A: I’ve never seen the beginning of A Clockwork Orange. Every time I see the movie on TV, it always starts in on the part where Alex is raping the writer’s wife.
B: Okay, so at the beginning, they’re at this milkbar. They’re drinking milk, which is a sort of crack cocaine.
[ED, a Burgess and Kubrick freak, can’t stop his ears from pricking up.]
ED: Crack cocaine? I don’t think so. Did we ever once see Alex getting a case of the shits? It could have been amphetamines.
B: Methamphetamines, yes.
ED: It could have been alcohol. It could have been a futuristic version of Kahlua. Or do you think that the sensation of drinking the milk was all inside their heads? Perhaps a placebo effect?
B: Well, they did say that the milk sharpened everybody up for a bit of the old ultraviolence.
ED: Yes. But it sharpened them up. One might argue that the instinct to pillage was already there.
B: Or perhaps the milk represented something maternal.
ED: That too!
B: Given the Christ imagery in the film, the milk was a liquified form of heroin.
ED: Wait a sec. So you’re saying then that violence is irrevocably tied in with drugs?
B: Maybe.
ED: Well, I should point out that Hitler was a vegetarian and a teetotaler.
Category / Film
Kubrick + UT2003 = Newfound Pop Art?
Is It Possible to Kneel In the Voting Booth?
Forget Christopher Walken. The real choice for 2008 is none other than General Zod, who apparently has recovered from his failed 2004 campaign and begun another quest to become “eternal ruler.” Like the White House, there’s a kid’s page, which features such math problems as “If each person on the Planet Houston knows five informants, and it takes ten minutes to relay a report, how quickly will General Zod learn about his picture being defaced in a town of 500 people?”
NYT = People-Style Profiles Can’t Be Too Far Away
LA Weekly reports on a development that may kill two mediums with one stone. Apparently, movie studios plan to kill their full-page advertising for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. (At $100,000 per full-page ad, that adds up to a lot of dough.) The justification? The studios want to attract younger, lowbrow moviegoers and they view these two newspapers as “older and elitist.”
This is a fascinating development for several reasons: (1) This only confirms the notion that Hollywood is uninterested in making adult films (or at least appealing to adult audiences). (2) Studios have previously thrown so much money at publicity that their lavish spreads have seemed almost inconsequential. Is this a sign that they’re starting to tighten their belts? (3) That entities as slow-moving as movie studios recognize the declining readership of newspapers suggests that, at least on the entertainment front, we’re about to see a real transformation in entertainment journalism and related media. I sincerely hope that online outlets aren’t co-opted, along the lines of the corrupt Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Of course, since this isn’t yet a fait accompli, expect to see Bill Keller promote more entertainment-oriented junk on the front page in a last-minute effort to woo back Hollywood.
In Other Words, R.A. Montgomery Has a Great Case For a Lawsuit
Variety: “Ben Affleck is in talks to create and write ‘Resistance,’ a potential drama series about a second American Revolution that he’ll exec produce with Live Planet partner Sean Bailey….’Resistance,’ to be produced by Touchstone and Live Planet, will be set in the not-so-distant future, imagining a United States that’s been divided into separate countries following a pair of catastrophic terror attacks”
(Choose Your Own Adventure) Escape by R.A. Montgomery: “By the year 2035, the United States has been split into three hostile provinces — Dorado, Rebellium, and Turtalia. You are a spy working for the Turtalian democracy and you must escape from the hostile Dorado.”