Director: Andy Warhol
Year Released: 1965
Rating: 2.0
A man lifts weights, dances to a Martha and the Vandellas song, is "arrested" and gagged in Warhol's "adaptation" of Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange ... and by "adaptation" I mean, "Andy may have read a page or two of the book and chucked it away." It isn't "good" in any real sense cinematically speaking - everyone's doing line readings and they can't actually act, the camera remains largely motionless, the plot is non-existent - but there is something claustrophobic and a little disturbing about it, like avant-garde theater done by sadistic drug addicts. Anyone that's a fan of Warhol's work will understand what he's aiming for artistically speaking - he could care less about traditional plotting or structure, he's only in it as a voyeur (coincidentally, that's how he first met Ondine). All throughout, my eye was consistently drawn to the adorable Edie Sedgwick, sitting at the right of the screen, smoking and bored (when not giggling) - her femininity is a nice contrast to the man-on-man activity happening everywhere else in the frame.
