Today’s consumers don’t have to answer that age-old question, the book or the movie, any more.
Some of today’s new Blu-ray releases, including the just-released edition of “The Terminator” and the upcoming “Papillion,” come in a book-like package featuring invaluable text and imagery from the film in question.
Take “A Clockwork Orange,” set to make its Blu-ray release May 31 in time for its 40th anniversary. The film comes in a handsome hardbound cover along with classic photos from the film and details of “Orange’s” legacy.
Did “A Clockwork Orange” inspire real-life “ultra-violence?” Did director Stanley Kubrick, who received some death threats in the wake of the film’s release, push on-screen violence too far? Kubrick himself petitioned to have the film yanked from English theaters, and the film returned to its native soil only after the director’s death in 1999, according to the book.
The package also includes some fun “Orange” trivia:
- David “Darth Vader” Prowse has a small role in the film as a bodyguard.
- “Halloween II” by Rob Zombie had “Orange” star Malcolm McDowell riffing on one of the film’s lines, “nice and sparkling clear…”
- “A Clockwork Orange” and “Midnight Cowboy” are the only two films to receive both an X rating and a Best Picture nomination.
(Photo: Malcolm McDowell plays a violent young man forced into a social engineering experiment in “A Clockwork Orange.” Warner Bros. Entertainment)
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
It seems like a nice package, if I had a BluRay player…and liked A Clockwork Orange. My problem with this story, movie and book both, is the whatchamallit procedure is supposed to be just so terrible, but after the crap Alex does, you’d be perfectly content watching him star in a contest between Imperial Roman and Qing Chinese corrections professionals (“death by a thousand cuts while crucified!”). If your dystopian vision has us rooting for the evil brainwashing, you have messed it up, droog.
More a complaint about the book than about the movie, is that it encouraged far too many other writers who think it’s okay to use an invented slang in their narrative. It’s a miracle it worked in Orange; a smart man doesn’t count on miracles happening a second time.
I actually laughed pretty hard the first hour of “A Clockwork Orange,” while being absolutely horrified at the same time.