A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971, UK, USA)

The most fascinating moment in the whole film comes on the tail end of a whole lot of brutal, cartoonish unpleasantry (which I'll get to later) when a bathrobed Alex sits eating dinner in the home of his wheelchair-bound former victim, unaware that his host has just discovered his identity. Seething with rage, he barely keeps up the hospitable facade enough to offer Alex a glass of wine, and as our perturbed protagonist delays drinking, a rather gratifying lady-or-the-tiger effect comes into play. A Clockwork Orange is (at least ostensibly) concerned with the problem of moral choice, how our ability to choose between good and evil makes us human. Confronted with the man who has wronged him (a person who has been deprived of his own choice), does the host poison him in revenge? The answer is somewhat unexpected, but still appropriately cynical. 

I find it troubling that this movie, which purports to be about the choices that makes us human, is populated almost entirely not with humans but with shrieking, stuttering caricatures. The only characters in the whole film whose mannerisms are not directly intended to provoke either laughter or a surrealist effect of alienation are Alex, the focal point of Kubrick's (Burgess's, I should say) satirical concerns, and the cleric, who nevertheless plays mostly an unwitting straight man to Alex's mockery and later on as a mouthpiece for the rather obvious moral question at hand. 

This is the only explanation I can give for the film's popularity: it is not challenging. The scenes of violence are brief and accompanied by striking, inherently pleasurable cinematography and musical selections, as well as titillation for the younger crowd to which it appeals. The humor is unsophisticated and mostly sexual in nature. Nicholas Winding Refn's 2009 film Bronson contains all these elements and succeeds in many different directions. Kubrick makes his technical brilliance known in A Clockwork Orange, but his montages have never been more lucid, more easily deciphered. It is very hard not to roll one's eyes at the sight of Alex imagining himself as a Roman Centurion scourging Christ on the way up calvary. Virtually nothing is left to the audience; you've figured it all out by the time you're out of your seat. 

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Shane Black, 2005, USA)

It's been a little while since I watched this movie, but it deserves more than to be filed away as just another afternoon passed pleasantly in front of the TV screen. I saw it perhaps later than expected, knowing that it was one of those so-called "underrated" films enjoying a healthy shelf-life on DVD and much beloved by casual cinephiles. I also knew that it was written and directed by Shane Black, the writer who brought so much pulpy life and lurid black humor to Tony Scott's The Last Boy Scout, which remains one of my favorite action movies. One of the first things you notice about Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the degree of separation which Black imposes between the audience and the story. The main character, Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey, Jr.) narrates the film and makes frequent reference to cinematic convention, taking a ball-peen hammer to the fourth wall and nicking away at it merrily. Some might find this device annoying; it doesn't always seem necessary, and there are instances where I wished Harry would quit his tinkering with the film and get on with the story.

What really surprised me about this film, though, was the resonance that Black gave this seemingly arbitrary device. Make no mistake, Harry's narration and knowledge of being in a film are never explained, but by the time the credits roll, I came to an understanding of why Harry talks about this particular story this way. Much of the noir-ish plot concerns Michelle Monaghan's Harmony Lane, a childhood friend of Harry's whom we're first introduced to in a charming opening scene that gains a kind of wistful meaning in the finale. They bump into each other after many years at a party in L.A., and Harry seizes upon her sudden turn of bad luck to play the hero (which means pretending to be a private detective) and make up for missed opportunities. As expected in a script with characters as well-drawn as these, their feelings for each other are continually thwarted by not only the obstacles of the plot, but by their own short-sightedness and personal flaws. But Harry knows so much about what the audience wants, why would he tell us a story where the hero doesn't get the girl? And that's the sad, wise secret to the success of Black's script: Harry tells the story in this way, with his winking asides and distracted riffs on audience expectations, because he can't quite look himself in the eye. He has to crack wise and pretend it all didn't hurt. Sure, he has his fist-pumping moment of triumph over The Bad Guys in the climax, but it's not enough. It doesn't get him what he wants - only a murmured line from Harmony that she probably doesn't even remember. The jokey, wrapping-it-all-up coda is his meager substitution for the lovers' reunion he wishes he could include.

All this is subtext, of course, but it wouldn't stick with me like it did if Black had spelled everything out. I think this is a great movie, with much more to offer than meets the eye.