Like Clockwork

Our movie watching is flying along at a breakneck pace, which can be frustrating if a particular film requires in depth analysis or a little time to percolate in your brain. But in the case of "A Clockwork Orange" it's a good thing! Neither Alyssa or I particularly wanted to dwell on this one. As a warning against a future dystopian society it is heavy handed at best, and ridiculous at worst, though its central theme does have some pertinence in today's society.

Ultimately the movie tries to follow in the novel's footsteps by asking its audience, "to what point will we sacrifice our free will for the good of society" and in a post-9/11 world, that is a question many people struggle with today. But the way the movie went about it, in contrast to the novel to my recollection, was just so over the top that you couldn't help but feel that ultimately the criminal got exactly what he deserved, side effects and all. I don't know if Alex is meant to be a sympathetic figure, but he certainly doesn't come off that way. I suppose the theme could also be that society clamoring for the defense of irredeemable criminals helps the irredeemable get off easy, but either way the message is muddled and poorly executed. Alyssa HATED the film, shocking, I know, considering its overall message and individual scenes.

I can't really recommend this to anyone, and the author's feelings of the adaptation seem to back that up.

From the novel's Wikipedia page; "The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die."

To sum it up, don't bother with the film, read the book if you'd like an interesting thought experiment. Funny how often that sentence applies!

Cupcakes!

Alyssa made some delicious Lemon cupcakes using a cupcake mix from Sprinkles yesterday. She made some homemade lemon butter cream frosting to top them with and then used Sprinkles' hard sugar candy bits to jazz them up. As I said, they were delicious! I had two, one before dinner and one after, but Josh, Megan and Alyssa all had one as well. So far as I could tell they enjoyed them also. Thanks to Grandma Pat for the Christmas present of the cupcake mix to Alyssa.

Saving Private Ryan

Almost three years exactly from starting the process, Alyssa and I have watched 30 movies of the top 100 with our viewing of "Saving Private Ryan" Saturday night. Yet another classic that Alyssa hadn't seen, and yet another movie that she has no interest in seeing again. I remember when the movie first came out there was a backlash about the intensity of the violence in it, though Spielberg defended it by saying he had intended to make it as realistic as possible. I understand and appreciate his claim, but there were definitely sections of action sequences that seemed gratuitous in the degree of violence shown onscreen. Unfortunately that led to Alyssa ignoring a large potion of the movie due to its graphic nature.
Fortunately for her there was also enough eye candy onscreen to keep her interested. Matt Damon, Vin Diesel, Barry Pepper, Edward Burns, Giovanni Ribisi and other young actors of the time were scattered throughout, not to mention Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Ted Danson and Paul Giamatti. The amount of talent featured was impressive. There are some really well done parts, simple and elegant, the reaction of Ryan's squad when Private Ryan is told of the loss of his three brothers, and Ryan's monologue on what to tell his mother if he also dies. The brotherhood among these men that led Spielberg and Hanks to go on to produce "Band of Brothers" is pretty obvious here as well.

Shawshank

Yay! Another movie knocked out! Actually we finished "The Shawshank Redemption" about a month ago but with Brian's Vegas trip, hanging with the Lacks and cleaning out our office of literally half the stuff we had in there, I hadn't had an opportunity to update. I love this movie, obviously the way Andy is treated by Bogs and his boys early on is enough to make you sick, but ultimately it's a story about the indomitable human spirit, and bromance.

It was Alyssa's first time seeing this movie and though she enjoyed it immensely it's another of the "I won't watch that again" types. Unfortunately, the whole damn thing has to be happy and not deal with anything somewhat depressing or dark for her to be willing to give it a second viewing. I'm not looking forward to her reaction to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"