Korova Milkbar of Mr. Kubrick's 1971 "A Clockwork Orange".
These plot points aren’t a total bust, yet the parallels between “Joker” and, say, another Warner Bros. classic “A Clockwork Orange” are immediate with supporting players, including Glenn Flesler, Brian Tyree Henry (and the always great Bill Camp), elevating their respective scenes, but Phillips borrows all his tone and look from other, better movies that you’d assume he could create a better origin tale than “man goes mad because of mental illness and child abuse.”
It is saturated with homages to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and King of Comedy (1982), as well as other films of that era like A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Network (1976).
Phoenix’s light-on-the-toes, vaudeville-dance-like movements are reminiscent of Alex in “A Clockwork Orange.”
Stanley Kubrick even pulled A Clockwork Orange from British distribution after a series of copycat crimes.
Regardless of my mixed feelings, I think it’s the best film about the psychological effect of violence as pop art since Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange .
In the canon of onscreen violence wrought by chillingly malevolent men, two scenes loom large: Malcolm McDowell’s macabre rendition of “Singing in the Rain” in A Clockwork Orange, and Christian Bale’s axe-swinging jive to Huey Lewis and the News in American Psycho.
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…including a Clockwork Orange-inspired home invasion that is both sickening and terrifying…
…a roving gang of ruffians who Clockwork Orange their way around the countryside wearing platinum blonde wigs and matching jumpsuits…
…with the latter bringing some dark Clockwork Orange vibes…
…make the Droogs of “A Clockwork Oranges” look like do-gooders.
…think A Clockwork Orange’s droogs…
Similar to Alex’s Droogs in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Jimmy and his Fingers, who have names like Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman), Jimmy Snake (Ghazi Al Ruffai), and Jimmima (Emma Laird), revel in the anarchy and violence they inflict on those, living and undead, they come across.
There are strong echoes of “A Clockwork Orange,” “Halloween,” and even “The Terminator” – all great films to mimic – but aside from its high concept, “The Purge” utterly fails to make a name for itself.
Soon a band of marauding preppies show up on the doorstep, cavorting with cleavers while their leader (Rhys Wakefield) does his damnedest to channel Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange.
That members of the bloodthirsty mob wear masks seems to have less to do with the rules of the movie (after all, their activities are temporarily legal) than with writer-director James DeMonaco’s desire to pay homage to “A Clockwork Orange’’ — as well as well as a raft of other, more effective movies ranging from “Straw Dogs’’ to “Funny Games.’’
Things become more complicated when a number of Purge revelers (led by a menacingly smiling Rhys Wakefield who'd make Alex from "A Clockwork Orange" proud) arrive at the house in full creep-out mode, including wearing exaggerated masks, wielding all sorts of weapons and being quite desirous of having their escaped "rabbit" (the stranger the boy let in) returned to them for the pleasure of their hunt.
It’s a startling idea—one that, if you think about it too much, is pretty much untenable, but on first glance carries a powerful philosophical charge given that it rests on the unsettling notion that human violence is inherent and therefore must be indulged in some way at some time (in this respect, it has much thematically in common with A Clockwork Orange, which suggested the futility and even immorality of eradicating violence).
It also unashamedly cribs from more disturbing films like Straw Dogs , Funny Games and A Clockwork Orange.
“A Clockwork Orange” is obviously the primary homage, but traces of “American Psycho” also sneak in – the scenes of Bruce doing drugs at the nightclub with his co-workers are surprisingly parallel to Patrick Bateman’s – and there are isolated moments of paranoia and brutal vulgarity that recall David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch” and even Martin Scorsese’s “ The Wolf of Wall Street.
It’s one of those rare films that presents you with a totally bankrupt character, and makes you want him to succeed in his illegal endeavors, not unlike Alex De Large in A Clockwork Orange.
The references to A Clockwork Orange seem leaden and obvious.
At times, this pig in a china shop suggests a descendant of Alex from “A Clockwork Orange,” and he is sometimes filmed as such, with distorting, wide-angle shots.
That, in fact, is what truly sets the film apart from its most obvious inspiration, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971).
In the film, Renton becomes the dominant figure, and he's the most distressing symbol of antiheroic nihilism since Malcolm McDowell starred in "A Clockwork Orange."
Besides smack and excrement, this punk manifesto contains a helping each of sex and bad language (delivered in a brogue that begs our full attention), an abundance of snotty energy, and, in deference to A Clockwork Orange , a little of the ol' ultraviolence.
"Trainspotting" reads like a cross between Colin MacInnes' "Absolute Beginners" and "A Clockwork Orange."
Danny Boyle, the director of Trainspotting, had his actors prepare by watching older movies: Goodfellas, The Hustler, The Exorcist, A Clockwork Orange.
This movie, with its Coen Brothers/Martin Scorsese camera angles and its scintillating rock underscore by Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Lou Reed and others, is, in some ways, a direct descendant of both "A Clockwork Orange" and "A Hard Day's Night."
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When the Wilsons try to take refuge at the Tylers, they discover that their friends have already been murdered by their own tethered in a scene that recalls Malcolm McDowell and his droogs dancing to “Singin’ in the Rain” as they make havoc in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
Act 2 still offers moments of bloody delight and inspired choices, particularly a bubbly soundtrack that runs counterpoint to the grisly action, like Kubrick’s use of “Singin’ in the Rain” in “A Clockwork Orange” (1971).
No one except Quentin Tarantino, the director Vaughn most obviously apes, is better at matching action-film set piece to music, even if Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie” still works better in Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1971).
Il s’agit également d’un domaine où Kick-Ass prouve une fois de plus toute sa perspicacité, utilisant toujours ses citations avec une intention bien définie, tel ce recours à une pièce de Rossini utilisée jadis par un certain Kubrick dans A Clockwork Orange qui viendra appuyer ici un tout autre contexte d’ultra-violence.